Saxophonist, composer and producer Yasuaki Shimizu brings a new duo show to Milton Court Concert Hall on Sunday 15 November 2026, playing alongside his sister Mieko Shimizu, a London based singer, songwriter, composer and producer. It is the only UK date on a European tour that also takes in Paris, Ghent, Utrecht, Helsinki and Stockholm.
The concert is part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, which runs from 13 to 22 November 2026. Standard tickets are £29 to £31.50 including fees, and the Barbican box office was still showing seats when we checked on 14 September 2026.
A rare UK date for Yasuaki Shimizu
One of Japanese music’s great genre travellers, playing as a duo at Milton Court- Address
- Milton Court, 1 Milton Street, London EC2Y 9BH
- Admission
- From £29 including fees
- Starts
- November 15, 2026, 7:30 PM
- Ends
- November 15, 2026 9:00 PM
More about the event
- Seats
- Milton Court Concert Hall holds 608 people, 391 in the stalls and 217 in the circle.
- Ticket tiers
- Standard tickets run from £29 to £31.50 including fees. The Barbican shows the £29 tier as a £25 ticket plus a £4 transaction fee. Young Barbican is free to join for anyone aged 16 to 25 and brings the price down to £12.
- Albums
- He debuted in 1978 and has released more than 40 albums since, across solo records, the band Mariah, the Saxophonettes quintet and soundtrack work.
- Saxophonettes
- He relaunched his saxophone quintet in 2006 and recorded Pentatonica with it in 2007, an album built on pentatonic compositions.
- Screen work
- His score for the 2013 documentary Cutie and the Boxer won Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Score at the Cinema Eye Honors. The film itself was nominated for an Academy Award.
The only UK date on a six city European tour
Shimizu announced the run on his own website as Europe Tour 2026. It opens at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris on 3 November, then Miry Concertzaal in Ghent on 4 November, the Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht on 6 November, Tavastia in Helsinki on 8 November and Fasching in Stockholm on 9 November. London on 15 November is the only British stop. The festival adds that he toured North America for the first time in 2025 and sold out every show.
The same announcement says what the duo will play. It describes an evolved and entirely reinterpreted programme built on his 1980s work, naming the albums Kakashi and Utakata no Hibi, with Mieko Shimizu supporting him across every date. The pair are reworking that material rather than reproducing it.
Kakashi in 1982 and Utakata no Hibi in 1983
Kakashi came out in 1982 under Shimizu’s own name. Utakata no Hibi followed in 1983 as the last record by Mariah, the experimental band he led in the early 1980s. Both run Japanese folk and pop melody through electronic, new wave and disco production. The New York label Palto Flats describes Utakata no Hibi as Japanese folk and pop idioms filtered through chamber disco, new wave and synth production.
Neither record was easy to find outside Japan until Palto Flats reissued them, Utakata no Hibi in 2015 as a double vinyl set and Kakashi in 2017. Those reissues are what put Shimizu in front of a Western audience again. They landed in the same years that Japanese city pop was finding listeners abroad through YouTube and vinyl, and the two revivals share an audience even though the music is doing different things.
Mieko Shimizu, the London half of the duo
Mieko Shimizu is based in London and calls herself an experimental composer and performer on her own website. The EFG London Jazz Festival describes her as a boldly nonconformist singer, songwriter, composer and producer. Her albums include Road of Shells and Totem, released in Japan, and My Tentacles and I Bloom, released in the UK.
She has worked with Mick Karn of the band Japan, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Nitin Sawhney, William D Drake of Cardiacs and David Cunningham of The Flying Lizards. David Cunningham also appears in the festival’s list of her brother’s collaborators, alongside Ryuichi Sakamoto, Björk and Van Dyke Parks, so the two of them have at least one working history in common.
Bach’s Cello Suites on tenor saxophone
In the mid 1990s Shimizu recorded what his own biography calls the first ever tenor saxophone interpretations of J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites. They were collected as Bach Box, released in 1997, which won a Record Awards Planning Prize. He went back to Bach in 2015 with a Goldberg Variations arranged for five saxophones and four contrabasses.
That is background rather than a preview. Nothing the Barbican or the festival has published about the Milton Court concert mentions Bach, and the tour announcement points at the 1980s albums.
Event details
- Cost: £29 to £31.50 including fees. Young Barbican £12 for anyone aged 16 to 25. Barbican members pay 20 per cent less with no transaction fee
- Date: Sunday 15 November 2026
- Doors: 7:00pm
- Stage time: 7:30pm
- Venue: Milton Court Concert Hall, Guildhall School of Music and Drama
- Address: Milton Court, 1 Milton Street, London EC2Y 9BH
- Part of: EFG London Jazz Festival 2026, 13 to 22 November
For more information and booking, visit the Barbican website.
Milton Court
Seven Japanese bills at EFG London Jazz Festival 2026
Shimizu is one of seven Japanese or Japan connected bills at this year’s festival. Haruki Murakami’s Jazz at Peter Cat: A Japanese Jazz Night takes over Barbican Hall on 21 November with three generations of Japanese jazz players, and both performances had sold out when we checked in September 2026. Kyoto Jazz Massive play Islington Assembly Hall on 22 November. The other four are the Riyoko Takagi Trio at Toulouse Lautrec Jazz Club on 19 and 20 November, BBE Music’s Japanese Jazz Series on the Barbican FreeStage on 21 November, a solo DJ set from Kyoto Jazz Massive founder Shuya Okino at The Jazz Social on 21 November, and the Japanese born, London based selector DJ Mari* supporting GoGo Penguin at KOKO on 16 and 17 November. For the background to all of them, our history of the rise of jazz in Japan covers how the music arrived and what it became there.
