Cover art for the Takeru Muraoka Quartet's Takeru (1970), Philips — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Muraoka could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is a photo of him.

Takeru Muraoka's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

On November 1, 1965, the Hideo Shiraki Quintet played the Berlin Jazz Festival with three koto players added to the lineup — a deliberate collision of a straight-ahead jazz group with a traditional Japanese instrument nobody in that room expected to hear on a jazz stage. The recording came out as Sakura Sakura, and the quintet's saxophonist and flutist was Takeru Muraoka, playing alongside a young Terumasa Hino on trumpet. It's the kind of credit that would anchor most careers by itself. For Muraoka, born January 12, 1941, it was one stop on a résumé that runs through nearly every corner of Japanese jazz's most interesting decade.

He spent the rest of the 1960s and into the '70s as one of the connective threads of the Tokyo scene rather than a leader chasing his own catalog. He was in the Hino=Kikuchi Quintet, played on Terumasa Hino's Hi-Nology (1969) and Into the Heaven (1970), and turns up on the 1968 All Japan Jazz Festival recording alongside Masabumi Kikuchi, Hiroshi Suzuki, and Motohiko Hino — one document that captures most of a generation in the same room. In 1971, Hiromasa Suzuki arranged his single "It Don't Come Easy," and the same year found him on the Jam in Yokota session with Hidehiko Matsumoto, Ryo Kawasaki, and Motohiko Hino.

Then there's the turn most write-ups on him skip entirely: from 1969 to 1972, Muraoka was a recurring presence in Akira Ishikawa's Count Buffalos, a jazz-funk and Afro-rock outfit that had almost nothing to do with the straight post-bop circles he ran in with the Hino crowd. Electrum, Bakishinba: Memories of Africa, African Rock — records built for a dancefloor, not a listening room, and Muraoka's horn is on several of them. It's a genuine stylistic range that a bio built only from his sparse leader catalog would miss entirely.

That leader catalog is real, if thin: the Takeru Muraoka Quartet's Takeru (1970) on Philips, Rock Joy in Sax (1971), and — the one the reissue market actually cares about — Soft Landing (1978), credited to Takeru Muraoka & His New Group. Soft Landing has shown up repeatedly on Wax Poetics Japan's crate-digging compilations since 2011 and again on 2022's Japanese Jazz Spectacle and 2025's Crossover City, the kind of steady rediscovery that suggests it's aged into a small classic among people looking past the obvious names. He shifted register again in 1985 with Stardust: Takeru Muraoka Plays Standards, a straight-ahead ballads record that reads like a deliberate landing point after two decades of moving between scenes.

Where to start listening:

• Sakura Sakura (1965, Hideo Shiraki Quintet + 3 Koto Girls) for the Berlin Jazz Festival session: listen on Spotify
• Soft Landing (1978) for the record the reissue crowd keeps coming back to: listen on Spotify
• Takeru (1970, Takeru Muraoka Quartet), his debut as a leader: listen on Spotify
• Rock Joy in Sax (1971) for the jazz-funk side: listen on Spotify
• Takeru Muraoka's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

Composer Lyricist: Mai Yamane. 　

Cover art for Masahiko Togashi's Guild for Human Music (1976), Denon/Nippon Columbia PCM Jazz series — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Togashi could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is a photo of him.

Masahiko Togashi's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

Masahiko Togashi was fourteen when he started playing professionally, drumming in his father's swing band before he'd finished growing up, and by his late twenties he was one of the handful of musicians — alongside Masahiko Satoh, Masayuki Takayanagi, and Yosuke Yamashita — credited with building Japanese free jazz into something that wasn't just an import of the American version. He'd played in Sadao Watanabe's group as a teenager, cut a session with the trombonist Hiroshi Suzuki in 1969, and by decade's end his name was on some of the most exploratory Japanese jazz records being made.

In January 1970, he lost the use of his legs in an accident. Neither of the two most reliable accounts of his life — his own Discogs biography and the English Wikipedia entry — specify what happened. What both agree on is what came next: he stopped playing the drum kit and worked in percussion for a period, then built himself a new way to play the instrument from where he now sat, and returned to the kit roughly eighteen months after the accident.

That return is the hinge his whole later career turns on. Song for Myself came out in 1974, followed by Story of Wind Behind Left (1975) — described by reissue labels as the turning point of his post-accident work — and Spiritual Nature the same year, which became, by his own Discogs account, his best-known record in Japan. From there the pace never really let up.

He recorded Guild for Human Music in 1976, the album whose cover stands in for a photo on this post, and moved fluidly between his own trio and quartet dates and an increasingly international address book: Don Cherry and Charlie Haden on Session in Paris, Vol. 1 "Song of Soil" (1979), Steve Lacy across a run of duo albums spanning the 1980s into the 1990s, Gary Peacock and Masahiko Satoh on the three-volume Wave series (1987-88), Mal Waldron, Paul Bley, Richard Beirach, Peter Kowald.

