'Jazz meets performance art, as her amazing voice headed off into dog-whistle territory, but there was such good humour and warmth in her performance. You couldn't help but love her' (Jazzwise Duncan Heining).

photo by Seán Kelly

'Yumi’s keyboard playing is generally one of a kind, her wonderful ability to jump from pure improvisation to strict compositional accuracy within the same thematic storyline, let alone the piece, making me scratch my head wondering how, why and to where the border between those two, completely different, styles disappears?' (Uzbekistan Progressive Rock Pages Vitaly Menshikov)

'The composer who tries hardest to address the Cargo audience' (The Guardian John L. Walters).

'How should I describe the unique world of 'Cool Down for Pole' and 'Improvisation on Japanese Lullabies' by Yumi Hara Cawkwell, composer based in London? To view her performance, improvisatory singing of Japanese lullabies, was a truly unique and mysterious experience' (Ongaku Gendai).

'Yumi Hara Cawkwell's Groove Study - a piece which, despite its title, was much more unhinged, jazzy and violent than the minimalist stuff around it' (The Times Richard Morrison).

'The other works leavened Reich and Riley's austerity with traces of pop in one form or another. The fractured rhythms of Yumi Hara Cawkwell's Groove Study amounted to a kind of electro-funk fantasia' (Evening Standard Nick Kimberley).