Jiro Inagaki
Jiro Inagaki (1933-2024) was a central figure in the development of jazz rock in Japan. Across the late 1960s and 1970s he led two distinct major bodies of work: the commercial Nippon Columbia cover and pop-jazz sessions that put his horn in front of mainstream Japanese listeners, and the Nippon Columbia and Eastworld soul-jazz and jazz-funk records that have driven Japanese jazz collector interest in his catalog for the past two decades. Thirty 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 albums from the commercial period on Nippon Columbia. 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 Nippon Columbia and Eastworld: In the Groove, A Sunflower in Greece, 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 archival releases from decades after the peak years: a 2013 Nippon Columbia compilation, a 2015 Nippon Columbia LP of previously unreleased 1970 concert tapes, and a 2023 double LP anthology issued for his ninetieth birthday. By then his earlier Nippon Columbia records had been rediscovered by a new generation of crate-diggers.
Jiro Inagaki, b. 1933
Jiro Inagaki was born October 3, 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 Nippon Columbia 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.
By the early 1970s Inagaki had pivoted into the soul-jazz and jazz-funk direction that would define his second act. He had formed the band Soul Media back in 1969 and stayed with Nippon Columbia, then later moved to Toshiba. The records that followed, Funky Stuff, Dosojin, and In the Groove 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 Nippon Columbia Soul Media records are what most international listeners encounter first.