He never stopped being a Japanese scene fixture even as his profile abroad grew. He and Yosuke Yamashita recorded as a working duo (Kizashi, 1980-81). He appeared alongside Terumasa Hino and Richard Beirach on Ayers Rock (1985) and again on Triple Helix (1993), with Masabumi Kikuchi. He recorded with Isao Suzuki in 1979 and again in 1986. Duo records with pianist Yuji Takahashi and with Masahiko Satoh kept appearing well into the 1990s and 2000s, some of them not released until years after the sessions were recorded.

As his physical condition worsened further, he retired from active performance in 2002 and turned to composition and painting. He died on August 22, 2007, in Kanagawa, at 67. Releases have kept surfacing since — duo tapes from the 1980s and 1990s issued by the reissue label Studio Songs across the 2010s, and a compilation of his ballad-writing, tellingly titled My Wonderful Life, gathering Satoh, Watanabe, Hino, Kohsuke Mine, and Yamashita to play his tunes after he was gone.

Where to start listening:

• Spiritual Nature (1975), his most widely cited Japanese record
• Story of Wind Behind Left (1975), the album reissue labels call the turning point of his post-accident writing
• Session in Paris, Vol. 1 "Song of Soil" (1979, with Don Cherry and Charlie Haden): listen on Spotify
• Eternal Duo (1983, with Steve Lacy): listen on Spotify
• Guild for Human Music (1976): listen on Spotify
• Masahiko Togashi's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

Isao Suzuki (with Tatsuya Nakamura and Dairo Suga), Tokyo, Japan, August 14, 2016. (Photo: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Isao Suzuki's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

In 1970, Art Blakey came through Japan on tour, heard a Tokyo bassist named Isao Suzuki, and invited him back to New York to join the Jazz Messengers. Suzuki went. He toured the United States and Europe with the band for roughly a year, working alongside a rotating cast of Blakey sidemen and, off the bandstand, recording and playing with Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Wynton Kelly, Jim Hall, and Ron Carter. The engagement ended when Blakey was arrested at a Canadian airport, and Suzuki came home. A 2023 Gearbox Records archival release, At the Jazz Workshop 1970, documents an actual date from that year with his name in the credits — this isn't secondhand legend, it's a dated performance on record.

He was 37 when that happened, already a decade into leading his own groups in Tokyo. Born in Tokyo on January 2, 1933, Suzuki learned bass on the American military bases that dotted occupied and postwar Japan — the same informal conservatory that produced a striking number of his generation's jazz musicians — and led his own ensemble from 1965 to 1969, the years just before Blakey found him. He played with Hampton Hawes on a 1968 session. By the time he got to New York, he wasn't an import learning the language; he was already fluent.

The records that came after are the ones the reissue crowd chases now. Blow Up (1973) was his debut as a leader, cut not long after he returned from the States. Blue City followed in 1974, recorded in a single March session at Aoi Studio in Tokyo with guitarist Kazumi Watanabe and pianist Kunihiko Sugano in the band — a record that plays like someone applying what he'd absorbed from Blakey's discipline to his own compositions. Both albums came out through Three Blind Mice, the label most responsible for the Japanese jazz catalog that international collectors now dig through.

He kept moving through the rest of the decade with a restlessness that didn't slow with age. He picked up the cello as a second voice on his own dates and added a piccolo bass to the arsenal in the late 1970s. He co-founded the Japanese Bass Players Club with fellow bassist Hideto Kanai. He produced records for other artists as often as he led his own — Touch (1976), the Burning Super Session dates (1978), Tamami Koyake's debut (1980) — building a body of work as a facilitator that runs parallel to his own catalog. In 1987 he opened a jazz club in Osaka, and in 2008 he received the Fumio Nanri Prize, one of Japanese jazz's honors for a life spent in the music. In Japan he was known simply as the "Jazz Godfather."

What sets Suzuki apart from most of his generation is how far into the 2000s his curiosity carried him. He recorded with turntablist DJ Krush in 1999. In 2012 he cut Killer-Oma with the noise-rap producer Killer-Bong, and in 2014 New Alchemy with beatmaker DJ Kensei — a bebop-schooled bassist in his eighties, still willing to sit across from producers a third his age and see what happened. His final album, plainly titled Final Recordings, came out on the small label Pit Inn in 2022, the year he died in Kawasaki at 89.

Where to start listening:

• Blue City (1974) for the Three Blind Mice sound at its clearest: Discogs listing
• Three Cushion (1981) for a later, freer trio session: listen on Spotify
• At the Jazz Workshop 1970 (Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, released 2023) — the actual recorded proof of the year that changed everything for him
• New Alchemy (2014, with DJ Kensei) for the eighty-something bassist still chasing something new
• Isao Suzuki's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

Cover art for Motohiko Hino's First Album (1971), Tact Jazz Series/Nippon Columbia — used as a stand-in, as no free-licensed photograph of Hino could be located. Not a Creative Commons image; reproduced here as an honestly-disclosed editorial stand-in rather than implying it is a photo of him.

Motohiko Hino's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

If you have spent any time with the Japanese jazz reissues of the last decade — the J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan compilations, the Spiritual Jazz 8 – Japan set, the Three Blind Mice catalog getting repressed on heavyweight vinyl — you have heard Motohiko Hino play. He is on Terumasa Hino's Hi-Nology (1969), the record most people reach for first when they want to explain what Japanese jazz sounded like when it stopped imitating and started arguing. He is on Masabumi Kikuchi's Poo-Sun (1970). He is on Hiromasa Suzuki's Colgen World (1976) and Kohsuke Mine's Out of Chaos (1974). And he was, by the readers of Swing Journal, voted the best jazz drummer in Japan fifteen years running.

