Nathan Tokunaga’s whirlwind jazz career goes back to where it all started

At 19, Nathan Tokunaga is pretty young to experience a full-circle moment, returning to the source of the inspiration that shaped his life.

But when the Belmont-raised reed player kicks off KCSM-FM 91.1’s Jazz On the Hill 2026 festival with his quartet at the College of San Mateo on June 6 he’ll be helping celebrate the epiphany-sparking radio station that led him to the heart of the New York City jazz scene.

Tokunaga started listening to KCSM as a captive audience “on the morning drives to elementary school with my mom,” he said. During a commute to sixth grade one day the car was filled by Australian reed expert Adrian Cunningham’s rendition of the voluptuous ballad “Petite Fleur” by foundational New Orleans jazz master Sidney Bechet (1897-1959).

“I didn’t know a clarinet can sound like that,” Tokunaga said. “I remember being captivated by it.”

A few months later Tokunaga came across a late-career video of clarinet star Benny Goodman in Japan, which fed his determination to start studying jazz. And when Gov. Newsom’s stay-at-home order to slow the spread of COVID left him sequestered, “I really used the lockdown to learn jazz,” Tokunaga recalled.

“I remember going on YouTube to find how to find a blues scale. My mom bought me music theory books. I spent a lot of time practicing and listening to records.”

When he emerged from his house in early 2021 Tokunaga found a welcoming mentor in early jazz specialist Clint Baker, who featured the young teen at his twice-monthly All-Stars gig at Cafe Borrone in Menlo Park (Tokunaga rejoins Baker at Cafe Borrone June 12 and Aug. 14).

He’s been soaking up bandstand experience ever since, while serving as something of a muse for older players like Charles Chen. A brilliant pianist who sidelined his software engineering career to focus on music, Chen produced a wildly ambitious night for Tokunaga’s senior recital last June featuring a 50-piece ensemble with strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion and special guests, including saxophone great Bob Sheppard, a founding member of Chick Corea’s Origin Sextet.

Recently signed to Turtle Bay Records, Tokunaga is preparing to make his first album. Back in the Bay Area for the summer after his freshman year studying jazz at The New School, he’s lined up nearly two-dozen gigs across the region, both as a leader and a sideman.

With his quartet — featuring Chen, bassist Dexter Williams and drummer Riley Baker — Tokunaga holds forth on soprano, alto and tenor sax, “depending on the situation,” he said. “But clarinet is my first instrument.”

He kicks off his Bay Area run with two shows at Meyhouse in Palo Alto May 22, and moves over to play the newly opened Meyhouse venue in San Ramon on May 23. He brings the same group to Jazz On the Hill, and adds two more players to accompany swing dancers June 13 at Bootleggers Ball in San Francisco.

He’s also performing around the Bay with drummer Benny Amón’s Quartet, multi-instrumentalist Kyle Athayde and his Dance Party, and the Charles Chen Quartet. Aside from his own group, his most extensive commitment is to guitarist Nick Rossi’s Jazzopaters, an eight-piece combo dedicated to music recorded by side-groups gleaned from the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the 1930s and ’40s.

The Jazzopaters summer schedule includes performances at the Stanford Jazz Festival July 10, Petaluma’s Mercury Theater July 11, and Mr. Tipple’s July 12. Tokunaga was a founding member of the band three years ago, playing alongside veteran Bay Area artists like saxophonist Patrick Wolff and pianist Adam Shulman. Rossi recognized in Tokunaga a player besotted with the jazz tradition and eager to absorb new information.

“We live in this golden age of technical brilliance with young musicians, so it’s almost a given you have to function at that level,” Rossi said. “Nathan does, and at the same time he’s got big ears and can internalize things in a short period of time. I met him shortly after he started being mentored by Clint Baker and witnessed his accelerated development.”

At the New School he’s gravitated to older masters, like 86-year-old drummer Andrew Cyrille, a lion of the 1960s avant-garde scene who made one of his first recording with tenor sax patriarch Coleman Hawkins (1961’s “The Hawk Relaxes”). Last semester he studied with 88-year-old bass great Reggie Workman and Nuyorican drum maestro Bobby Sanabria.

“I’m very much rooted in the tradition, but I’m not trying to fit into one box or label,” Tokunaga said. “I want to move the art forward and find my own voice.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].

NATHAN TOKUNAGA QUARTET

When & where: 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. May 22 at Meyhouse in Palo Alto, $38-$48; www.meyhousejazz.com; 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. May 23 at Meyhouse in San Ramon; $25-$42; 7:30 p.m. July 18 at The Sound Room in Oakland, $25 www.soundroom.org