The New York Times called her music "grandiloquent beauty that transitions easily from grooves to big cascades to buoyant swing"(Giovanni Russonello), Meg Okura is a jazz composer and violinist and the founder of the Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble based in New York. In the last decade, she has won over two dozen prizes and honors, including the ISJAC Fundamental Freedom Commission. Over the last 18 years, her ensembles have graced iconic venues in New York, such as Birdland Jazz Club, Blue Note, Dizzy’s, and Knitting Factory, as well as the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., K.L. Jazz Festival in Malaysia, and other performances in the U.S., Israel, Serbia, and Japan.

As a violinist, she has performed and recorded with many jazz greats, including Lee Konitz, Steve Swallow, and Tom Harrell. She also toured Japan and the U.S. with the late Michael Brecker’s Quindectet with musical director Gil Goldstein. Okura has contributed to over 100 projects, including film, TV, live videos, and albums with artists like David Bowie, Diane Reeves, JC Sanford, Erica Seguine, and Emilio Solla y La Inestable de Brooklyn, earning her a Grammy nomination as a violinist.
Native of Tokyo, Okura toured Asia as a soloist and concertmaster for the Asian Youth Orchestra in her teenage years. Her journey in the U.S. began with a solo concerto debut at the Kennedy Center in 1992 with Alexander Schneider's New York String Orchestra. She earned B.M. and M.M. degrees from the Juilliard School, where she studied the violin with Lewis Kaplan and Masao Kawasaki, chamber music with Robert Mann, Samuel Sanders, and Seymour Lipkin, and was the concertmaster of the Juilliard Opera Orchestra. She has performed at esteemed venues worldwide, including Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Center, Barbican Hall in the U.K., Village Vanguard, Blue Note Tokyo, Hollywood Bowl, and numerous international jazz and Jewish music festivals.
Meg Okura has seven albums under her name. Her duo album with Kevin Hays is out this May from Adhyaropa Records, and her 10-piece Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble’s highly anticipated fifth album, featuring Randy Brecker is in the works. Okura is also the musical director and arranger of the Sakamoto Tribute Ensemble, an ensemble dedicated to performing works by Ryuichi Sakamoto, an iconic composer.
Her classical composition “Phantasmagoria” will be performed at LunART Festival on Saturday, June 1 at 7:30 pm on the Hamel Music Center - Collins Hall in Madison, Wisconsin, as the winner of the call for scores competition.

Ms. Okura will be spending part of the summer at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as the recipient of the 50th Anniversary VCCA Fellowships for Artists of Color, 2024.
Okura’s latest commissioned work as the winner of the 2024 Wa-hi Jazz Composition Competition will be performed by her Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble in New York City on November 2, 2024.

For more, please visit www.megokura.com