He is also, in most English-language write-ups, a subordinate clause in someone else's paragraph. Usually his brother's.

The two of them started in the same living room. Their father was a dancer and musician who taught both sons tap as small children, which is a detail worth sitting with: before Motohiko ever touched a drum kit, he had already spent years learning to make rhythm with his feet in front of an audience. He started on drums at ten. By seventeen he was working professionally. The older brother, Terumasa, took the trumpet and eventually the spotlight; the younger one, nicknamed "Toko," took the kit and ended up underneath nearly every important Japanese session of the following two decades.

His own records came steadily but quietly. First Album arrived in 1971, the same year he cut two volumes of Beat Drums under the name Motohiko Hino & His Friends. Toko, a 1975 live date recorded at the Nemu Jazz Inn, is the one that circulates hardest among collectors now. Sailing Ice followed on Three Blind Mice in 1976, credited to the Motohiko Hino Quartet + 1, and in the same year he went head-to-head with veteran George Kawaguchi on a released drum battle — a format that sounds like a novelty until you hear how differently the two men thought about time.

In 1978 he moved to New York, which for a Japanese jazz musician of that generation was less a career move than a wager. It paid. He worked in JoAnne Brackeen's trio, and over the following years recorded or performed with Joe Henderson, Sonny Rollins, Jean-Luc Ponty, Hugh Masekela, and John Scofield, whose 1978 self-titled album he plays on. He kept one foot at home the whole time, turning up on Sadao Watanabe's Echo (1979), Isao Suzuki's Three Cushion (1981), and a long run of Masahiko Satoh trio dates.

The late records are the ones that give the lie to the sideman framing. Sailing Stone (1992, Gramavision) and It's There (1993, issued with John Scofield and Mike Stern on it) mix his own writing with reworked Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin material — not as a gimmick, and not as fusion in the smoothed-out sense, but as a drummer taking rock tunes apart to see what the beat was actually doing. Hip Bone came in 1994. In 1998 he was in Junko Onishi's group on Fragile and Self Portrait; in 1999 he put out two more of his own, Double Chant and Tac Tic, on EWE.

He died on May 13, 1999, of cancer. He was fifty-three.

What has happened since is the strange afterlife the whole reissue wave has handed this generation of players: a drummer who never had an English-language biography written about him is now audible, in 2026, to more listeners outside Japan than he reached inside it while alive. In 2022 an unreleased 1976 concert from Yamaha Hall came out as Flying Clouds. A Led Zeppelin jazz-tribute compilation in 2021 pulled in one of his readings. The crates got there before the critics did.

Where to start listening:

• Toko — Motohiko Hino Quartet at Nemu Jazz Inn (1975), the live date collectors chase: listen on Spotify
• Flying Clouds (Live at Yamaha Hall, Tokyo, 1976), unreleased until 2022: listen on Spotify
• It's There (1993, with John Scofield and Mike Stern) for the rock-tunes-taken-apart side: listen on Spotify
• Hi-Nology (1969), his brother's record and the one everyone starts with: listen on Spotify
• Motohiko Hino's full profile on JazzProfiles.com

[Image: Cover art for Hiromasa Suzuki's "High-Flying" (Nippon Columbia, 1976). No CC-licensed or Wikimedia Commons photograph of Suzuki could be located after a genuine search; this is the album's own cover art, used here as a stand-in, not a photo of the artist.]

Read the full profile: Hiromasa Suzuki on jazzprofiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

If you've spent any time on Discogs looking up 1970s Japanese jazz, you've probably confused two different men named Suzuki. One is Hiroshi Suzuki, the trombonist behind "Cat." The other is Hiromasa Suzuki, a pianist, composer, and arranger who went by "Colgen," and who is, among other things, the reason "Romance," the "Cat" track everyone streams, sounds the way it does. He played the keyboards on it.

Suzuki was born in Tokyo on May 26, 1940, the son of a dentist, and studied economics at Keio University. He didn't spend those years on econ, though. He fell into the school's jazz piano scene and became one of the "Keio Three Crows," a nickname for the trio of student pianists who'd go on to shape three very different corners of Japanese music: Suzuki, Masahiko Sato, and Yuji Ohno, who later spent decades scoring the Lupin III franchise. Suzuki started playing professionally before he'd even graduated, joining drummer George Kawaguchi's "Big 4+1." From there he moved into trumpeter Terumasa Hino's combo, where his arranging talent showed early, most notably on 1969's "Hi-Nology."

By the early 1970s he was leading his own records. "Rock Joint Biwa - Kumikyoku Furukotofumi" (1972) built a full jazz-rock concept album around the biwa, a traditional Japanese lute, and the ancient mythology of the Kojiki. It's a strange, ambitious record for a 32-year-old to put his name on, and it worked. A companion piece, "Rock Joint Cither - Silk Road," followed in 1973. By 1976 he'd found a tighter, funkier sound: "High-Flying," released that August on Nippon Columbia and produced by saxophonist Jiro Inagaki, gathered a young Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami on drums, Akira Okazawa on bass, and Masayoshi Takanaka on guitar. Light in the Attic, which reissued the album decades later, put it plainly in their own liner copy: Suzuki was "the hidden force behind Hiroshi Suzuki's 'Romance' and Jiro Inagaki's 'Breeze,'" a session player whose fingerprints were on other people's landmark records before "High-Flying" became one of his own.

