Chihiro Yamanaka (山中千尋) was born in 1976 in Kiryu, a textile town in Gunma Prefecture, and put her hands on a piano at four. The training was classical and it went on for years. Jazz reached her in high school, late enough that she arrived at it with a fully formed technique already in place, which is audible on everything she has recorded since.

She left Japan for Berklee College of Music in Boston and graduated in 2000 with honors, taking first place in Down Beat's Outstanding Performance Award competition on the way out. She also passed through Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead residency at the Kennedy Center, a program built specifically to put young players in front of an audience with a repertoire they had to write themselves.

Her recording career started a year later and it started small. Living Without Friday came out on 5 October 2001 on Atelier Sawano, the Osaka audiophile label, catalogue number AS 016, with Ray Parker on bass and LaFrae Olivia Sci on drums. She is credited on it as producer as well as leader, and she has kept that producer credit on nearly everything since. Three more Sawano records followed: When October Goes (2002), the Leaning Forward concert DVD (2003), and Madrigal (2004). By the second of those she had Larry Grenadier on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums, which is an unusually strong rhythm section for a pianist who had not yet been signed anywhere.

Verve took her in 2005. Outside By The Swing (UCCJ-2040) put her in a room with Robert Hurst and Jeff "Tain" Watts, and the Verve decade that followed is where the shape of her working method becomes clear. She does not keep one band. Abyss (2007) introduced the trio she held longest, Vicente Archer and Kendrick Scott. Bravogue (2008) brought in Gene Jackson on drums. After Hours (2008) and its 2012 sequel drop the drummer entirely for a piano, bass and guitar format with Yoshi Waki and Avi Rothbard. Forever Begins (2010), with Ben Williams and Kendrick Scott, went to No. 1 on the Japanese jazz charts.

The Verve high point is Reminiscence (2011). She booked two separate trios into East Side Sound for a single day on 27 June: her working unit of Yoshi Waki and John Davis, and a second group with Grenadier and the soul and funk drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie. She plays acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes and organ across the record. It took the Jazz Japan Award for best album that year.

In 2014 she moved to Blue Note, arriving for the label's 75th anniversary, and used the move to open the format up. Somethin' Blue (UCCQ-1016) is a horn record: Yasushi Nakamura on bass, Kendrick Scott and Mark Whitfield Jr. on drums, Lage Lund on guitar, Jaleel Shaw on alto and Benny Benack III on trumpet. It reached the top five on the jazz charts. The following year Blue Note also issued Live In Osaka!! by The Spheres, her all-electric trio with Dana Roth on bass and Karen Teperberg on drums, recorded at Billboard Live Osaka on 2 June 2015, which she produced and for which she arranged everything. A Spheres tour followed in spring 2017.

From 2013 onward almost every record she makes takes a declared subject, and it is the single most distinctive thing about her catalogue. Molto Cantabile (2013) and Utopia (2018) rebuild classical repertoire inside a jazz trio, from Mozart's Rondo alla Turca to Liszt's Liebestraum No. 3. Syncopation Hazard (2015), released to mark ten years since her major-label debut, is Scott Joplin ragtime alongside William Bolcom and Keith Jarrett rag material and her own writing. Guilty Pleasure (2016) sets her originals beside Hoagy Carmichael. Monk Studies (2017) was recorded at Boomtown Studio in Brooklyn in March and April of that year for the Thelonious Monk centenary, with Mark Kelley on bass and Deantoni Parks on drums, and she plays piano, Rhodes, synthesizer and Hammond B-3 across it. The same year Universal issued a Monk anthology, Retrospection And Introspection, that she compiled herself. Prima Del Tramonto (2019) marks Blue Note's 80th and leans on Michel Petrucciani and Sonny Clark. Carry On (2024) takes the Bud Powell and Henry Mancini centenaries together. Ooh-La-La (2025) is Brazilian, Jobim and bossa nova with a Stevie Wonder arrangement folded in, and carries her first credited vocal on a leader album.

The rotating cast is worth reading as a career in itself. LaFrae Sci is on the 2001 debut, and returns to the drum chair on Today Is Another Day (2022) and Dolce Vita (2023), twenty-one and twenty-two years later. Ballard is on three records, Tain Watts on one, Kendrick Scott on three, Gene Jackson on one, Purdie on two, and John Davis holds the seat from 2012 onward.

She is alive and working. Blue Note Tokyo has booked her for 15 and 16 October 2026, billed as the 25th anniversary of her debut, with a group called the Chihiro Yamanaka New York Trio.

Yamanaka is a virtuoso in the older sense of the word, and critics reach for the same comparison repeatedly. John Fordham of The Guardian described her as playing straightahead classic jazz with a showboating virtuosity that makes listeners doubt their senses, and put her in Oscar Peterson's line. The classical training she carried into jazz is the mechanism behind that: articulation, evenness and stamina at speed, applied to a repertoire that does not usually demand them.

What she does with the technique is more interesting than the technique itself. The theme-album habit that starts with Molto Cantabile in 2013 lets her point that classical facility directly at classical material, then swing it. Syncopation Hazard does the same with ragtime, a form whose written left hand rewards exactly her kind of accuracy. Monk Studies is the counterweight: Monk's music resists polish, and she meets it with Fender Rhodes, synthesizer and Hammond B-3 rather than trying to play it cleanly.

Her instrument list has widened steadily. The Sawano and early Verve records are acoustic piano trios. From Reminiscence (2011) onward the Rhodes and the organ appear regularly, Because (2012) adds synthesizer, guitar, ukulele and harmonica, and the Blue Note records treat keyboards as a normal part of the palette rather than an effect. The Spheres project takes that to its endpoint with a fully electric trio.