Patrick Shiroishi

Patrick Shiroishi is making music with the saxophone that no one is making with any instrument, let alone the regal reed. Though Shiroishi is an avid collaborator with the likes of Claire Rousay and Jessica Ackerley and a member in good standing with Wild Up, The Armed, and Fuubutsushi, his solo saxophone albums are demanding considerations of heritage, history, hate, endurance, and emancipation. Raised in Los Angeles by parents with very different perspectives on being Japanese-American, Shiroishi first resented his ancestry, wanting so badly to be a “normal” American boy that he became a Boy Scout. But as he began to consider the pain that shaped his family’s past, like concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, his work acquired a new gravity and force, as if countless voices had found new expression through his horn.

His 2021 album, Hidemi, was a critical and personal breakthrough. Imagining the life of a grandfather he had never met lived after leaving the largest such camp, Shiroishi multi-tracked his saxophone into rapturous pieces of rage and joy, trying to render how it might have felt to be an outcast reentering the world. He continued and broadened that work for 2025’s Forgetting is Violent, a collaborator-rich consideration of the way racism weaves through and corrupts our society and the way we all battle hidden demons. Shiroishi is a disarming and generous person, with a grin that seems like an invitation for instant friendship; his music reckons with the ugly sides of life, pulling them into his benevolent persona and expelling them with declarative force.