Chikara Ueda (上田力, Ueda Chikara in Japanese order) was a pianist, keyboardist, arranger and producer who spent the 1970s and early 1980s turning Tokyo studio players into some of the most polished fusion records the country made. He was born in Tokyo on November 5, 1925. His own biography, kept online by his staff, says he began drawing attention in the early 1960s for arrangements that blended jazz and popular music without friction, and that the fusion boom of the late 1970s then put him at the front of it.

The first records under his name were not subtle. Between 1972 and 1974 King Records issued a run of albums called Rock Impulse! under the name Chikara Ueda & The Caravan, large-band jazz-rock readings of whatever was on the radio: "Zarathustra," Stevie Wonder's "Superstition," "You're So Vain," "Midnight Train to Georgia," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." The first double album was split with another King act, Godzilla & Yellow Gypsy, and one 1973 volume was cut for quadraphonic playback. Funk Over Beethoven (King, 1975) kept the format but gave the writing more room: four long pieces, two of them past eleven minutes, for a brass and reeds band of more than twenty with four vocalists, with Ueda arranging and playing keyboards.

In 1976 CBS/Sony issued Mellow Wonder (The World of Stevie Wonder), recorded on August 27, 1975 with a group billed as the New Sonic Ensemble. Ueda played electric piano and an ARP Odyssey and wrote the arrangements, Takeru Muraoka was among the reed players, and the opener "Too High" ran past ten minutes. A 1977 CBS/Sony album, Joe Roth Never Give Up, was a seven-part program with movements named for the quarters of a football game.

1978 was the year the work became steady. He arranged and conducted two albums for Warner Bros. with Tatsuya Takahashi's big band Tokyo Union: Soul Porter, a set of Cole Porter songs with two Ueda originals, and Funpico, for which he wrote all the music. The same year he made a disco album for King as Ueda Chikara & Soul Basket and arranged and conducted Toshiyuki Honda's Burnin' Waves (Electric Bird), then played keyboards on Honda's Opa Com Deus in 1979.

That was also when The Power Station began. For Denon he recorded Burt Fusion (June 1979), a program of Burt Bacharach songs, and Bos & Boz (September 1979), a Boz Scaggs program on which Toots Thielemans played harmonica on two tracks, Sadanori Nakamure played acoustic guitar and Shuichi Ponta Murakami played drums. Flying Easy (Columbia, September 1980) put Harvey Mason on drums, Honda on flute and saxophones, Takao Naoi on guitar and a six-man trombone section, with Shigeharu Mukai among the trombonists on two tracks; Ueda is credited on electric piano, Prophet 5 and Oberheim OB-X. "Cloudy" from that record has since turned up on Japanese jazz-funk compilations. Sunlight Whisper followed in April 1981, and Head Wind (Sound Design, 1985) brought Mason back, with the bassist Louis Johnson.

Around the band records he was working constantly as an arranger and producer. In 1980 he wrote and arranged the music for Toshiyuki Miyama's New Herd on Big Stuff, with Yasuaki Shimizu guesting on tenor saxophone and Natsuki Tamura in the trumpet section. Recorded at King Studio on October 12 to 14, 1980, Herdland put him in the producer's chair and on the baton with the same band. Two months earlier, on August 3 to 5, 1980, the Cuban band Irakere recorded Cuba Libre at Sound Inn Studio in Tokyo for JVC, an album on which Ueda is credited with writing, composing, arranging and producing. He arranged George Kawaguchi's African Hot Dance (June 1980) with Kawaguchi's Super Fusion Band, and four tracks of Kawaguchi's Super Drums 2 (1983).

Singers got the same treatment. He produced and arranged Toshio Oida's Longest Dream (Express, 1981), Keiko Amae's Smokin' Prelude (Columbia, 1981) and Dancing Gold (1982), Michiko Akao's Kazamai (Toshiba, 1981) and Yoko Maeno's Twilight (Columbia, 1982), and he produced and arranged one track on Eri Ohno's Feeling Your Love (1979). Television gave him a second audience: he arranged the theme and wrote background music for the police drama Keishicho Satsujinka (1981), and recorded the soundtrack Cara de Piedra (Starchild, 1982) for the drama Ai no Kiseki: Doctor Norman Monogatari.

Away from the studio he wrote about music. He interviewed visiting artists including Quincy Jones, Bob James, Joe Sample and Michel Camilo, wrote liner notes, and contributed to music magazines; essays and sleeve notes from his archive, among them pieces on Steve Gadd and Seawind's Window of a Child, are republished on a blog run by his staff. From 1996 he started a series of concerts aimed at playing the whole of Antonio Carlos Jobim's songbook, which reached 52 shows by 2011 and produced albums credited jointly to Ueda and Nanda Nova, including Chega de Saudade / Jobim My Love (Omagatoki, 2007).

Chikara Ueda passed away on October 11, 2017.

Ueda was an arranger first and a soloist second. On Flying Easy, Sunlight Whisper and the Tokyo Union albums the picture is the same: a tight rhythm section, a big trombone or saxophone section voiced like a studio horn band, and his electric piano and Prophet 5 or Oberheim lines running between them. The repertoire points to American and Brazilian studio jazz of the 1970s as his reference. He built whole albums around Stevie Wonder, Burt Bacharach, Boz Scaggs and Cole Porter material, and later around Jobim.

The groove-first side of the work is the better known one, partly because DJs and compilers have kept finding it. A good deal of it sits at the pop end of fusion, and some of it is plainly pop or disco; he also worked on television themes and is credited on pop singles of the 1970s. The jazz identity shows most clearly in the Tokyo Union and New Herd albums, the Honda and Kawaguchi sessions, and the Jobim concerts of his later years.