Okäru Lovelace

She started classical piano at the age of 4. She started writing lyrics and compositions at about 6 years old, and won the Tottori Prefecture Elementary School Education Research Association Composition Award at the age of 8. At the request of her mother, who was a nurse, she graduated from the Hygiene Nursing Department of Yonago Kita High School, and then graduated from the Hygiene Nursing Department of Nara Bunka Women's Junior College, obtaining a national qualification. She worked as a registered nurse at Tokuchi Internal Medicine in Osaka for 3 years, but was deeply influenced by the words of the president of the company during a television interview, ``Don't give up,'' and chose the path of music that had always been deep in her heart. Later, she found out that this was Konosuke Matsushita of Panasonic. While working as a nurse, she began singing in Osaka, saved up money, and in 1994, she performed a singing and dancing show in Sydney, Australia for a year. The show was highly praised by TRF dancer Sam and others. At that time, she was nicknamed OKARU, a combination of the letters of her real name KAORU, and was well received, and so her stage name Okaru was born.

In 1996, she moved to the United States alone to study jazz in earnest in New York. She attended the Manhattan School of Music's summer vocal department and the Broadway Dance Center to learn the basics of singing and dancing. She studied under legendary jazz musicians (Barry Harris, Norman Simmons, Jimmy Lovelace, Randy Western, etc.) to learn the history, knowledge, techniques, and meaning of jazz.

She began her career as a solo vocalist in the New York jazz scene. She married Jimmy Lovelace, a jazz drummer who had recorded with George Benson and Wes Montgomery, but Lovelace was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away within a few months. After that, she began to focus on writing lyrics and composing music, pursuing her own worldview that comes from her heart, hoping that music can heal and touch people's hearts. Her representative works include "Light is Always in the Sky," written in the hope of a peaceful world where children can continue to bring hope and dreams after the terrorist attacks she experienced in New York, "Star Samba," in which the power hidden in the "star" from her name makes wishes come true, and "Welcome to Oyama," a nature-themed song that expresses her feelings for her hometown of Oyama.

He contributed to the New York jazz community by hosting the jazz jam sessions organized by the Jazz Foundation of America for three years. He was a regular performer for six years at the long-established "Paris Blues" in Harlem (the black neighborhood), the home of New York jazz, leading the unit "Beautiful Journey" that he formed with his partner, trumpet player Tiger.

He appeared at the event commemorating the 1,300th anniversary of the founding of Mt. Oyama, which was also attended by Princess Mako, and the ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of the founding of Oyama Elementary School.

He has also performed at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with a piano that was exposed to the atomic bomb, at the lantern lighting ceremony, at Kurashiki Jazz Street and flood reconstruction support concerts, at a reconstruction support concert in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, at the Hoshinomura Peace Memorial Ceremony in Fukuoka Prefecture, and in Himeji, Niigata, Yokohama, and other places around Japan.

BSS Sanin Broadcasting Radio Program

He was a regular personality on "Jazz Park" for six years.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she launched the "Enliven New York with Live Music" project, and has been working with her trumpet partner to bring smiles and emotional tears to New Yorkers in places like Central Park, 5th Avenue, and in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.