Daisuke Takeuchi (竹内大輔) is a Tokyo pianist and keyboardist who works on two tracks at once. He is the pianist of TRI4TH, the five-piece "danceable jazz" band that has won two Jazz Japan Awards in the 2010s and 2020s, and he is the leader of a piano trio that has put out four albums of its own since 2008. Most of what is known about him comes from his own official website and his long-running blog, plus the jazz press around TRI4TH, and it is a working musician's record: a birth date, a set of bands, a run of releases, and a calendar that fills most evenings of the month.

He was born on January 29, 1980, in Tokyo. By his own account he started classical piano at three, found jazz in high school, and played in a band at university. A Shibuya club's artist profile adds that he began studying jazz and theory at 16 with Masaichi Takano and started performing at 18, and that he has since played venues including TUC, Star Pine's Cafe in Kichijoji, JZ Brat in Shibuya and Blue Note Nagoya. His official biography does not name a school or a teacher beyond that. The classical grounding matters to how he is described: Billboard JAPAN's feature on TRI4TH notes that four of the band's five members, Takeuchi among them, studied classical music first, and that only the bassist is a jazz player by background.

Before TRI4TH he was already a busy side musician. The same Shibuya profile lists a TV Asahi network programme on which he played a pianist role alongside the actor Kazuki Enari, keyboards for the Chinese entertainer Li Hao's band, a Japan Fair in Shanghai, keyboards at the Daihatsu booth of the 39th Tokyo Motor Show, and keyboardist and band leader on Tsubasa Imai's tour. On record, he plays piano on two tracks ("Stem" and "Netsu") of the mini-album No Name Collection (Pony Canyon, September 19, 2007) by JiLL-Decoy association, a Tokyo band whose Discogs genre tags run from jazz to rock and pop.

His own name first went on a sleeve the following year. Pictures (October 17, 2008), the first CD by the Daisuke Takeuchi Trio, is all original material and is also on iTunes. A second album, Fingers Dance (July 3, 2011), was sold only at the trio's live shows; he describes it as seven tracks and just over 70 minutes. Then came ReInterpret the passage (Village Again / Palette Sound, April 10, 2013), a cover album that turns "On Green Dolphin Street," Chick Corea's "Spain," Thelonious Monk's "Monk's Dream," the Beatles' "Here, There and Everywhere," Bacharach's "Close To You," Airto Moreira's "Tombo in 7/4," a reggae-tinged Satie "Gymnopedie No. 1" and a solo-piano "Don't Know Why" into trio pieces. The fourth album, Voyaging (Fauvisme, a division of SCM, April 15, 2015), is all originals, written around trips to European cities, with cover photography by Orie Ichihashi. On the 2012 and 2013 dates documented on his blog, and on Voyaging, the trio is Nobuo Ikeda on bass and Toshiyuki Sasaki on drums.

TRI4TH is the larger platform. Japanese Wikipedia dates his joining the group to 2012, after the original pianist (喜多形寛丈) left, and his own blog already counted him as a member that July. He is credited on Discogs as pianist on Awakening (2015), Meaning and Defying (2016), 4th Rebellion (2017) and Hybrid Roots (2018), the band's covers album; the later major-label records Anthology (2018), jack-in-the-box (2019), Turn On The Light (2020), GIFT (2021) and CALM&CLASH (2023) carry only the band credit on Discogs. Defying won the New Star prize of the Album of the Year award at the Jazz Japan Award 2016, and GIFT won Album of the Year in the New Jazz category at the Jazz Japan Award 2021, with no ceremony held that year because of COVID-19 and the result announced in the January 2022 issue of JaZZ JAPAN. The band played the Tokyo Jazz Festival in 2016, Jazz a Vienne in France and the Copenhagen Jazz Festival in 2017, Summer Sonic in August 2019, a one-man date at Blue Note Tokyo in February 2020, and, on June 7, 2022, the final night of its 15th anniversary "Beyond" tour at Zepp DiverCity Tokyo, the largest hall it had headlined. "Dirty Bullet" was the ending theme of the 2018 TV anime Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens. Billboard JAPAN credits Takeuchi as composer of "Just a Drizzle" on GIFT, a piano-led instrumental that Nippon Television used as the theme of the weather corner on its early-evening programme news every. in autumn 2021.

