Rei & The Moving Castle
LowDown
March 4, 2026
You can easily go wrong with a tribute band. Sometimes—hell, often—the effect is hokey, especially if the band’s genuine affection for the material supersedes the requisite discernment needed to make music that isn’t cheesy. A specific touch is required to make it worth listening to. Thankfully, Rei Wang has that touch.
Wang fronts the band Rei & The Moving Castle, an OKC-based jazz tribute band centered around the music of Studio Ghibli, the home of Hayao Miyazaki classics like Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Howl’s Moving Castle. The band rearranges composer Joe Hisaishi’s classic tunes from those movies into jazz works that are somehow both feel-good and rigorous, riding that line with a lot of humor, talent, and onstage Ghibli plushies.
A critic should be forgiven for having low expectations for a show billed as “Studio Ghibli Jazz.” Those expectations were more than surpassed within the first few seconds, as the band came out with a flowing arrangement of Hisaishi’s “Merry-Go-Round of Life,” the most recognizable song from Howl’s Moving Castle, drifting from the saxophone of Colin Farrell. Farrell used the easy melody from the movie as a base to develop a wide range of melodic material, coming at the theme from many directions, pushing away from it, and coming back, just to dance around it. Soon, guitarist Brian Belanus would do the same with My Neighbor Totoro’s “The Path Of The Wind,” stepping in and out of the melody to emphasize the inherent emotionality of the tune. From the opening moment, I was hooked on this band.
Drummer David Bowen managed to sneak a cinematic universe’s worth of complexity inside his tidy beats, portioning out sixteenths and sextuplets inside standard jazz rhythms. Using complicated fills to contribute to the music, rather than distract from it, is no easy feat. At the end of “Merry-Go-Round of Life,” Bowen led the band in a charging barrage of staccato hits, using the snare to connect them with loose, disjointed attacks. The whole thing could have fallen apart if not for the connection between the drummer and the band, who miraculously landed the whole thing like a pig flying a plane. (That’s a Porco Rosso joke.)
From the back of the stage, wearing all black, Rei Wang pushed the grooves with a bass taller than her. On a surprise song from the anime “One Piece,” Wang showed off her ability to reach into the bass’s highest registers in one of her few solos, all effective and enjoyable. As a bandleader, Wang was genial and fun to watch; her connection with drummer David Bowen was unsurprisingly tight, given that the two are husband and wife.
I was surprised by LowDown’s piano, which sounded slightly out of tune in the mid-high range, and came across muddily in the mix compared to the other instruments, which sounded sharp and easy to hear. Pianist Kendrick McKinney handled it well, playing standout solos and quiet, delicate passages, especially in the Spirited Away classic “One Summer’s Day.” But in certain moments, the piano’s tuning became overly evident and frustrating to hear. I hope that, in the future, out-of-town guests will be given a better experience with it.
Lovers of Joe Hisaishi’s music will love the sound of his scores no matter what form they come in; the melodies are so strong that they’d carry through a greeting card speaker. What a pleasant surprise, then, to find that Rei & The Moving Castle has chosen not to rest on Hisaishi’s laurels, but to actually push his music further. These OKC musicians thoroughly moved this Tulsa crowd, and given the enthusiastic, sold-out response they got, I hope and imagine they’ll be back.
