Daisaku Kume (久米大作, Kume Daisaku in Japanese order) was born in Tokyo on 23 July 1957, the son of the actor and narrator Akira Kume (久米明). He went to Meisei Gakuen High School and later studied at the College of Art of Nihon University. According to the guitarist Akira Wada's biography, he was still a high-school student when Wada, then putting together live sessions around Tokyo with the bassist Ken Watanabe, brought him in on keyboards. That group became Prism, and Kume is credited on electric piano on its first album, Prism (Polydor, 1977), and on piano, electric piano and synthesizer on Second Thoughts/Second Move (1978) and on III (recorded in the autumn of 1978 and issued in 1979). By the time of the double album Prism Live in November 1979 he is listed only as a guest.

In 1979 he moved to The Square, the band later renamed T-Square, where he is credited on keyboards on Rockoon (CBS/Sony, April 1980), the Sony Walkman commercial single I'm Walkman (1980), It's Magic (1981) and the album Magic (November 1981). He shares the keyboard and arranging credit on Rockoon with Shiro Sagisu, and on Magic the arranging credits are spread across the band, which included the guitarist Masahiro Andoh and the saxophonist Takeshi Itoh. Japanese Wikipedia lists nine Square pieces that he wrote or co-wrote, among them "Rockoon", "Larisa", "Sunshine Sunshine" and "I Luv U". He left in 1981, and Hirotaka Izumi took over the keyboard chair from 1982.

His next stop was a very different band. In 1981 he joined the percussionist Kiyohiko Semba's Haniwa All Stars, an experimental art-rock group, and Discogs credits him on keyboards and percussion on Haniwa (CBS/Sony, 1983). With Semba he also formed the duo Haniwa-chan, whose Kanashibari (CBS/Sony, 1984) has him on keyboards. In May 1984 a seven-inch flexi-disc of his was given away with the keyboard magazine Keyple, a tongue-in-cheek instructional record whose title translates roughly as a course in keyboard bluff and showy phrases. In 1985 he married the singer Saki Kubota, who left the entertainment business and now works as a church musician under her own name, Sayuri Kume; he has produced and played on her records.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s he worked as a session keyboardist, arranger and composer across pop, rock and stage music. Discogs lists credits for him on releases by Cornelius, Pizzicato Five, Flipper's Guitar, Kahimi Karie and many others. A notable screen credit was the music for Takeshi Kitano's 1989 debut film Sono Otoko, Kyobo ni Tsuki (Violent Cop), whose soundtrack album appeared in September 1990 on Samurai Music Corporation and includes a rearrangement of Erik Satie's "Gnossienne No. 1". In the same month came 9 Picture Cards: The Ear of Marco Polo (Electric Bird, 1990), billed to Daisaku Kume & Selah, a nine-track album that Discogs files as electronic and jazz fusion. He plays keyboards, vibraphone and melodica, and arranged and co-produced it, with a band that includes the drummer Jun Aoyama, the bassist Vagabond Suzuki, the percussionist Kiyohiko Semba and the saxophonist Hiroyasu Yaguchi.

His own name came to the front in 1993 with Eastern Shore (Moo Records, a Tokuma Japan imprint; Japanese release 25 November 1993), which Japanese Wikipedia counts as his third solo album and which was issued in the United States through Mesa/Bluemoon. Produced by Yoshio Maki and recorded in the Los Angeles area and Tokyo in the spring of 1993, it is atmospheric and electronic, closer to new age and ambient music than to jazz; a modern reviewer at FOND/SOUND calls it a mix of electronic music, Japanese new age and jazz. Forever & Never followed in 1995 (Moo Records), recorded between December 1994 and February 1995 in North Hollywood with both an instrumental and a vocal version of "Never Knew Love". Discogs classifies it as pop. That same year he became music director of the stage production Ghetto, directed by Tamiya Kuriyama, and he has since written and directed music for many of Kuriyama's productions.

