Before Kuroda arrived in the U.S. in 2000, he grew up in Kobe, Japan and followed his older, trombone-playing brother’s footsteps by joining the junior high school jazz band. While in Japan, Kuroda played in jazz bands for 12 years, from junior high school through college jazz big band. But he says that he really got into jazz by playing on the local jazz scene with the smaller combos. “The big band was just playing music charts; it didn’t have much improvisation,” Kuroda explains, “I sat in with a lot of the elders on the local scene. They showed me so much love.”Kuroda eventually came to the U.S. where at the New School he had his first formal jazz studies. “I never had a jazz music teacher in Japan. I took my first music theory, ear training and jazz ensemble classes for the first time in my life in English, which made it even crazier,” he says, “ But that made me want to come to New York.”