Over two decades guitarist and composer Miles Okazaki has built a body of work marked by rigor and restless curiosity. With Boomtown, his ninth album of original compositions and his fourth as a leader for Pi Recordings, he presents a large-scale, finely wrought, sometimes unruly work that hurtles forward with narrative force. The album continues the themes of Miniature America from 2024, described by pianist Ethan Iverson as “meticulously assembled, absolutely a blast to listen to, and informed by a generous – even carefree – spirit.” As on that album, Okazaki has assembled ten musicians: saxophonists Caroline Davis, Jon Irabagon, and Anna Webber, trombonists Jacob Garchik and Kalia Vandever, bassists Chris Tordini and Hannah Marks, Matt Mitchell on piano, Dan Weiss on drums, and Okazaki on guitar. It’s a group designed for precision and spontaneity alike, and cast with intentionally different voices on the same instruments to further explore the album’s sense of opposing energies.

Boomtown is the middle installment of Okazaki's third trilogy, which started with his early works (Mirror, Generations, Figurations), followed by three with his band Trickster (Trickster, The Sky Below, Thisness). The current series features large ensembles and an expansive sound, with broad gestures that court instability. While his Trickster projects exhibit the meticulous intricacy of a fine Swiss movement – undeniably influenced by the years that Okazaki spent as a member of saxophonist Steve Coleman’s Five Elements – Boomtown reflects a broad shift in his practice.

When asked to describe the process for this album, Okazaki responds:

"I believe that all humans are creative by nature, and that all places can be locations of inspiration – if you look closely enough. The music for this album came to me on August 21, 2024 while driving across the state of Wyoming. The feeling was something about magic combined with terror. For me there's no explanation for how or why the music arrives, but I think it's possible to set ideas in motion and then try to be observant enough to catch them if they come back to you and ask for attention. I'd say that's basically how I compose. On that particular day, I had released Miniature America a month before and my thoughts were on the scale of things. Some melodies and forms came to mind, and I did my best to translate them into what you have here. The Romantic poets had a notion of the ‘sublime’ – it's not the same as beauty, which is a surface level thing. The sublime includes some element that you can't get your mind around, something simultaneously transcendental and terrifying. I'm drawn to portraits of America that deal with this polarity. This is a place of miraculous creativity and dreaming mixed with incredible greed, callousness, and suffering. I'm a person who works with the dual nature of things, and this my attempt at making a kind of ugly beauty.”