Takuya Nakamura's jazz-jungle fusion & a new book of letters between composer Larry Sitsky and Gwen Harwood

Some might think that jazz and electronic music don't have much in common, but Japanese DJ and trumpeter Takuya Nakamura has proven all that wrong. Growing up in 1980s Tokyo, he moved to the United States in 1990 to study under the legendary jazz composer George Russell, and went on to bring this expertise to the New York jungle electronic scene. He now performs live DJ sets of jungle, trip hop, dub, and all sorts of experimental electronic music with trumpet in hand.

Larry Sitsky may be one of Australia's most important living composers, and he's certainly the most commissioned. One of his most important creative relationships over his long career was with poet Gwen Harwood, who wrote many of the libretti for his operas. A new book filled with the substantial thirty-year correspondence between the two has just been released. Ann-Marie Priest is a longtime scholar of Gwen Harwood's work, and is the editor of the book, Fiery Tales: The Correspondence of Gwen Harwood and Larry Sitsky

Takuya Nakamura is performing as part of Move My Way festival, on October 3 in Eora Sydney, and October 4 in Naarm Melbourne. His forthcoming album -- Shape The Future is out November 12.

Fiery Tales: The Correspondence of Gwen Harwood and Larry Sitsky is out now via Monash University Publishing.

Music heard in this program:

Title: Jungle Jungle

Artist: Takuya Nakamura

Composer: Takuya Nakamura

Album: Mysteries of the Cosmos

Title: The Banks of the Moldau, Act1 Sc3

Artist: Raymond Myers (Rabbi Judah Loew), The Australian Opera Chorus, Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra, Christopher Lyndon Gee (cond.), Barrie Kosky (dir.)

Composer: Larry Sitsky, Gwen Harwood (libretto)