Two further bands round out the picture. In Kurofune (黒船), the group Tomotaka Sekiya built in 2013 around Amami island song vocalist Anna Sato and Tsugaru shamisen player Hikari Shirafuji, he is the pianist; Toshiyuki Sasaki was the drummer until the Motion Blue Yokohama concert of August 21, 2019. The band's Journey (October 10, 2018) mixes Amami and Tsugaru folk songs with jazz and includes a "Birdland." In Nautilus, the drum-led Tokyo trio Sasaki started in 2014, Takeuchi played keyboards, including on the early Palette Sounds 7-inch singles, on a 2017 compilation for the German label Agogo, and on the Gil Scott-Heron cover "Lady Day & John Coltrane," reissued on the UK label Jazz Room Records in January 2023. His official biography lists Nautilus as active until March 31, 2020. For the DJ and producer Tatsuo Sunaga's project Sunaga t Experience he played piano on five tracks of STE (Blue Note, May 20, 2015) and on the 2014 Inugami Jazz EP, and he is the credited writer of "Kind Of."

Session work extends to Japanese pop: Discogs credits him on piano for the singer Kaseki Cider's 2019 single "Boku wa Picasso," Maron Hamada's 2022 EP Let's Amen and four tracks of Mashiro Makita's 2023 album Kokuhaku.

In 2021 he gave his first solo piano concert at Kanda Lydian (March 20) and played the two-grand-piano event "2PIANO4HANDS" in Tokyo; in May of that year the trio, with saxophonist Junnosuke Fujita as guest, played Lydian again, which he counted as his 83rd show under his own name. His website's 2025 calendar shows the same pattern at larger scale: TRI4TH's autumn tour finale at Club Quattro Shibuya on October 3, festival dates in Kitakyushu, Sumida and Sabae, a Kurofune set at the Juhla Festival on November 9, the TYH Bass Trio show led by Sekiya at Cotton Club on November 11, and a steady run of evenings accompanying vocalists and violinists in Ginza, Akasaka, Yokohama and Nagoya. He turned 46 this January.

Not published anywhere: the name of a conservatory or university, an entry of his own on Wikipedia, and the line-ups of Pictures and Fingers Dance.

Takeuchi sits in two lanes. As a trio leader he is a melodic, classically trained piano-trio player. The reviewer of Voyaging at Jazz in Japan called him "a nimble, energetic and earnest player" who can be stately or insistent, and heard the record moving from a film-score feel through post-bop to an Erik Satie-inspired passage. His own track notes explain the method: on the cover album he rebuilt "Love Theme From Spartacus" in five with occasional bars of six at a faster tempo, moved most of "Close To You" to the relative key, and cut the introduction from "The Countess Cathleen" so the trio could begin on the theme. On Voyaging he describes "Less is More" as the one odd-metre piece, built around a drum solo, and "Veins of Leaf" as a piece where the bass and drums follow the melody rather than keep a beat.

The favourite he picked for JJazz.Net's "My Favorite Jazz" column is Michel Petrucciani's "Looking Up" from the 1989 Blue Note album Music, which he says showed him that classical elements have a place in jazz and which he has carried into his composing. He describes classical music as the root of his own playing and as a genre he felt a cover album could not leave out, which is how a Satie piece ended up on ReInterpret the passage.

In TRI4TH, the band's own stated line is "danceable jazz" with room for hard bop, acid jazz, 1990s club jazz, rock, R&B, ska and hip-hop, and Billboard JAPAN says its members bring home influences from other artists' sessions, stage work and TV music. Takeuchi's piano there is the lyrical, groove-oriented voice in a horn-led quintet. Nautilus adds jazz-funk and soul-jazz, with Rhodes and synthesizer textures, and covers of Roy Ayers, Bill Withers, Gil Scott-Heron and Bob James. Kurofune adds Japanese folk song. The profile therefore draws its jazz credentials from his trio, his jazz-press awards with TRI4TH and Tower Records jazz-chart placings, while acknowledging that a good part of his output sits at the dance-floor and pop edges of the scene.