Jiro Inagaki
Jiro Inagaki is one of the most-recorded tenor saxophonists of postwar Japanese jazz. Across the late 1960s and 1970s he led two distinct major bodies of work: the commercial CBS/Sony cover and pop-jazz sessions that put his horn in front of mainstream Japanese listeners, and the East Wind and Toshiba soul-jazz and jazz-funk records that have driven Japanese jazz collector interest in his catalog for the past two decades. Thirty-one albums across three eras. Browse below.
Browse by Era
Each era page covers a distinct period in Inagaki's career, with full reviews, personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, and album art for every record.
Twenty-one albums from the commercial period on CBS/Sony Japan. Cover sessions, pop-jazz dates, easy-listening instrumentals, and the steady studio work that established Inagaki as one of the most-recorded saxophonists in the Japanese jazz scene before the soul-jazz turn.
Seven records covering the peak years with Soul Media on East Wind and Toshiba: Dosojin, In the Groove, The Underground Rulers, and Funky Stuff among them. The soul-jazz and jazz-funk records that have driven Japanese jazz collector interest in Inagaki's catalog for the past two decades.
Three late-career releases that round out Inagaki's recorded output decades after the peak years. Independent and small-label issues that document his continued activity into the 2010s and 2020s, by which point his earlier East Wind records had been rediscovered by a new generation of crate-diggers.
Jiro Inagaki, b. 1933
Jiro Inagaki was born February 26, 1933 in Tokyo. He took up the tenor saxophone after the Second World War, when American jazz records and US military broadcasts were the dominant musical influence on a generation of young Japanese musicians. By the late 1950s he was active on the Tokyo club circuit, recording as a sideman through the early 1960s before stepping out as a leader at the end of the decade.
The CBS/Sony years that began in 1969 made him a working studio name in Japan. The early leader dates leaned heavily on instrumental covers of American pop and movie themes, the kind of records a Japanese label could put in front of a wide audience without alienating older listeners who weren't yet ready for the heavier modal and free-jazz directions that some of his peers were exploring. Twenty-one albums in four years is an unusually dense output even by Japanese studio standards.
Around 1973 Inagaki pivoted into the soul-jazz and jazz-funk direction that would define his second act. He formed the band Soul Media and signed with the new East Wind label, then later with Toshiba. The records that followed, Funky Stuff, Dosojin, In the Groove, and The Underground Rulers in particular, drew on the same Blue Note funk vocabulary that Grant Green and Lou Donaldson had been developing in the United States a few years earlier, but filtered it through the rhythm sections, studio sound, and arranger sensibilities of Japanese jazz. These records were not widely known outside Japan when they were released. The reissue and rediscovery boom of the 2000s and 2010s changed that.
Inagaki continued recording sporadically into his eighties. The three legacy releases between 2013 and 2023 are not the records his Japanese jazz reputation rests on, but they are useful documents of a saxophonist who never fully stopped working. The East Wind records are what most international listeners encounter first.