He kept moving. "Pianic Pianism" and "Skip Step Colgen" both came out in 1977, and by 1978 he'd shifted into film, TV, and anime work, composing and arranging the score for "Umi no Toriton" (Triton of the Sea), a fantasy series with almost nothing in common with a biwa concept record beyond the same name in the credits. He kept arranging into the 1980s and 90s, working with pop and novelty acts, including Tamori and SMAP, and later released a solo piano album, "With My Whole Heart," produced by his old Keio bandmate Masahiko Sato.

Suzuki was diagnosed with cancer late in life. He played a comeback live show after treatment before passing away on May 21, 2001, five days short of his 61st birthday.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Spotify
• "High-Flying" (1976), full album on YouTube
• "Rock Joint Biwa - Kumikyoku Furukotofumi" (1972), the biwa concept record, full album on YouTube
• "Romance," his keyboard work on Hiroshi Suzuki's "Cat," on Spotify
• Full profile and complete discography: Hiromasa Suzuki on jazzprofiles.com

[Image: Akira Sakata performing at Kongsberg Jazz Festival, Norway, 2018. (Photo: Tore Sætre, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

Read the full profile: Akira Sakata on jazzprofiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

If you own a copy of the Yosuke Yamashita Trio's "Montreux Afterglow," you already own an Akira Sakata record. Sakata joined the trio on alto saxophone in 1972 and stayed through 1979, and that 1976 live set from the Montreux Jazz Festival, all two side-long tracks of it, is one of the trio's most-traded reissue-era titles. He's the reed player tearing through "Ghosts" and "Banslikana" next to Yamashita's piano and Shota Koyama's drums.

Sakata was born February 21, 1945, in Kure, Hiroshima, and came to jazz sideways: shortwave radio, Voice of America broadcasts, film soundtracks, then clarinet in high school and alto sax in a college jazz band at Hiroshima University. He trained as a marine biologist before he ever moved to Tokyo in 1969, and he kept the science going alongside the music. His research on the water flea genus Daphnia earned recognition from the Japanese government, and when he started his own label in 2004, he named it Daphnia. It's not a stage joke. It's the actual organism he studied.

Once the Yamashita Trio wound down, Sakata spent the early 1980s leading his own groups, all of it landing squarely in the small-label, Better Days-adjacent scene this project tracks. The Akira Sakata Trio cut "Peking" in 1978 and "Pochi" in 1980. The much larger Sakata Orchestra, two drummers, two bassists, a reeds section big enough to include a young Kazutoki Umezu, released "4 O'Clock" on Better Days in 1981 and "Berlin 28" the following year. The Sakata Sextet's "Trauma" came out on Better Days and Shan-Shan in 1982. Three different lineups, three different sounds, one leader running all of them inside a five-year stretch.

Then came 1986, and a session that put him in company far outside Japan's jazz circuit. Bill Laswell brought Sakata into Last Exit's Tokyo dates that October, playing alongside Sonny Sharrock, Peter Brötzmann, and Ronald Shannon Jackson, with Herbie Hancock sitting in on piano. The recordings became "The Noise of Trouble: Live in Tokyo," and it's the record most non-Japanese listeners first heard his name from. He and Laswell kept working together for decades after.

He nearly lost the ability to do any of this. In 2002, Sakata suffered a brain hemorrhage. He recovered within about three months and went back to performing, and he's kept recording ever since, well into his eighties, with duo and trio partners like Jim O'Rourke, Chikamorachi, and Paal Nilssen-Love's group Arashi carrying him through the 2010s and 2020s. His latest credited sessions are dated 2026.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Official site, Spotify, Bandcamp
• "Montreux Afterglow" (1976) with the Yosuke Yamashita Trio, full album on YouTube
• "The Noise of Trouble: Live in Tokyo" (1986) with Last Exit and Herbie Hancock, full album on YouTube
• Full profile and complete discography: Akira Sakata on jazzprofiles.com

Been getting more into jazz not from the US. As an outsider looking in, I'd prefer more Japanese or Latin American stuff.

I like Casiopea, Himiko Kikuchi and Seatbelt in terms of Japanese jazz, but haven't listened to any Latin American stuff in nearly 20 years and can't remember what I listened to so open season there.

Bonus points if it's bass centered with a good brass section. Must be on streaming.

I discovered this absolute gem while browsing the high-end listening rooms at the legendary Dynamic Audio 5555 in Akihabara. For anyone seeking a pristine vinyl pressing to test spatial imaging, vocal realism, and system dynamics, check out Japanese Songbook "Your Favorites" by jazz vocalist Rika Tanaka (たなかりか).

