Akira Ishikawa began his recording career with Shin Matsumoto and New Pacific and moved through a string of Tokyo bands — Akira Miyazawa Modern Allstars, Toshio Hosaka and Emanaries — before assembling a group out of the session players he worked with most, the ensemble that would become the base of Count Buffalos. By 1970 he was an established first-call session drummer. That year he did something almost none of his contemporaries did: he traveled to East Africa, including Uganda, to hear the rhythms firsthand rather than secondhand off records, and came home with new percussion instruments and a direct understanding of what he'd been reaching for.

That trip became the foundation of Count Buffalos, and the records that followed — Electrum (1970), Drums Concerto (1971), African Rock (1971/1972), Uganda (1972), Get Up! (1975), among many others — form a genuinely distinct body of jazz-funk built on Afro-rock foundations, dense with the specific instrumentation he'd brought back rather than a generic exotica gesture. Decades later, that catalog found new life through reissues by Light in the Attic Records (the source of this profile's stand-in cover image) and Mr Bongo, and African Rock in particular now circulates as one of the more sought-after Japanese jazz-funk records of its era.

The Count Buffalos work ran alongside a parallel career as one of Tokyo's most reliable session drummers. Under his own name, he recorded a long run of drum-battle and drum-anthology records with the other leading session drummers of his generation — George Kawaguchi, Takeshi Inomata, Sadakazu Tabata — and appears on shared credits with Hiromasa Suzuki, Motohiko Hino, and Masahiko Togashi. Through 1969-1972 he also built one of the deepest recurring working relationships documented in this project with saxophonist Takeru Muraoka, who played on multiple Count Buffalos records across that stretch.

He died on February 10, 2002.

Ishikawa's Count Buffalos catalog is defined by its direct, lived relationship to African percussion rather than an imported influence — a distinction that separates it from many contemporaneous exotica-adjacent records. It sits alongside a completely separate, more conventional catalog of Japanese session-drummer work, giving him one of the wider stylistic ranges of any artist covered in this project.