About

Sam Pomanti is a keyboardist, composer and producer from Toronto based in Tokyo. He has performed as a live musician and recorded all throughout his native Canada as well as internationally, all the while steadily adding to his personal catalogue of songs and compositions. Sam’s breadth of musical knowledge and varied skillset as a keyboardist, composer, orchestrator, and accomplished student of the Japanese language (JLPT N1) has allowed him to enjoy success performing with a variety of artists around the world, such as BANKS, Koshi Inaba, Bazzi, Kim Mitchell, B’z, Narita Shouji, Richard Page of Mr. Mister, Scott Helman, Johnny Orlando, Anna Sofia, Mike Stern, and Ed Sheeran.

From 2019, Sam’s activities started to grow in Japan. In summer 2019, Sam performed as keyboardist/background vocalist on a 3 and-a-half month, 39-show tour with B’z (Whole Lotta New Love: B’z LIVE-GYM 2019), one of Japan’s most influential bands, and the country’s biggest-selling band of all time. Throughout that same year, Sam handled the pre-production programming, much of the keyboard recording, and some synth bass recording on Japanese-American supergroup INABA/SALAS’s sophomore album Maximum Huavo, which debuted at #1 on Japan’s Billboard Hot Albums chart in April 2020.

As a composer and songwriter, Sam has been steadily adding to his catalogue since his late teens across a wide range of styles. His college band Moonhead released one EP, which Sam handled the rhythm and horn arrangements and composition for, his entirely self-produced artist project Kitsuna has released two EPs, a full-length album, and several standalone singles, he has penned and produced some co-writes with writers in his hometown, and has in recent years been studying orchestration and scoring for picture. In 2021 Sam composed half of the score to a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) documentary on David Suzuki’s enduring The Nature of Things program called Nature’s Big Year, which looked at the positive and negative effects the pandemic has had on ecosystems around the world. He has also composed the scores for two Toronto-made short films, Pink Rabbit and The Whipping Boy, the former of which selected as a nominee for South Korea’s Bucheon International Film Festival.

Sam spent 2022 living in Los Angeles, adding to his composition catalogue through private endeavours and scoring work for short films and music videos, and also participating in several tours, performing keyboards with BANKS on her Serpentina Tour in North America and Europe, and keyboards, electric and bass guitar with Bazzi on his sold-out Infinite Dream Tour. In February 2023, Sam travelled to Japan to perform keyboards at sold-out shows with legendary Japanese singer Koshi Inaba at Yokohama Arena, which were broadcasted live to over 200 theatres around Japan. Sam now resides in and works from Tokyo, contributing music to video games and short films as well as performing as a keyboardist with various artists. Sam arranged two songs, and contributed one string arrangement as well as recording keyboards on seven songs on Koshi Inaba’s album Tadamono which debuted at #1 on Japan’s Oricon Weekly Album chart and rose to #1 on the Japan Billboard Hot Albums chart in July 2024. He also joined Koshi Inaba on his nationwide arena tour enIV in summer 2024, playing keyboards in his band.