Miggy Augmented Orchestra's Unveils New Album UNBREAKABLE HOPE & RESILIENCE

SoundSpore Records has announced the June 26, 2026 release of Unbreakable Hope & Resilience, the latest album from composer, pianist, and six-time Grammy-nominated producer Migiwa "Miggy" Miyajima and her Miggy Augmented Orchestra.

Recorded live at Dizzy's Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center on March 17, 2025, the album is a 72-minute documentary-style big band suite drawn from Miyajima's personal interviews with twenty survivors and volunteers of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (commonly referred to as 3.11). The ensemble features a 17-piece big band alongside actors Megan Masako Haley, Ashton Muñiz, and Arielle Gonzalez, who voice the interviewees throughout the performance.

Miyajima is herself a survivor of 3.11. The year after the disaster, she arrived in New York City on a Japanese government scholarship, torn between gratitude for the opportunity and guilt over those still suffering at home. That guilt became a question: if she, someone who had not lost her home or family to the waves, felt this shattered, how were those who had experienced it directly managing to carry on? Beginning in 2019, she set out to find answers, interviewing twenty individuals: a pastor whose church stood barely five kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, a mother and son from Ishinomaki who lost their family to the tsunami, volunteers who relocated to devastated communities, and a cancer survivor. None of them were larger-than-life heroes. They cried. They struggled. And yet, somehow, they took another step. It is their raw, unvarnished humanity that forms the heart of this album.

The suite unfolds across nine jazz movements and four narrations. The album opens with "Intro 1 (2:46 p.m.)," in which backstage chatter between band members conjures the ordinariness of life before disaster, before Ryan Keberle's trombone breaks in as a wailing siren capturing the chaos of the moment the earthquake struck. "Where Is My Home?" tells the story of Pastor Akira Sato, whose church stood barely five kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi. He lost his home and all his possessions and spent more than a year moving between evacuation shelters while holding his congregation together, before a new church, funded by donations from around the world, rose in a different town. Sam Dillon's driving tenor saxophone and fast-swing rhythm convey the upheaval, before a settling chord announces new hope. "I Live, I Talk" centers on Kyohmi Takahashi, who lost both parents to the tsunami in Ishinomaki and was drawn back into daily life by the hands extended by those around her, with Quinsin Nachoff's tenor saxophone solo mirroring that process of response and recovery.

"Let Me Talk About My Dream" follows Kazemaru Chiba, Kyohmi's son, who at 18 lost his grandparents in the disaster and stood by his mother through years of depression, and now works toward building a society where people genuinely support one another. An 18-bar melody modulates repeatedly into a rich ensemble texture that reflects the shape of his journey. Movements five and six tell Miyajima's own story: her arrival in New York, the collision of joy and guilt, and the friend whose words persuaded her to take the next step, rendered in an intimate piano and trombone duet with Jason Jackson, the only track on which Miyajima performs at the piano. "I Will Make a Change" follows engineer Takayuki Yoshinaga, who left Tokyo to join a community rebuilding project in Namie, Fukushima, a town that had been evacuated in its entirety, expressed as a blues featuring Carl Maraghi's baritone saxophone.

"The Future of the Planted Seeds" tells the story of A.K. Akemi Kakihara and Together for 311, thirteen Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in New York who sustained memorial events for a decade and found, in doing so, a second family. In the introduction, Miyajima steps back from conductor and composer to survivor, reading aloud the names of each of the group's thirteen members - one horn player sounding a note for each name, until all thirteen voices join in harmony. Ben Kono's flute then traces that bond with quiet certainty. "Life Is Good" is one of the album's most exuberant tracks, inspired by Miyajima's mother Yuko, who survived both the earthquake and a subsequent cancer diagnosis and emerged with the resolve to put everything she had learned to use for others. The full band breaks into handclaps as the ensemble's collective joy spills over. "10 Years and Counting" layers a melody from one to ten, growing richer in harmony and texture with each pass, as Miyajima looks back across a decade of survival and creation. The album closes with "Fourteen Springs," a quiet and unshakeable declaration carried by Megan Masako Haley's voice and Rachel Therrien's trumpet: that Miyajima will live fully for those whose lives were cut short.

Works-in-progress from the suite were performed in New York, Texas, Florida, Portland, Australia, France, and Japan before the world premiere at Dizzy's Club in March 2025. Each time, audiences wept. "Knowing that so many people pushed through after the earthquake gave me strength," one listener shared. "My family went through cancer too." Whatever the country, whatever the background, the drive to keep walking through pain proved to be something audiences everywhere could feel. On the night of the world premiere, as the final notes faded, the crowd sat in stunned silence before erupting in applause, many wiping tears from their eyes.

As 2026 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Miyajima has chosen this moment to release the album globally. "This project began as a way to work through my own pain," she reflects. "But what I was left with in the end was a sense of wonder, at how remarkable human beings truly are, and how beautiful and precious it is to keep fighting to live. In a time of war, displacement, and extreme inequality, I kept asking myself how to live with integrity through all of it. This album is the answer I found."

For the past seven years, Miyajima's work on this project has been supported by the Jerome Foundation's "Jerome Hill Fellowship," the MAP Fund's SPA Coaching, the Asian American Arts Alliance's residency, and the Woodward Residency, while production was partially funded by the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, administered by the New York City Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation for the Arts. LMCC Creative Engagement and Culture Lab LIC provided opportunities for the work-in-progress concert and the world premiere.

Unbreakable Hope & Resilience will be released on June 26, 2026, preceded by three singles: "Where Is My Home?" on March 27, "Life Is Good" on April 24, and "The Future of the Planted Seeds" on May 29. A release celebration concert will take place at Dizzy's Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center on July 13, 2026.