Ami Nakazono (中園亜美, Nakazono Ami in Japanese order) was born in 1986 in Kagoshima, at the southern end of Kyushu, and describes herself as a player with two foundations: a classical background and the working experience of New York. An earlier artist biography says she began classical piano at four and took up the alto saxophone around the age of 12, in her school brass band. She finished the music course at Fukuoka Daiichi High School, then enrolled in the jazz department of Senzoku Gakuen College of Music in Tokyo.

From Senzoku she moved to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied saxophone with Walter Beasley, and the same earlier biography also names Dino Govoni and Bill Pierce among her teachers. Berklee's archive lists her senior saxophone recital on December 2, 2009, the year she graduated. Her first recordings from this period are small and independent: the single "December" (2010) and the five-track EP Musiq Is Love (2011), both on streaming services under her own name. After Berklee she based herself in New York, working as a sideperson in the United States and Europe, and in 2014 she moved to Tokyo to start a solo career in earnest.

That career began with Make It Happen!, released on October 21, 2015 by VEGA Music Entertainment (VGDBRZ-0062) with the keyboardist Jun Abe as sound producer. The label billed it as her first full-fledged smooth jazz album, recorded with players from Los Angeles, Tokyo and Bangkok, among them the trumpeter Luis Valle, the flugelhorn player Ilya Serov and the Thai singer Kanokkan Sudhikam. It was issued in Thailand through Hitman Jazz at the same time, and she played jazz festivals in Bangkok and Chiang Mai that year. A release tour followed in 2016, including a June 16 date at Live Spot RAG in Kyoto with Abe on keyboards, Shingo Tanaka on bass, Yoshiaki Muto on guitar and Shin Takada on drums, and in August 2016 she put out the worldwide digital singles "She's Home" and "World Connection." Her official profile lists a solo concert at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., in April 2017.

The Real (Space Shower Music, DDCB-13037) followed on April 25, 2018, a ten-track album with an official video for the title track on the Space Shower channel. In 2019 she joined Mai Kuraki's 20th anniversary hall tour. With the keyboardist Marie Takeda she formed the duo LE GRAND RETOUR, whose first single "GENE" was released digitally in June 2020, followed by a first live-streamed concert in July 2020. In 2022 she gave a solo concert at Cotton Club in Marunouchi, Tokyo.

The six years between her second and third albums were not idle. She joined THE JAZZ AVENGERS, the eight-piece Tokyo group organized around the drummer Senri Kawaguchi, as soprano saxophonist; the group's self-titled debut came out on April 26, 2023 and 8 STEPS on May 8, 2024, with a concert Blu-ray, Live 2023 Unite, taken from the tour finale at Shibuya Pleasure Pleasure in Tokyo on October 11, 2023. She also joined 坐音 (Zaon), a fusion group led by Abe that adds Japanese instruments (shakuhachi, koto and taiko) to a jazz rhythm section, whose self-released album appeared on April 15, 2022, and she recorded two volumes of J-pop standards arranged for jazz with the pianist Manami Morita as The Jazzles (January 2022 and January 2024, both on VEGA). In a June 2024 interview in the saxophone magazine THE SAX she said she had not come up through Japanese fusion, which made the fusion repertoire hard at first.

On and On, her third album, was released on April 17, 2024 by Elec Records (YZAG-1120), played by the band she had worked with for roughly ten years: Abe on piano and keyboards and as producer, Yoshiaki Muto on guitar, Shingo Tanaka on electric bass and Shin Takada on drums, with Luis Valle guesting on trumpet on "Reunion." She plays soprano, alto and tenor saxophone on it, and told THE SAX she wanted the record to show off the appeal of the soprano sound. A ten-city tour followed, ending at Cotton Club in Tokyo. In 2024 she was also featured on "Truth?" on the Night Tempo album Connection and on pianist Yusuke Hirato's single "Forest of Black."

Since 2025 she has been busy with two other bands. LE GRAND RETOUR released its first album, OVER, on May 21, 2025 on Kamnabi Records, a Disk Union label, with Takeda and credited contributors including Yasutaka Mizunaga on drum programming, guitar and vocals; Nakazono plays sopranino, alto and tenor saxophone and sings on it. She is also a member of Cityy, a Tokyo quartet with the saxophonist Miho Terachi, Takeda and the bassist Juna Serita, whose album HELLO, CITYY is listed on Apple Music with a May 2026 release date. THE JAZZ AVENGERS has been on hiatus since May 2025. Her solo single "PASTEL SUNSHINE" came out on April 22, 2026.

She is active this autumn. On October 21, 2026 she and Takeda will play a free "Machi no Jazz Club" concert at the Yamaha Innovation Road museum in Hamamatsu during the 34th Hamamatsu Jazz Week, and on October 22 she will appear at Kajimachi Yamaha Hall in a memorial talk and concert with Shinya Takagi marking the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth.

Nakazono is a soprano-first saxophonist whose home territory is smooth jazz and contemporary fusion. Discogs files The Real and On and On under Jazz with the style tag Smooth Jazz, and her label described Make It Happen! as smooth jazz; a December 2016 review in God Is In The TV heard Kenny G and Grover Washington Jr. in it, along with funk-rock and lounge touches. Her tone is clean and singing, and her records lean on melody, groove and the sound of a working band rather than extended solos.

Her training points two ways. The classical foundation and the Berklee years, with Walter Beasley among her saxophone teachers, gave her the American mainstream-saxophone vocabulary; the Tokyo years with Jun Abe introduced her to the Japanese fusion grooves and chord progressions that, by her own account, did not come naturally at first. Her bands span a wide range: the electronic-leaning jazz of LE GRAND RETOUR, the horn-section fusion of THE JAZZ AVENGERS, the Japanese-instrument fusion of 坐音, and the J-pop-into-jazz arrangements of The Jazzles.

There is a pop edge to her activity that belongs in the picture. She joined the pop singer Mai Kuraki's 20th anniversary tour in 2019, is featured on an electronic album by the producer Night Tempo, and plays saxophone on "My Favorite Things" on a 2018 album by the actor and singer Yu Shirota. Even so, all three of her solo albums, her group records and her concert bookings (Cotton Club, Blues Alley, Hamamatsu Jazz Week, jazz-club halls, Berklee) place her as a jazz musician first, and that is how Discogs and Japanese Wikipedia classify her.