It takes awhile to link up with Noriko Kamo, who keeps going adrift in the snowfalls of Hokkaido's Hakodate. Since her mother is now living alone, Noriko tries to come back to Japan every year to keep her company through the hardest month of the year. It helps, she says, that "it's quiet in New York right now."
Noriko is house pianist at the famed Cotton Club in Harlem, uptown Manhattan. "They were having difficulty finding an African-American piano player who could play jazz, R&B and standards. When they got stuck, they called me."
The club was unsure to begin with, however. For one thing, Noriko was Japanese. For another, she was a woman. "Breaking tradition, I was a very new idea for everyone. It's OK now, though. I've been working there since 1998."