Asuka Kaneko (金子飛鳥), who spells her name Aska on her own records and has performed since July 2020 as Aska Maret (マレー飛鳥), is a violinist, electric violinist, vocalist and composer born in 1959 in Suginami, Tokyo. She grew up in a family of visual artists; her mother is an abstract painter, and she has said that practising the violin outdoors on her mother's sketching trips shaped an improvisational style that she links to the natural world. She began violin and piano at four, played in a junior orchestra from ten to fifteen, and at fifteen won the top prize in the string quartet category at an international youth music event in London. She went on to study violin and composition at Tokyo University of the Arts.

A working professional from the early 1980s, she played in the backing string quartet Karyobin for the singer Tomoka Ueda, formed the string ensemble Aska Strings in 1984, and in 1985, while still a student, joined Kenji Sawada's backing band, her first professional stage. Aska Strings and Kaneko herself went on to play strings on a very large number of Japanese pop and rock records, among them Yutaka Ozaki, Shogo Hamada, Unicorn and Taeko Onuki, and she served as a music director of the Asian Fantasy Orchestra, a ten-year pan-Asian project supported by the Japan Foundation. She also played in Adi, an avant-garde band that made four albums between 1990 and 1993, and in Mekong Zoo, whose Minimal Dance appeared on the London label Wolf Records in 1995.

Her first solo album, Multi Venus (Roux, September 23, 1992), was recorded in Tokyo from March to June of that year. It is a rock-leaning record with a jazz cast: the guitarist Tsuneo Imahori and the drummer Yoshihiro Tomioka anchor the band, and the guests include Maceo Parker on alto saxophone, the guitarist Kazumi Watanabe, the alto saxophonist Akira Sakata, the pianist Fumio Itabashi and the bassist Nobuyoshi Ino, the last three together on the eleven-minute ジェンネ ジェノ (Jenne Jeno). Twelve Myths (Zigzag, October 18, 1995) went further afield, setting her electric violin and voice among Indian sarangi and tabla, koto, Korean haegum and Javanese gamelan, with sessions credited to Barefoot Studio, Real World and Onkio Haus in Tokyo. That same decade she was credited on electric violin and voice in Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris's Testament: A Conduction Collection (New World Records, 1995), and on a Japan Foundation tour of Asia in August and September 1994, documented on the two-disc Central Asian Tour, she played in a band with Bill Laswell, Akira Sakata, the drummer Anton Fier and the guitarist Nicky Skopelitis.

From 1996 she lived for about four and a half years on Oahu, Hawaii. In 1998 she won a Bessie Composition Award in New York for her music in the choreographer Yoshiko Chuma's Unfinished Symphony, whose contrabass piece later became "Fune no Oka" on the Aska Strings album Foot Prints (1999). Back in Japan she toured Europe with her own acoustic unit under Japan Foundation sponsorship from 2000 to 2004, released Mother (Universal, July 19, 2002), a set of her own pieces with Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight" and the Rolling Stones' "Angie" among the covers, and in 2003 joined the Japanese-Argentine group Gaia Cuatro with the pianist Gerardo Di Giusto, the bassist Carlos "El Tero" Buschini and the percussionist Tomohiro Yahiro. Gaia Cuatro's first album, recorded in Japan in 2004, was reissued by the Italian jazz label Abeat in 2011 as Visions, with a bonus live track featuring the trumpeter Paolo Fresu, and AllAboutJazz Italy called her violin the vibrant soul of the group's melodies.

The jazz thread grew steadier from about 2010. In October 2010 she played first violin in the string quartet on Yosuke Yamashita's Delightful Contrast (Verve, released February 23, 2011), recorded at Crescente Studio in Tokyo with Yamashita's New York Trio of Cecil McBee on bass and the drummer Pheeroan akLaff, and with arrangements by Miho Hazama on four tracks. She is on akLaff's live Dear Freedom Suite (ModernMasters, 2013) with the bassist Toshiki Nagata, and on Gaia Cuatro's Kaze (Abeat, 2015), where Fresu plays on a piece he co-wrote with her, "Wagako-E." In November 2015 she recorded the free improvisation duets Luminations with Scott Robinson on bass saxophone at his ScienSonic Laboratories in Teaneck, New Jersey; ScienSonic released it as SS09 in 2017. Gaia Cuatro's Lucrecia (Abeat, 2019) again features Fresu, and in December 2020 she appeared as a guest on Free, a trio album by the Italian pianist Michele Fazio on which the trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso also plays. Infinity (Abeat, 2023) is her fullest recent jazz statement, a trio with Fazio and Buschini and the accordionist Fausto Beccalossi as guest on three tracks.

Alongside this she kept an unusually wide working life. She has been music director for stage productions, among them the director Tamiya Kuriyama's Caligula at the New National Theatre Tokyo in November 2019, and she took part in Final Fantasy string arrangements and the music for the films Dr. Kanzo (1998, with Yamashita's score) and The Witch of the West Is Dead (2008). After the 2011 earthquake she began organising a continuing series of benefit events built on words and sound. She also has duo projects with the harpist Amy Camie (Nebula, 2016), the pianist Masaki Hayashi (Delicia, 2017), and the guitarist Akira Ogawa (the duo A-Un). On July 27, 2024 she was listed first among the violins of the special chamber orchestra when Maria Schneider conducted her own music at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, a concert produced by Miho Hazama; her own website calls her its concertmaster. She now lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri and in Tokyo, and in March 2026 she was the featured violinist at a Jazz St. Louis weekend led by the trumpeter Dawn Weber.

Kaneko is better described as a genre-crossing violinist than as a jazz musician in the narrow sense, and it is only fair to say so. She calls herself a composer, arranger, producer, violinist, electric violinist and vocalist, her official biography lists classical, rock, pop, film and theatre alongside jazz, and the great majority of the roughly 220 releases on her Discogs page are string parts on Japanese pop, rock and film recordings, with only a dozen or so jazz or improvised-music sessions among them. Her own records move among progressive rock (Multi Venus), world music and folk (Twelve Myths, Ave), ambient and healing music (Still, Forest's Breath, the duo yuLa) and classical-leaning chamber work (Nebula, the Aska Strings albums); the digital distributor even files her under New Age.

What makes her relevant to Japanese jazz is a body of work that is clearly jazz-identified and has grown steadily since 2003: Discogs classes Gaia Cuatro's albums and the Michele Fazio records as Jazz, the group records for the Italian jazz label Abeat, her duets with Scott Robinson are catalogued as free improvisation, and she has been the string voice on sessions with Yosuke Yamashita, Sachi Hayasaka and Pheeroan akLaff, with Butch Morris in a conduction setting, and with Maria Schneider's music in Tokyo. As a soloist she plays a fluid, vocal violin line and often sings or uses overtone voice, and her improvising draws on Latin American folk forms with Gaia Cuatro and on open, textural free playing with Robinson and akLaff. She is credited as a composer on much of her own material.