Miles Okazaki is an American, New York-based guitarist and composer who likes to compose trilogies of albums. Boomtown is the second installment of his third trilogy, following Miniature America (released on his and drummer Dan Weiss label, Cygnus Recordings, 2024), and featuring large ensembles and an expansive sound, with broad gestures that court instability and reflect a broad shift in his practice.
Okazaki says that the music for this album came to him in August 2024 while he was driving across the state of Wyoming, and he felt «something about magic combined with terror». He calls the twelve pieces of Boomtown sublime as they include «some element that you can’t get your mind around, something simultaneously transcendental and terrifying». He adds that he is drawn to «portraits of America that deal with this polarity. This is a place of miraculous creativity and dreaming mixed with incredible greed, callousness, and suffering. I’m a person who works with the dual nature of things, and this is my attempt at making a kind of ugly beauty».
Okazaki has assembled a tentet comprised of some of the finest musicians from the New York modern jazz scene – sax players Caroline Davis (alto), Jon Irabagon (tenor and soprano), and Anna Webber (alto), trombonists Jacob Garchik and Kalia Vandever, double bass players Chris Tordini and Hannah Marks, pianist Matt Mitchell, drummer Dan Weiss, and Okazaki on guitar. The album was recorded at Sear Sound in New York in October 2025. The cover photo of Okazaki’s youngest daughter at the magic hour of twilight, in a magic place.
Boomtown’s booklet offers Okazaki’s handwritten skeletal compositional ideas, but Okazaki is very much inspired by Thelonious Monk’s «Ugly Beauty» (a Monk title from 1967), pairing discipline and unpredictable spontaneity, drama and subtle, introspective passage, and searching for where beauty and abrasion are part of the same continuum, the in-between places, the liminal, the borderlands, where the Trickster (the title of Okazaki’s previous trilogy) lives. Okazaki has created a tonal serialism specifically for this album to establish the music’s color palette and create an alien, unsettled atmosphere. Okazaki is also inspired by the time he spent as a member of saxophonist Steve Coleman’s Five Elements, and the cyclical structures with clever contrapuntal ideas, and polyrhythmic grooves reflect that seminal time. But Okazaki’s Boomtown does not seek to replicate or celebrate a glorious past; it resonates it in its own restless, searching way. It makes you think and enjoy its many tricks, wonders, and thoughtful «ugly beauty».
Eyal Hareuveni
Miles Okazaki (guitars), Caroline Davis (alto saxophone), Anna Webber (tenor saxophone, flute), Jon Irabagon (tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Kalia Vandever (trombone), Matt Mitchell (piano), Chris Tordini (double bass), Hannah Marks (double bass), Dan Weiss (drums)