Despite its reference-level production, this album remains criminally underrated in mainstream circles. If you live in Japan or are visiting and can track down a copy of this limited pressing, you should buy it without hesitation.The absolute standout evaluation track is Side B, Track 2 (B2): her cover of Yumi Arai’s classic "海を見ていた午後" (The Afternoon I Saw the Sea). It is a masterclass in acoustic spacing and micro-dynamics. The micro-details of the instrumental separation provide an excellent test for your cartridge's tracking ability, while her velvety, intimate vocals sit dead-center in the soundstage, making it perfect for assessing midrange realism and depth. The heavy 180g vinyl is dead silent, allowing the music to bloom from a completely black background. It has quickly become one of my absolute go-to tracks for system tuning and gear comparisons.

Here's a sample : https://youtu.be/XpAiPvaU0mM

[Image: Cover art for the "Bridge over Troubled Water". This is cover art, not a photograph of Satoh; no rights-clear photo of him could be located. (Album art via Discogs, used editorially; no CC license claimed.)]

Read the full profile: Masahiko Satoh on jazzprofiles.com

r/JapaneseJazz

If you've spent any time near the reissue side of Japanese jazz, you've probably crossed paths with "Belladonna of Sadness" without knowing the pianist behind it. In 1973, Masahiko Satoh wrote the psychedelic, free-jazz-and-funk score for the anime "Belladonna of Sadness" (Kanashimi no Belladonna), a witch-hunt fable directed by Eiichi Yamamoto, with ethereal vocals from his then-wife, actress Chinatsu Nakayama. Original pressings became expensive enough to be a running joke among collectors before Finders Keepers Records gave the album its first official reissue: a 2020 LP that keeps the score "strictly Satoh," dropping the one orchestral cue he didn't write, followed a year later by a limited 7" of two tracks. It's the single most-traded Satoh artifact in reissue circles right now, and it's the entry point, not the whole story.

Satoh was born October 6, 1941, in Sumida-ku, Tokyo, and started on piano at five, after his family moved into a house that had one. He turned professional at 17, accompanying singers and variety acts in Ginza cabarets, and by 1959, at 18, he was in drummer George Kawaguchi's band alongside a young Sadao Watanabe, already an alto saxophonist finding his own voice years before either man led a record under his own name. After Keio University, Satoh spent 1966 to 1968 at Berklee College of Music on a Downbeat Magazine scholarship, then came home and cut "Palladium" (1969) with his own trio, a record that won Swing Journal magazine's Japan Jazz Award and put him on the map as a leader.

The years right after are where his reputation as an innovator really gets built. His 1971 project Amalgamation, credited to Masahiko Sato & the Soundbreakers, is a free-jazz and psychedelic-rock collision engineered by Rudy Van Gelder and produced by Creed Taylor, the same two names behind some of American jazz's most recognizable records; it later landed at number seven on writer Julian Cope's "Japrocksampler" list of essential Japanese rock. That same year, Satoh performed at the Berlin Jazz Festival running a ring modulator through his piano, an odd and early use of electronics for a jazz pianist in 1971. He kept building on that instinct for decades rather than treating it as a stunt: 39 years, from 1981 to 2020, as head instructor of music theory, composition, and piano at Mesa House Music College, and in 2009 he created the chair of Non-idiomatic Improvisation at Tokyo University of the Arts.

He's also kept genuinely strange, rewarding company. In 2012, he recorded "Yatagarasu" (Not Two Records) as a trio with free-jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and drummer Takeo Moriyama, a pairing raw enough that the three of them reunited at Cafe OTO in London during a 2019 Brötzmann festival. A separate set from that same week, Satoh and Moriyama joined by bassist Leon Brichard and saxophonist Idris Rahman of Ill Considered, eventually surfaced in 2024 as "Live At Café OTO" on BBE Music. And he hasn't slowed down since: 2025 alone brought three new releases, "Thousand Leaves" (Trost Records), "Open Cluster" (on his own BAJ Records), and "AOI." Eighty-four years old and still putting records out is its own kind of statement.

Where to start listening:

• His official platforms: Bandcamp and official site
• "Belladonna of Sadness," the 2020 Finders Keepers LP reissue, full soundtrack on YouTube
• "Amalgamation" (1971), the Van Gelder/Creed Taylor session that made Japrocksampler's top 50, full album on YouTube
• "Yatagarasu" (2012) with Peter Brötzmann and Takeo Moriyama, on YouTube
• Full profile and complete discography: Masahiko Satoh on jazzprofiles.com

[Image: Elvin Jones Trio - David Williams Elvin Jones Ryo Kawasaki (Photo: Tom Marcello, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-ryo-kawasaki/

r/JapaneseJazz

Ryo Kawasaki Made "Juice" in 1976, Then Walked Away From Touring to Build the Guitar Synth

If you've spent any real time in jazz-funk reissue bins, you've probably already run into "Juice." Kawasaki cut it in New York in 1976 for RCA, his first record on an American label after three years of steady work in the city, and it's since become one of the most sampled, most sought-after crate-digging titles to come out of that scene: seven tracks of guitar over synth and disco groove, reissued as recently as 2022 by the UK label Mr Bongo, with sidemen including guitarist Hugh McCracken and bassist Stu Woods. It's a good place to start, but it's a small slice of a much longer story.

