Chie Ayado (綾戸智恵) made her first record at 40 and had one of the best-known voices in Japanese jazz within two years. She was born on September 10, 1957, in Abeno Ward, Osaka, and grew up on classical piano lessons that began at three, on jazz and gospel records, on Hollywood films, and on the chanted narrative music of gidayu, which she has said she loved as a child. By her teens she was playing piano in nightclubs.

At 17 she took a leave of absence from high school and used part-time wages to travel to the United States. She went back repeatedly over more than a decade, mostly to Los Angeles, where she sang gospel and jazz in clubs and churches, and later spent a long stretch in New York. She came home to Japan in 1991 with her infant son and took whatever work paid: English teaching, cooking school lunches, and singing part-time in live houses. At 40, at an outdoor event, she was noticed by the jazz enthusiast Osamu Uchida, and the recording career followed.

For All We Know (EWE Records, 1998) was her first album, released on June 21, 1998. The rhythm section was drawn from the Tokyo jazz scene: Motohiko Hino on drums, Yoshio Suzuki and Tsutomu Okada on bass, Kazumasa Akiyama on guitar and Mikio Masuda on piano and organ, with Ayado herself on vocals and piano. Your Songs followed in October 1998, recorded over September 30 and October 1 and 2 at Onkio Haus in Tokyo with Masuda, Okada, saxophonist Tetsuro Kawashima, and two drummers sharing the chair, Yoshihito Eto and Hino. Uchida is among the three people credited with its liner notes.

Life (May 1999) was the breakthrough. "Tennessee Waltz" and "Amazing Grace" became her signature songs, television appearances and annual autumn tours began, and the albums came in quick succession: Friends (1999), Love, Everybody Everywhere and Natural (all 2000). Live! (2001) was drawn from two December 2000 concerts, one at the Tokyo jazz club STB139 and one at Sapporo Concert Hall Kitara. At the 51st Geijutsu Sensho she received the Minister of Education's New Artist Award in the popular entertainment division, and in 2001 she won the Art Award at the Avon Awards to Women. Live! II (2001) was recorded with the Nobuo Hara big band Sharps & Flats, and a third live release was billed as a meeting with pianist Yosuke Yamashita. In December 2003 she marked five years as a recording artist with concerts at Osaka-jo Hall and the Tokyo International Forum, and that year-end she sang "Tennessee Waltz" on NHK's Kohaku Uta Gassen.

Her records of 2002 to 2004 widened the sound. My Life (2002) used the Cuban drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez and Robby Ameen. Shine (2003), Time (2004) and Seven (2004) were produced by the American keyboardist John Beasley, and the players across the three albums include trumpeter Brian Lynch, saxophonist Yosvany Terry, percussionist Pedrito Martinez and bassist Carlitos Del Puerto, with guitarist Dean Parks, a horn section and a string orchestra on Time. To You (2003), by contrast, is Ayado alone, singing and playing piano, on a DSD-recorded SACD.

She began working for herself in the middle of the decade with the self-produced Mydo (まいど), and moved to East House Records for Fifty (2007) and its successors. She paused her activities in 2008 to look after her mother after a stroke, and returned in 2010 with a run of projects. My Way (April 2010) put her in front of Nobuo Hara and His Sharps & Flats on arrangements by Norio Maeda, and a one-night concert with the band followed at the Tokyo International Forum on June 12, 2010. Only You and a live companion paired her with the American pianist Junior Mance. In 2014 she left her agency and record label and set up her own company, Maido (Mydo), which has issued her records since: Picture in a Frame (2014), the Do Jazz series (2015, 2017 and the two-disc Do Jazz Good Show! in 2019, with the Anointed Mass Choir), Hana Uta (2022), My Favorite Song at Home (2025) and Umami (2026). Outside her own albums she narrated Isao Tomita's Jungle Emperor symphonic poem (2009), made Haikara Octet (2019) with the Black Bottom Brass Band, and in January 2024 played a concert with the New Japan Philharmonic.

She has also worked steadily as a television presence, a film and drama actress and a voice actor, and in 2020 she suspended live work for health reasons before returning. She is 69 and still recording.

Ayado is a pianist-singer who sings jazz standards with a gospel singer's weight and a storyteller's timing, and she is her own accompanist on a large share of her records. The core of her repertoire is the American songbook and the blues (Stormy Monday, Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You, Georgia on My Mind, Route 66), together with the gospel and spiritual songs she learned young ("Amazing Grace", "His Eye Is on the Sparrow").

She is equally known for putting rock, folk and pop songs of the 1960s and 1970s through that jazz-and-gospel treatment: the Beatles, Elton John and Simon and Garfunkel songs recur, as do Japanese songs such as "Yozora no Mukou". That crossover repertoire, her television work and her Kohaku appearance are the reason her place in the jazz world has sometimes been argued. She has said that critics once told her that her music was not jazz and that for a long time she did not feel she could call herself a jazz singer. Against that, her releases are filed under jazz on Discogs and Apple Music, her YouTube channel is named for her as a jazz singer, and her records are built around jazz rhythm sections and soloists: Hino on the first two albums, Junior Mance on two, Nobuo Hara's big band on two more, and an international Latin-jazz cast on the Beasley albums.