Eriko Shimizu was a classical prodigy before she was anything else. Born in Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo, to a piano-teacher grandmother, she began formal training at five and went on to study piano and composition at Nemura Music Academy. At sixteen she performed her own concerto with the New Japan Philharmonic, conducted by Maxim Shostakovich — Dmitri Shostakovich's son — and toured internationally as a classical soloist.

At seventeen, she walked away from classical music entirely, stepping back for roughly two years while working ordinary jobs. At nineteen, jazz found her by accident, through a part-time job at a jazz bar run by Buddhist monks, where amateur musicians and salarymen sat in on casual sessions — an environment she found liberating compared to the formality of her classical training. She learned jazz largely through immersion rather than formal study, starting with Wynton Kelly, Tommy Flanagan, and Phineas Newborn Jr. before arriving at Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, whom she has described as the "ultimate expressions" of the music.

She spent five to six years in saxophonist Kohsuke Mine's quartet, a real working apprenticeship documented on his 2011 album With Your Soul and 2019's Bamboo Grove. She has also worked with saxophonist Nao Takeuchi and currently leads her own trio with drummer Takeshi Takemura and bassist Takashi Sugawa.

Her leader catalog moves at its own deliberate pace: SORA (2010) was her debut, and Aspire followed twelve years later, in 2022, on the Days of Delight label — a full album of original compositions written as flexible material for the trio to interpret rather than fixed scores. She continues to compose in a more traditional vein as well, with orchestral work performed by the New Japan Philharmonic.

Shimizu's playing draws on a formal classical foundation reshaped through self-taught jazz immersion — early influences in Wynton Kelly, Tommy Flanagan, and Phineas Newborn Jr., later Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Her compositional approach on Aspire — writing pieces as flexible material rather than rigid scores — reflects the same instinct that drew her away from strict classical performance in the first place.