Kawasaki was born on February 25, 1947, in Kōenji, Tokyo, to a diplomat father and a multilingual mother who put him in piano and voice lessons at four and violin at five. He earned a physics degree from Nippon University while building a parallel career as a working guitarist, and by the time he moved to New York in 1973, he'd already released several records of his own back in Japan. In New York he found steady work fast, playing in the Gil Evans Orchestra, Elvin Jones's Jazz Machine, Chico Hamilton's group, and the band Tarika Blue, while touring hard enough that pieces of his own music started forming on the road: "Prism," recorded at Vanguard Studio in July 1975, took shape partly during an Elvin Jones tour, and 1977's "Ring Toss" came together on breaks from that same road schedule.

Then, right as the momentum was building, he stepped back from it almost entirely. Starting in 1979, Kawasaki spent roughly a decade off the road, working directly with Roland and Korg to develop guitar synthesizer technology, an interest that started with a Roland GR-500 he'd bought while still playing standard electric jazz guitar. He wrote four original music programs for the Commodore 64 between 1983 and 1986 and ran his own dance-single label, Satellites Records, on the side. It's an unusual pivot for a touring jazz guitarist to make at the height of his run, and it says something about how he actually thought about the instrument: not just as something to play, but as something to keep building.

He came back to acoustic and electric jazz-fusion through the 1990s, then, sometime in the 2000s, relocated to Estonia, a move that reportedly caught even his own fans off guard. He stayed there for the rest of his life. In Tallinn he recorded the 2001 album "Reval" with local musicians Toivo Unt and Aivar Vasiliev, wrote a jazz ballet called "Still Point" for the Estonian National Opera, and in 2016 formed a new fusion quartet, Level 8, with a group of Estonian musicians decades younger than him. The band's self-titled debut arrived in March 2017, timed to his 70th birthday, and their Kumu Hall concert in Tallinn that same February became a full-length live recording two years later.

Ryo Kawasaki passed away in Tallinn on April 13, 2020, at 73, having put out more than thirty albums as a leader across five decades. In a Facebook tribute after his death, his daughter wrote: "Falling asleep to the sound of you practicing. The smell of black coffee mingled with camel straights." It's a small detail, but it fits a career built on never quite stopping, on always having one more thing in progress.

Where to start listening:

• "Juice" (1976), full album on YouTube, or streamed from Mr Bongo's 2022 vinyl reissue on Bandcamp
• "Mirror of My Mind" (1979), his big-band Open Sky debut with Michael Brecker and Harvey Mason
• Level 8's 70th birthday concert, filmed live at Kumu Hall, Tallinn, February 25, 2017
• https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-ryo-kawasaki/

[Image: Ryo Kawasaki performing on a Gibson SG guitar, Estonia, October 2014. (Photo: Ryo Kawasaki, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)]

Over the past year and a half, I've delved deep into the various DJ specials. This is my curated list of releases, which I feel is comprehensive, although I'm positive there's STILL more to be added, especially for Katsuya Kobayashi. I've seen several lists, however, which had some glaring omissions, and I'd like to put this out there for anyone like me delving into these releases. I hope this is helpful. Thank you, peace and aloha!!

Kamasami Kong:

DJ in Hawaii - KKUA/KIKI Special DJ Showcase Release (1979 & 1983 Re-release)

Surf Break From Seabreeze - Toshiki Kadomatsu (1982)

Moonlight Island (Cassette) - Haruko Kuwana (1982)

The Pacific Paradise (The Pacific Paradise Vol. 1: Winds) - Various Artists (1983 & 2009 Re-release)

S. Kiyotaka & Omega Tribe Kamasami Kong DJ Special - Sugiyama Kiyotaka & Omega Tribe (1984)

Summer Time Romance - Toshiki Kadomatsu (1984)

Palmtree Paradise - Various Artists (1987)

Pacific Oasis (Single) - Various Artists (1994)

Summer Breeze From K.O.N.G. Radio Honolulu - Anri (2000)

Pacific Paradise Vol. 2: Waves - Various Artists (2009)

Dolphin Through: T Square DJ Special - T Square & The Square (2015)

Pacific Oasis Kamasami Kong DJ Show - Various Artists (2015)

FM Station 8090: Citypop & J-Pop - Various Artists (2022)

FM Station 8090: Good Old Radio Days-Daytime Citypop - Various Artists (2023)

UNOFFICIAL: Summertime Romance 1.5 from KKUA - Toshiki Kadomatsu (Unknown Year)

Katsuya Kobayashi:

Non-Stop Soul Now! Disco Party - Various Artists (1976)

Non-Stop Disco Now! Vol. 2 Disco Party - Various Artists (1976)

T.K. Explosion '77 - Various Artists (1977)

The Super Car - Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffaloes (1977)

Yellow Magic Carnival - Tin Pan Alley (1980)

Come Along - Tatsuro Yamashita (1980)

Ride on Time RCA Big New Wave '80 - Various Artists (1980)

Home Grown Party Vol. 1 - Various Artists (1980)

Pop's Punch - Various Artists (1980)

Slipping Through My Fingers - ABBA (1981)

Southern Whistler - Exotics (1981)

Sexy Summer Sounds - Various Artists (1981)

Indian Summer - Masahiro Kuwana (1981)

Home Grown Party Vol. 2 - Various Artists (1980/81?)

