Eiji Kitamura has been making records since 1957 and is still working at 97, which makes him the longest continuously active musician on this site by a wide margin.

He was born in Shibuya, Tokyo, on 8 April 1929, and came to the clarinet late by the standards of most professionals, picking it up as an undergraduate at Keio University's Faculty of Literature. He left before finishing the degree. Nobody taught him jazz; he learned it from records, at an age when the music was arriving in Japan in fragments.

His professional career began in 1950 with Tetsuro Takahama's Esquire Cats and properly in 1951 with the Saburo Nanbu Quintet, where he spent three years. He formed his own group, Cats Herd, in 1954 and led it until 1957, then took a sideman chair with Mitsuru Ono's 6 Brothers Band from 1957 to 1960. From 1960 onward he has led his own quintets and quartets without a substantial break, and his first album under his own name, All About Eiji Kitamura, appeared on Columbia in September 1960 with vibraphonist Ichiro Masuda and tenor saxophonist Satoru Oda in the band.

What separates him from almost every other Japanese jazz musician of his generation is that he never emigrated. Toshiko Akiyoshi left for Boston in 1956 and Aki Takase for Berlin in 1988, because leaving was how a Japanese player built an international reputation. Kitamura stayed in Tokyo, and the Americans came to him.

Benny Goodman, the reason Kitamura had taken up the clarinet at all, toured Japan as a cultural envoy in 1957 and heard him play. The praise Goodman gave him that night remains the anecdote most often told about him in Japan. More consequentially, Goodman's own pianist followed. Teddy Wilson, veteran of the Billie Holiday sessions and the Goodman trio and quartet, recorded Teddy Wilson Meets Eiji Kitamura for Trio Records on 5 October 1970, with Ichiro Masuda on vibraphone, Masanaga Harada on bass and Buffalo Bill Robinson on drums. They continued through Swing Special / Teddy & Eiji Vol. 3 in 1973, the one album where Kitamura is credited on alto and tenor saxophone rather than clarinet, and their material was still being compiled as late as After You've Gone in 2003.

Concord Jazz, the California label built around American swing revivalism, then signed him. Dear Friends (Concord ICJ-80180, 1980) put him with the Concord Jazz All Stars: Warren Vaché on cornet and flugelhorn, Cal Collins on guitar, Phil Flanigan on bass and Jake Hanna on drums. Swing Eiji followed in 1981, arranged by Nat Pierce. Seven Stars assembled the largest billing of his career, with Teddy Wilson, Cal Tjader on vibraphone, Ernestine Anderson singing, Eddie Duran, Bob Maize and Jake Hanna, all seven named on the sleeve. He also appears on Woody Herman's Presents A Concord Jam Volume 1 (1981) and A Great American Evening Vol. 3 (1983), and with the Scott Hamilton Quintet on In Concert. By his own account he appeared at the Monterey Jazz Festival eighteen consecutive times between 1977 and 1996, and co-produced the LA International Jazz Party with trumpeter Bill Berry through the 1990s.

At home his reach extended well past jazz. He recorded with Hibari Misora (ひばりとムード, Columbia, 1961) and Ayumi Ishida (東京の夜は更けて, Victor, 1964), made Farewell in 1975 with Fumio Nanri, the trumpeter of the generation above his, and in 1984 played the clarinet part on Eiichi Ohtaki's Each Time (Niagara Records, released 21 March 1984), one of the most durable Japanese pop albums of its decade. Japanese hi-fi manufacturers used his tone as reference material: Diatone, Technics, Sony, Akai, Pioneer and Sharp all issued demonstration discs featuring him between 1973 and 1985.

In April 2007 he received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette.

He has not stopped. See You Again: Live at Jazz Club Ginza Swing appeared in 2021, credited to Eiji Kitamura & The Swing Supporters, with three clarinets in the front line. In December 2022 he was the featured guest on Makoto Ozone's Park Street Kids, a New Orleans set recorded live at Body & Soul in Shibuya on 25 May 2022, with Ozone producing, playing piano and writing the liner notes. Kitamura was 93. In April 2026 he played a concert in Fukui built around his 97th birthday.

Kitamura is a swing player and has never pretended otherwise. He interprets the traditional swing repertoire rather than the modern one, and the two names invariably attached to his sound are Benny Goodman and Woody Herman, both of whom he eventually recorded alongside or in tribute to. He also studied Buddy DeFranco and Lee Konitz while working out his own approach to improvisation, and after his fifties he took lessons with the classical clarinettist Yuji Murai, which fed a rounder, more even tone into what had been a purely self-taught jazz technique.

The quality most often named is warmth. He is not a player who reaches for velocity or harmonic complication; the appeal is a full, singing sound at moderate tempo, which is precisely why Japanese audio manufacturers kept putting him on their demonstration records. His repertoire has stayed remarkably stable across seven decades, running through the standards, Goodman's book, and Dixieland material he was still playing in 2022.