George Kawaguchi (ジョージ川口, born Joji Kawaguchi) was the drummer who put a postwar Japanese audience in front of a jazz band for the first time and kept it there for half a century. He was born in Kyoto on 15 June 1927, the second son of the saxophonist Yonosuke Kawaguchi, and at six he was taken with the family to Dalian in Manchuria. It was there, watching Gene Krupa in the American film Hollywood Hotel, that he decided he would be a drummer. He was still a teenager in the last months of the war, training as an army air cadet, and by 1945 he was a professional, playing in an international band that worked clubs for Soviet troops in Dalian.

He came back to Japan in 1947 and joined Torirō Mitsuki's band that May, then worked the American military clubs that were the real jazz schools of the Occupation. In 1949 he moved into Raymond Conde's Gay Septet, which brought him his first notice as a young drummer to watch. In 1953 he formed the group that made his name, the Big Four, with tenor saxophonist Hidehiko "Sleepy" Matsumoto, the pianist Hachidai Nakamura, who would go on to become one of Japan's best-known popular composers, and the bassist Mitsuru Ono. The quartet set off a Japanese jazz boom. It recorded as a working band for more than twenty years and played intermittently into the 1980s.

The records show how quickly it became an institution. Jazz at the Torys (King, 1957) was taken from the radio programme "Torys Jazz Game" and recorded between 17 June and 22 July 1957 at Tokyo's Video Hall, and its closing track, "Drum Boogie," became his signature. On 15 June 1958, his thirty-first birthday, the band recorded On Stage! Big 4 Plus 1 at the same hall, with the 25 year old Sadao Watanabe added on alto saxophone and flute. The Original Big Four followed on King in 1959. Japanese biographical references name Watanabe, Yosuke Yamashita and Terumasa Hino among the young players he brought on, and Masahiko Satoh, Hiromasa Suzuki and Jiro Inagaki each worked in a Kawaguchi group early in their careers.

The Big Four kept changing its shape without losing its name. On Caravan (Takt, 1967) the pianist Yuzuru Sera guested with a quartet built around Takatoshi Oya on tenor, Masaaki Fujita on guitar and Tetsuji Kimura on bass, and the same musicians cut The Life for Royal that year under the billing Big Four Plus One. George and Sleepy (Victor, 1969) was recorded on 30 September 1969 with Isao Suzuki on bass and Kunihiko Sugano on piano. Blow! Blow! Big 4 (Columbia) arrived in May 1974, with Akira Miyazawa sharing the tenor chair with Matsumoto. And in April 1976, on 12 and 19 April at Epicurus Studio in Tokyo, he and Matsumoto made The Big 4 for Three Blind Mice, with Hideo Ichikawa on piano and electric piano and Takashi Mizuhashi on bass, a record that leans into the fusion sound of the day with titles like "Invader 7" and "Sleepy's Funk." The group's Original Big Four Live (Philips) followed in 1977.

Alongside the band he built a second career as Japan's drum-battle man. Drum-Scope (King, 1957) put him against Hideo Shiraki, Jimmy Takeuchi and Nobuo Hara. In 1970 he made Drum & Drum with Akira Ishikawa and in 1971 Four Jazz Drums for Warner with Takeshi Inomata, Isamu Harada and Motohiko Hino, arranged by Norio Maeda. A 1975 RCA drum-battle album gave his Big 4 one side of a four-way contest with Ishikawa's Count Buffaloes, the George Otsuka Trio and Inomata's Sound Limited, and Otsuka, Ishikawa and Inomata were back with him on The Exciting Drum in 1980. In 1976 he faced Motohiko Hino directly on G. Kawaguchi vs. M. Hino and traded "Drum Boogie" with the actor and drummer Frankie Sakai on a Victor album of its own.

In July 1966 the John Coltrane quintet toured Japan. A chronology of that tour places Kawaguchi at the late-night jam session held at Tokyo's Video Hall after the band's concert at Koseinenkin Hall on 22 July, on drums alongside Hideo Shiraki, with Sadao Watanabe, Hidehiko Matsumoto, Jiro Inagaki and a group of other Japanese players, and again at the pre-arranged jam that closed the tour in the small hours of 24 July. Which members of the visiting band joined in is not recorded there. What the listing does show is the place Kawaguchi held in the Tokyo scene: when Coltrane's group came to town, he was one of the two drummers named at the welcome jam.

