Fumio Nanri (南里文雄) was the first Japanese jazz musician to become widely known outside Japan, and the man Louis Armstrong called the Satchmo of Japan.

He was born in the Minamikyuhoji district of Osaka in December 1910. His father passed away four days after the birth, and Nanri spent his childhood moving between relatives in Hiroshima, Kyoto and Kobe. In 1925 he joined the boys' band run by the Takashimaya department store in Osaka, which is where the trumpet started. He moved to Tokyo at 19, joined Ichiro Ida's band near Asakusa, and left after two months.

What followed was an education almost no other Japanese musician of his generation had. In 1929 he went to Shanghai, then the busiest jazz city in Asia, and studied piano under Teddy Weatherford, the American pianist who had come up in Chicago alongside Armstrong and spent most of his career working the Asian hotel circuit. In 1932 Nanri took a job with a ship's band and reached San Francisco, joining Shigeya Kikuchi's ensemble. He came home carrying a first-hand sense of how the music was actually played, at a point when most Japanese players were learning it from records.

In 1934 he formed Fumio Nanri and His Hot Peppers. The band cut some of the earliest jazz sides recorded in Japan and backed the crooner Dick Mine, including on "Dinah." From 1937 to 1940 Nanri was based in Dalian, holding the house band chair at the Perroquet dance hall and travelling back to Japan for recording dates. In February 1944 he was conscripted as a combat medic with the Kurume 48th unit.

He reformed the Hot Peppers in 1946 and worked the Cliffside dance hall in Yokohama; a second version of the band followed in 1948, built with Hajime Hana and Toshiyuki Ichimura. His 1948 press portrait, taken for Asahi Graph, dates from exactly this period.

Then came 1953, the year that both nearly ended his career and fixed his reputation. A sudden onset of optic atrophy left him close to blind. He was playing again by August. In December, Armstrong arrived for his first tour of Asia, the two trumpeters played together, and the nickname followed Nanri for the rest of his life.

His recorded output as a leader belongs almost entirely to his last six years, and almost entirely to one partnership. Beginning with St. Louis Blues (Columbia JDX-40, 1970), he made four records fronting the big band Toshiyuki Miyama & The New Herd. He also stepped outside that format once, for the all-blues Soul Trumpet (Fumio Nanri In Blues) (Express ETP-8129, 1971), arranged by Norio Maeda and driven by Akira Ishikawa on drums.

He kept working to the end. In 1971 he took part in a trumpet workshop honouring Armstrong alongside Bobby Hackett and Clark Terry. In 1973 he gave a recital marking 48 years in jazz. In 1974 he organised a benefit concert for the Vietnamese people, and in July of that year recorded Farewell (Kiva KV-203) with Eiji Kitamura on clarinet.

Fumio Nanri passed away on 4 August 1975, at 64. Farewell was released on 10 November, three months later, its obi describing it as a memorial pressing. His son Yuichiro Nanri (1931-1985) was also a trumpeter. The Nanri Fumio Prize (南里文雄賞), established in his name, went to Japanese jazz musicians for decades afterward; Takeo Moriyama received the 27th in 2002.

Nanri played Dixieland and trad jazz, and he played it with a directness that came from having heard the music at close range in Shanghai and San Francisco before most of his contemporaries had left Japan. Armstrong was the model, openly and permanently: one of the tracks on Soul Trumpet is titled "I Remember Satchimo," spelled that way on the sleeve, and Nanri's repertoire stayed anchored to the Armstrong songbook and the New Orleans standards for forty years. "St. Louis Blues" appears on at least four of his releases.

The late big band records complicate the picture. Toshiyuki Miyama & The New Herd were, by 1970, one of the most modern-leaning large ensembles in Japan, commissioning charts from the era's contemporary writers. Setting a Dixieland trumpeter in front of that band produced a genuinely unusual hybrid: traditional soloing over arrangements that belong to a later decade. The 1970 Nemu festival guest spot, where he soloed on a Kozaburo Yamaki chart for the same band, is the same idea captured live.

His playing after 1953 also carried the fact of the illness. He worked with vision that had been seriously damaged, and the twenty-two years of recording and performing that followed are the substance of his reputation as much as the prewar pioneering is.