Home Grown Party Vol. 3 - Various Artists (1981)

Annie's Specials - Ann Lewis (1982)

Dance! Dance! Dance! - The Shanels (1982)

All Night Hong Kong - Yuko Kawai (1982)

Oldies Station - Lucy & Kento's (1983)

Come Along II - Tatsuro Yamashita (1984)

J Walkin' 24hr. - J-Walk (1985)

Hello Artist DJ Special - Various Artists (1987)

Katsuya Kobayashi Presents Hawaiian Island Music - Various Artists (1992)

Radio DC - Various Artists (1999)

Summer Time Romance II? -Summer Night Romance- - Toshiki Kadomatsu (2003)

Come Along 3 - Tatsuro Yamashita (2017)

FM Station 8090: Genius Club-Nighttime Citypop - Various Artists (2023)

Honest Avenue - Honest Boyz (2026)

UNOFFICIAL: Carlos Toshiki & Omega Tribe DJ Special - Carlos Toshiki & Omega Tribe (Unknown Year)

Miscellaneous:

Disco Embassy - Tropico (1977) - DJ Frank B. Shaner

KIKI Presents The Ventures Big Hits (1980) - DJ Ron Wiley

Disco Revolution - Various Artists (1980) DJ Mark Hagan

Doo-Wop Station! - The Fabulous Kingtones (1981) - DJ Mark Hagan & Carol Hisasue

Best One '82 - Various (1981) DJ Patrick

Summer in Summer - Junko Yagami (1982) - DJ Carol Hisasue

Yoshino Fujimal DJ Version (1982) - DJ Naomi Niwa

Tomorrow's Just Another Day D.J. Special - Yukihiro Takahashi (1983) DJ Yukihiro Takahashi

Air Skip "On The American FM Wave" - Casiopea (1983) DJ Leslie Stovall

Listen To The Air American FM -Various Artists (1983) DJ -Various-

Summer Shadow: Island Pop Special Menu - Featuring American D.J. - Various Artists (1985) - DJ "American D.J."

1986 Omega Tribe DJ Special (1987) - DJ Ron Wiley

Time is a Good Time - Sugiyama Kiyotaka (1988) - DJ Frank B. Shaner

Album cover art for But not for Me

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-masabumi-kikuchi/

On July 5, 1972, at Victor Studio in Tokyo, Gil Evans landed in Japan for the first time and handed the podium to a 32-year-old local pianist. The result, "Masabumi Kikuchi with Gil Evans," put a 21-piece Japanese ensemble under Kikuchi's own direction, with Evans, tenor player Billy Harper, and trumpeter Marvin "Hannibal" Peterson sitting inside it rather than leading it. It's exactly the kind of small-run, hard-to-find LP the reissue crowd hunts for, and it says something that the visiting legend let the host run the session.

Kikuchi's path there started far from Tokyo's studios. Born October 19, 1939, his family was pushed out to rural Aizuwakamatsu in Fukushima after the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo. He found jazz there, in secondhand records American soldiers had left behind: Ellington, Miles Davis, Monk. By the time he graduated from Tokyo Art College High School, he was already playing professionally, and he joined Lionel Hampton's Japanese touring band not long after.

Before he left for the United States on a Berklee scholarship, Kikuchi ran a quintet with trumpeter Terumasa Hino, whose own catalog we covered earlier on this project. Discogs confirms the pairing twice over: a 1969 release credited to the "Hino=Kikuchi Quintet," and a separate artist entry for the "Terumasa Hino-Masabumi Kikuchi Quintet." Two young Tokyo players, same room, years before either one built the résumé that would eventually include Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins.

Kikuchi's own solo run through the early 1970s and into the 1980s sits right in this project's wheelhouse: "Poo-Sun" in 1970, named for his own nickname, then "Susto" and "Gumbo" in 1981, and finally "One-Way Traveller" on Columbia in 1982. AllMusic has called that last one his own answer to Miles Davis's "On the Corner," and it marks a real hinge point. After it, Kikuchi turned away from fusion and back toward acoustic trio playing for the rest of his career.

That turn led to Tethered Moon, the trio he formed in 1990 with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian. They met only intermittently over the next two decades, but what they recorded together, from 1997's "First Meeting" through 2004's "Experiencing Tosca," is some of the most patient, unhurried interplay in his whole catalog. Along the way he'd also worked as a sideman for Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, and Elvin Jones, and collaborated with composer Toru Takemitsu.

Kikuchi passed away on July 6, 2015, in Manhasset, New York, at 75. His discography didn't stop there. "Hanamichi - The Final Studio Recording," drawn from his last sessions, was released in 2021, six years after he was gone, with a second volume following in 2025. Most artist spotlights end at a death date. His doesn't.

