Miles Okazaki: Trickster

“I don’t usually present things that are in my comfort zone,” the guitarist Miles Okazaki once said. “My comfort zone is not my own music. That’s something built to challenge.” For two decades, Okazaki has been testing the borders of his musical comfort zones and pushing far beyond them, from his work with the ever-rigorous Steve Coleman to his six-volume effort to interpret the complete compositions of Thelonious Monk. His daring quartet, Trickster, actually emerged in 2015, while he worked with bassist Anthony Tidd in Coleman’s Five Elements. Their debut, released in 2017, found Okazaki building parts for bass, drums, piano, and, guitar from concepts involving astrology and illusions, then turning a band that included Tidd, Craig Taborn, and Sean Rickman loose on them.

Since that debut, the lineup has evolved, with Matt Mitchell behind piano and Gene Lake recently on drums. But Okazaki’s emphasis on allowing the band to explore beyond its comfort zone remains a core component of his and its constitution; he, after all, didn’t even study music in college but instead majored in English, because he sensed he was bad at it. On their 2023 album Trickster: Live in Brooklyn, recorded during a three-week stand in a tiny venue called SEEDS, they worked through impossibly complex changes and rhythms. During “Kudzu,” for instance, all four members suggested a separate vine, winding this way and that and somehow, against obvious logic, connecting beautifully. The critic Nate Chinen wrote that Trickster is “capable of shifting the ground underfoot without ever losing its balance.” At Big Ears 2026, they push out of their comfort zone as ever to land that trick yet again.