Ryo Yamada

About

Ryo Yamada is a Japanese pianist, composer and improviser based in the Netherlands since 2023. He graduated in composition from Aichi University of the Arts in 2008. His practice moves between jazz, free improvisation, fully notated composition and interdisciplinary performance.

He creates music in response to people, space, image and movement. Across collaborations with dancers, actors, visual artists, filmmakers and musicians, he explores how sound can be shaped by the situation around it: a score, a gesture, an image, an object or the presence of an audience.

His early practice encompassed instrumental and electronic music, media work, installation, performance art, theatre and dance. From 2007 he performed as a keyboard player and improviser in Geonori, a free improvisation group whose performances included art events and Performing Arts Garden 2011 at Aichi Arts Center.

As Creative Staff in composition at Nagakute Cultural Center during fiscal years 2011–2014, he worked on composition, arranging, direction, participatory workshops and school outreach. He also taught composition, music theory and solfège as a part-time lecturer at Nagoya University of the Arts.

Selected collaborations include The Other Side (2019–2022), an evolving intermedia performance directed by Kei Fushiki with spatial composition by Masafumi Igaki, and Ogen/blik Vol.3 (2019), a work for piano and moving image with filmmaker Tatsuya Maruyama. In East from the West (2025), with Liza Lin and Diana Harteveld, he created a sound composition from porcelain and ceramic sounds, later extending the project into film and live grand-piano improvisation.

In the Netherlands, he conducts and accompanies Chorus SORA, a Japanese community choir in Amstelveen. With vocalist Noriko Yamada, he performs in Picca e Picca, a piano and voice duo that reimagines Japanese songs through original arrangements and improvisation. The duo presented its first Netherlands concert in Rotterdam on 9 May 2026. Later that summer, Picca e Picca performed at North Sea Round Town 2026 as part of Jazz op de Meent in Rotterdam.

He is a member of the music division of De Haagse Kunstkring. His Dutch collaborations also include improvised piano and melodica with poet Cecilia Meinders and dancer Yurie Umamoto in Haarlem in 2025. Alongside these projects, he continues to develop solo jazz and free improvisation.