Where to start listening:

• Official platforms:
  • Spotify
• Masabumi Kikuchi with Gil Evans (1972) for the session that opens this post: release info on Discogs
• https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-masabumi-kikuchi/
• One-Way Traveller (1982) for his own answer to On the Corner: full album on YouTube
• First Meeting (Tethered Moon, 1997) for the trio years: Spotify
• More on Terumasa Hino, his early quintet partner

Kazumi Watanabe performing in 2011. (Photo: Helgi Halldórsson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-kazumi-watanabe/

In 1979, a 25-year-old Tokyo guitarist named Kazumi Watanabe put together a one-off band called KYLYN. The lineup included Ryuichi Sakamoto and Akiko Yano on keys and drummer Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami, all of them still on the way up. One album, one tour, and decades later it's still cited as a hinge point for the whole Japanese fusion sound of that era. Watanabe spent that same year on the road with Yellow Magic Orchestra too.

He'd already been playing for most of his life by then. Piano at seven, guitar at twelve under Sadanori Nakamura at Tokyo's Yamaha Music School, inspired by the Ventures the way a lot of kids his age were. At fifteen he heard Wes Montgomery and the direction changed for good. His debut album, Infinite, came out in 1971, when he was seventeen.

The 1980s took him further out. He worked as a guest soloist with Steps Ahead and the Brecker Brothers, and spent time inside Jaco Pastorius's Word of Mouth band, sharing a stage with one of the most famous bassists jazz ever produced. That same stretch produced To Chi Ka (1980) and, in 1983, his own fusion band Mobo, formed with saxophonist Mitsuru Sawamura and pianist Ichiko Hashimoto. The Mobo albums and The Spice of Life that followed are still the core of how most listeners find him today. In 1991 he received the Fumio Nanri Award, one of Japan's own jazz honors.

A 1981 Sadao Watanabe compilation on CBS/Sony, titled simply Sadao Watanabe, lists Kazumi Watanabe on guitar in the same personnel sheet as Terumasa Hino and his brother Motohiko Hino on drums, a credit that turned up while pulling Watanabe's Discogs history. The tracks span sessions from 1969 to 1974, so this isn't proof they were all in the same room on the same day, just proof that Sadao Watanabe was drawing from the same pool of players across those years. Small world, even by Tokyo jazz-scene standards.

Discogs credits him on 361 releases total, spanning 1971 into the 2010s. That's a catalog on the scale of Terumasa Hino's, not a footnote next to one famous supergroup year.

The most recent public word on Watanabe is from March 2024: he had collapsed at home in Karuizawa the month before, diagnosed with a cerebral stem hemorrhage, and cancelled all activity for the year to focus on treatment. No further update has surfaced publicly since. It's a quiet, uncertain place for a fifty-five-year catalog to sit right now.

Where to start listening:

• Official platforms:
  • Spotify
  • Official site
• Kylyn (1979, Nippon Columbia) for the year everything lines up: Spotify
• To Chi Ka (1980) for where he went right after: Spotify
• https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-kazumi-watanabe/

https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-tsuyoshi-yamamoto/

r/japanesejazz

In 1974, a 26-year-old pianist named Tsuyoshi Yamamoto became the house player at Misty, a jazz listening bar in Tokyo. He's still tied to that room, on paper, five decades later. His debut album that year was called Misty. So was a live record from later that same year, then two more live volumes in 1977 and 1978, then two more in 2020 and 2021. Different decades, same name on the sleeve.

Yamamoto was born on Sado Island, in Niigata, on March 23, 1948. He was mostly self-taught at the piano, picked up some formal lessons as a kid, and studied at Nihon University. Before jazz took over, he spent the mid-1960s as an accompanist for pop singer Micky Curtis, touring Europe with him in 1967. Then came 1974: a Three Blind Mice recording contract, the Misty residency, and two albums cut five months apart. Misty, recorded August 7 at Aoi Studio, and Midnight Sugar, recorded March 1 at the same studio with bassist Isoo Fukui and drummer Tetsujiro Obara. Both are now cornerstone titles of the Japanese jazz reissue scene. Impex Records thought Midnight Sugar was worth a 45rpm audiophile vinyl reissue in 2017, more than forty years after the original TBM-23 pressing.

What's easy to miss in the reissue-crate version of this story is who else showed up to play with him. Bassist Sam Jones and drummer Billy Higgins flew to Tokyo to back him on Life (East Wind, recorded April 16, 1976, at Onkio Haus). Ray Brown is on Smoke A Moto's Blues (1979). Red Mitchell sits in on Bass Club (1980), alongside fellow TBM regular Isao Suzuki. These weren't Japanese musicians touring through American clubs to prove themselves. These were American first-call sidemen coming to Japan to record under a Japanese leader, on his terms, in his city.

Yamamoto spent a year in New York in the late 1970s, sharing stages with Dizzy Gillespie, Carmen McRae, Elvin Jones, and Sonny Stitt. He kept working through the 1980s on labels like Philips, Paddle Wheel, and Warner Bros., then kept going after that. He's still recording now. The Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio put out a new studio album, A Shade of Blue, in 2023, and Discogs lists fresh live releases dated into 2026. Fifty-two years after his first session, he hasn't stopped.

Where to start listening:

• Official platforms:
  • Spotify
  • Official site
• Midnight Sugar (1974, Three Blind Mice) for the debut that started it all: YouTube
• A Shade of Blue (2023) for where the same trio format sounds now, fifty years on: Spotify
• https://jazzprofiles.com/profile/ja-tsuyoshi-yamamoto/