From 1998 to 2003 he was a core member of the Asian Fantasy Orchestra, a Japan Foundation touring ensemble, and Discogs credits him on keyboards on its Asian Tour 1998 album (Polydor, 1999). In 2003 Prism recorded new versions of its older pieces for the SACD sets Present I and Present II (Universal J), and Kume is credited on keyboards on both. In 2004 he wrote the music for the television anime Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase and, according to Japanese Wikipedia, appeared as the Kume Daisaku Unit at the JAZZJAPAN event at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris. In 2005 he started the blues band GIBIER du MARI with the singer Natsuki Mari and Nobu Saito, and he served as general music director of the Meitetsu Little World Ethnic and Earth Orchestra, a community orchestra of ethnic instruments, which played at the Aichi World Expo that year. His score for the stage play Yakiniku Dragon (2006) was part of a production that won the Grand Prize at the 16th Yomiuri Theatre Awards and the Grand Prix at the 8th Asahi Stage Arts Awards, and its soundtrack was released in 2011. In 2009 and 2010 he orchestrated L'Arc-en-Ciel's "Hurry Xmas" and "Bless" and worked on VAMPS' Sweet Dreams unplugged.

The jazz side of his catalogue grew again after 2008. Someone Loves You (Universal Strategic Marketing Japan, released 6 August 2008) was credited to the Kume Daisaku Orchestra, an eleven-piece band with a brass quintet that included Wada on guitar, the drummer Hiroyuki Noritake, the bassist Vagabond Suzuki, the percussionist Kumiko Takara, the woodwind player Steve Sacks and brass players Maki Mizutani, Teppei Kawakami, Chiho Aida and Momo Sato; the label described it as jazz groove with colourful harmony. Island Rhapsody (MMP, released 6 June 2011) is a thirteen-track album that he composed, arranged and recorded himself at the Master's Crib studio in Pasadena, California, between June and September 2010, with Yoshio Maki producing. In 2011 he played piano on "Tohoku", a single recorded on 31 July at Genonsha Studio 246 in Tokyo for the victims of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami, with the singer Shizuru Ohtaka and the clarinetist Kazutoki Umezu; it was sold only at their live performances. On 19 September 2011 he played the Tokyo club Jirokichi with the guitarist Hirokuni Korekata, Vagabond Suzuki, Semba and the drummer Yasuo Sano, a night issued as the DVD Live! (Atoss International, January 2012). His own YouTube channel also carries live clips from 2010 and 2011 of a project billed 4DK, with the guitarist Kyoji Yamamoto, including one titled "Out of Fusion".

He has also worked in a chamber setting as pianist and producer of Birth of Aria, a project with cello, violin, marimba and voice whose EP Birth of Aria (TheGLEE, 2017) and Traveling Music (2019, with the singer Kahimi Karie as guest) both appear on Discogs under Jazz. He rejoined his old band for T-Square's fortieth-anniversary album It's a Wonderful Life! (Orange Lady, November 2018), playing keyboards and electric piano alongside Andoh, Itoh, Noritake, Izumi and the drummer Satoshi Bandoh, and was credited again on T-Square's forty-fifth-anniversary album Vento de Felicidade (Orange Lady, May 2023). He teaches keyboard and composition at the Mesa House music school in Tokyo. He turned 69 in July 2026.

Kume's place in jazz is mainly through fusion, and it should be said plainly that it competes with a much larger body of other work. Of the roughly 160 releases that Discogs credits him on, about 40 percent carry a jazz genre tag (most of them Prism, Square and T-Square albums, fusion compilations and his own later leader dates), while a similar share are tagged pop or rock: studio and arranging work for pop acts, theatre, film and anime scores, a new age solo record, an experimental art-rock band and a blues band. He is a keyboardist and composer first and a jazz bandleader second, and the jazz and the non-jazz parts of his career run side by side rather than one replacing the other.

The jazz core is the first generation of Japanese fusion. Prism, formed by Akira Wada and Ken Watanabe in 1975, drew on Santana, Return to Forever and Al Di Meola; The Square, led by Andoh, was developing the style that became T-Square. Kume's credits in both bands are for piano, electric piano and synthesizer, and his Square writing credits include "Larisa", "Sunshine Sunshine" and "I Luv U". His later jazz records use more acoustic colour: the brass-led arrangements of Someone Loves You and the chamber instrumentation of Birth of Aria. His 2012 DVD with Korekata, Suzuki, Semba and Sano is classified by Discogs as free improvisation. Away from jazz, his Violent Cop score is spare synthesizer and piano music that reworks Satie, and Eastern Shore is an atmospheric album that Discogs files under new age. The keyword tags on his own YouTube channel include jazz fusion, jazz, brass orchestra and electric piano.