Eri Chichibu is a Boston based Japanese composer, arranger, and pianist/keyboardist. She dual majored in Jazz Composition and Film Scoring, and minors in Video Game Scoring at Berklee College of Music, on full scholarship from the college and TOMODACHI Suntory Music Scholarship. 

 

Since her childhood, Eri attended Yamaha music school where she learned to play the Electone and later received gold prize for composition/arranging at the national Electone Stage—consecutively from 2010 to 2014. She received her bachelor’s degree in Education, Clinical Psychology (Family Therapy, Brief Therapy) from Tohoku University in 2015. In the same year, she received the Berklee Award, a full-tuition scholarship for Berklee’s Five-Week Summer Performance Program awarded to selected participants of Hokkaido Groove Camp, led by Tiger Okoshi. After attending the program, she entered the college in September 2016.   

 

At Berklee, she has been studying under the instruction of Greg Hopkins, Bob Pilkington, Billy Childs, Ayn Inserto, Nando Michelin, Tim Huling, Claudio Ragazzi, Sheldon Mirowitz, and Andreas Bjørck; she has also studied with Tiger Okoshi, Bruno Raberg, and Billy Kilson for performances. 

 

She has won the 2020 Owen Prize, 2019 ASCAP Foundation Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award and has selected as a finalist for Creative Composers 2018. She has presented her piece "Crossing Reality" at the ISJAC Symposium 2019. Her pieces have been showcased in the Maria Schneider Workshop, George Lewis Masterclass, John Hollenbeck Masterclass, as well as many prominent concerts at Berklee such as Women in Jazz Collective and Women Musicians Network Concert. Her original Bach-style sinfonia was played as part of the Best Invention Plus Concert. She is also selected as a composer and conductor of 2019 Berklee Silent Film Orchestra.

 

She has composed/arranged for student jazz bands, and has scored for short films. As a keyboardist and pianist, she has performed at various venues such as Massachusetts State House (Boston, MA), Army Navy Country Club (Arlington, VA), Stardust (Sendai, Japan), World War Reconstruction Hall (Sendai, Japan), and Sendai Denryoku Hall (Sendai, Japan).

 

Eri’s compositions reflect her unique personality and are often described as having aquatic elements, reminiscent of the ocean and other movements of water. Tiger Okoshi has likened her compositions to impressionism art and lyrical poetry; her compositions have a natural flow and an organic sound. Stylistically, her music is influenced by jazz, classical, rock, and other kinds of music; however, she draws inspiration from other disciplines of the arts and sciences, such as visual arts, astrophysics, geometry, and the culinary arts. Eri’s broad interests largely contribute to her distinctive sound and compositional approach. She is currently working on projects that fuse these different elements through music and aims to collaborate with others involved in different fields.