From the late 1970s the drum records got bigger and the band got larger. Super George & The Super Band (Paddle Wheel, 1979), recorded on 25 and 26 June 1979, put a saxophone and brass section around him that included Matsumoto and Yasuaki Shimizu on tenor, with Isao Suzuki on bass, playing funk and fusion material such as "Superstition" and "Isn't She Lovely." African Hot Dance (Electric Bird, 1980), cut on 17 to 19 June 1980 with an expanded Super Fusion Band that also included Takeru Muraoka and Shimizu, is a fusion and jazz-funk album with arrangements by Chikara Ueda. Super Drums 2: Tribute to Gene Krupa (Paddle Wheel, 1983), recorded at Urayasu Bunka Kaikan on 15 and 16 February 1983, was the return to the swing-era drummer who had set him on the path in Dalian.

The 1980s took him to America and into the company of the players he had grown up listening to. On 16 March 1982 he recorded Big 2 with the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, with Arnett Cobb on tenor, Kenny Barron on piano and Milt Hinton on bass. That year Union Jazz issued Killer Joe, a two-drummer date produced by Teo Macero in which Art Blakey is panned to the left channel and Kawaguchi to the right, with Slide Hampton, Wallace Roney and Branford Marsalis in the horn section and his son Raiji Kawaguchi on percussion. He made a laserdisc, Collaboration, with the American drummer Shelly Manne in 1982, and in 1986 produced the promotional DHL Presents George Kawaguchi Super Big Band, with Hiromasa Suzuki and Norio Maeda among the arrangers. His tribute record George Kawaguchi Plays Herbie Hancock was cut at King Studio on 31 July 1987 with Donald Harrison and Terence Blanchard in the front line and Cyrus Chestnut on piano.

The honours piled up as the catalogue did. He received the 6th Nanri Fumio Prize, named for the pioneering trumpeter Fumio Nanri, and the 31st Arts Encouragement Prize of the Minister of Education, the first time that prize went to a jazz musician, both around 1981. He was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 1988 and the Order of the Rising Sun, Fourth Class, in 1997. On 2 November 1990, at Pamir in Tokyo, he led an all-star live date, released the next year as Jazz Battle, whose cast ranged from Matsumoto and Terumasa Hino to Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, Ron Carter, George Duke, Benny Green and Rufus Reid. Away from music he was a keen shooter and served as an international clay-pigeon referee at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

George Kawaguchi passed away in Tokyo on 1 November 2003, aged 76, of a cerebral hemorrhage, only days after he had last performed in concert. That year the Japan Record Awards gave him a Special Achievement Award at their 45th ceremony. His son Raiji continued the group as the New Big Four, and a tribute album by the New Big 4+1 was released in 2008.

Kawaguchi's playing was big, bright and built for a room. Japanese critics described it as bold and powerful, with flamboyant showmanship and fast, forceful drum solos, and his mustache and warm personality made him a familiar face beyond jazz, with film, television and commercial appearances and a turn as a judge on NHK's Kohaku Uta Gassen in 1995. Gene Krupa was the model he never stopped acknowledging, from the Dalian cinema where he first saw him to the Tribute to Gene Krupa album decades later, and "Drum Boogie," the Krupa showpiece, was the number the Big Four built its encores around from the 1957 Jazz at the Torys radio recording onward.

His real contribution was structural rather than technical. The Big Four gave Japanese postwar jazz a repertoire of standards, a band to play them and a stage that was not a military club, and then he kept re-forming around new players so that the music never settled into a museum piece. The sidemen on his sleeves tell the story: Matsumoto and Nakamura in the 1950s, Sera and Fujita in the late 1960s, Ichikawa and Mizuhashi in the 1970s, then a rotating cast of American guests in the 1980s.

He worked across the swing, mainstream and big band idioms rather than in one school. The Three Blind Mice album and the Super Band records show him adapting to jazz-funk and fusion without abandoning the swing feel underneath, and the drum-battle records show the showman side the public loved. He also played repeated sessions with the taiko drummer Daihachi Oguchi, a measure of how far he was willing to take a rhythm section away from the jazz club.