Miles Okazaki - Boomtown

Boomtown is guitarist/composer Miles Okazaki's latest work for large ensemble, a follow-up to his 2024 release, Miniature America. Inspired by a drive across Wyoming, the album explores themes of hope, dreams, collapse, and abandonment through the narrative of an imaginary boomtown. Unlike Okazaki's recent work with his band Trickster, which is characterized by intricate rhythms, Boomtown features grand gestures and a journey that moves between desolate, pastoral beauty and tumultuous ruin, evoking the duality of sublime and ominous.

To realize this vision, Okazaki assembled a ten-piece ensemble featuring saxophonists Caroline Davis, Jon Irabagon, and Anna Webber; trombonists Jacob Garchik and Kalia Vandever; bassists Chris Tordini and Hannah Marks; pianist Matt Mitchell; drummer Dan Weiss; and Okazaki on guitars. Together, they create music that is by turns filled with profound beauty and menacing dread, capturing the essence of the boomtown's rise and fall.