Ayumi Tanaka (田中鮎美) was born in Wakayama, Japan, on March 9, 1986. She began lessons at three at a Yamaha music school, where the training covered performance, composition and arranging and her first instrument was the Electone, Yamaha's electronic organ. In 2000 she won first prize in the Yamaha Junior Electone Competition. She stayed in Wakayama for university and completed a degree in education at Wakayama University in 2009, improvising alongside her studies from an early age.

The turn toward jazz came through Scandinavia. She has said that when she first heard Norwegian jazz the musicians' expression struck her as very personal, and in 2011 she moved to Oslo and enrolled at the Norwegian Academy of Music. There she studied jazz piano with Misha Alperin, Helge Lien and Anders Jormin, and classical piano with Kristin Fossheim and Ellen Ugelvik, and finished a master's degree as a performing jazz musician. The late Misha Alperin, a pianist who also recorded for ECM, became her mentor; she credits him with urging her to find her own voice.

Shortly after arriving she met the bassist Christian Meaas Svendsen and the drummer Per Oddvar Johansen, and the three began working as the Ayumi Tanaka Trio. Their first album, Memento, was recorded in Oslo in January 2015 and released in January 2016 on AMP Music & Records, with Tanaka also credited as producer. From 2015 she was the pianist in Svendsen's quintet Nakama, which has put out six albums with her on piano, from Before the Storm (2015) to New World (2022); the group's New Rituals (2019) was built around sutra chants performed by the choir of the Rinzai Zen Center Oslo. In June 2016 she recorded 3 Pianos at the Academy with Johan Lindvall and Christian Wallumrød, three pianists and no other instruments, released that November on Nakama Records, and that year she also appeared on Mongrel's Thick As Thieves (Losen Records).

Her route onto ECM ran through the drummer Thomas Strønen. She took the piano chair in his group Time Is A Blind Guide and made her ECM debut on Lucus (ECM 2576, 2018), recorded in March 2017 in Lugano with Ole Morten Vågan on bass, Håkon Aase on violin and Lucy Railton on cello. The producer of that session, the label's founder Manfred Eicher, began working with her directly in 2018, and two trio projects followed. One was Bayou (ECM 2633), a trio with Strønen and the clarinetist Marthe Lea. The three had met at the Academy and played together weekly for two years; the tape of their first concert, made with a single microphone on Strønen's laptop, reached Eicher, who heard its tension and stylistic freedom and proposed a studio record. They recorded it in August 2018 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, and it came out on April 9, 2021.

Her own ECM debut as a leader followed that autumn. Subaqueous Silence (ECM 2675), with Svendsen and Johansen, was recorded in June 2019 at Nasjonal Jazzscene Victoria in Oslo and released on October 29, 2021, seven tracks in about 34 minutes, each credited wholly or partly to her. The Wire's Andy Hamilton wrote that "Tanaka makes every note count; not one is unfelt," and her own site lists five-star notices from BBC Music Magazine and the Danish paper Politiken.

Between ECM dates she kept a steady run of smaller, looser releases. Duets with Johansen was recorded at Steinsrud in Lommedalen on March 12, 2020 and put out digitally three days later, with two of its nine tracks titled for the live-streamed "Corona Concert." In 2021 she played on Red Lamplight On The Brick Wall, a live set from Kafé Hærverk in Oslo with the guitarist Tellef Øgrim and Johansen, issued on Jazztrau. In December 2025 ECM released Off Stillness, another Time Is A Blind Guide album on which she plays piano.

Her newest record is Windflower (ECM 2859), released on August 21, 2026. It pairs her with the bassist Thomas Morgan and Strønen. The trio first played together in September 2024 at Nasjonal Jazzscene Victoria, Eicher proposed a studio session, and they recorded in May 2025 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, France. Eight of the nine tracks are spontaneous trio pieces; the ninth, "La Source," is hers. ECM released it ahead of a European tour.

Tanaka has played in Scandinavia, Germany, India, Japan, Brazil and North America. She has also taught: she led children's workshops at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2013 and 2014 and gives workshops at Barnas Jazzhus in Oslo. She lives in Oslo and, according to her own site, is developing solo music.

Reviewers describe her playing in the same terms: sparse, patient, and built around silence. Her pieces are short, with long pauses that let a note die away before the next idea arrives, and in the trio she gives priority to the group sound over solos, with Johansen working in brushes and Svendsen often bowing the bass. She has said she wants the trio to act like a chamber ensemble that shares a flow of energy even through silences, and the chamber description recurs in ECM's own notes for Windflower, which names chamber music, jazz, and East, West and Nordic sensibilities as ingredients.

Two lineages meet in the sound. One is the Norwegian improvising scene she joined in 2011, with Alperin as her teacher and Strønen and Svendsen as her closest partners; the other is her Japanese upbringing, which critics have connected to the restraint and space of traditional Japanese music, although she describes her own path as classical music first and Nordic improvisers later. BBC Music Magazine placed the trio album in territory where Monk, the Wandelweiser group and Morton Feldman overlap. The material ranges from composed trio pieces (Subaqueous Silence) to collectively improvised sessions (Bayou, Duets, most of Windflower), and much of her catalogue sits closer to free improvisation than to conventional trio jazz.