Hiroaki Katayama (片山広明) was born in Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture, on March 1, 1951, and moved with his family to the nearby city of Noda at the age of eight; Japanese Wikipedia gives Noda as his hometown. A boyhood friend's tribute page recalls a mother who was a shamisen master and a son who started on alto saxophone in the junior high school brass band, kept playing through high school, and took his first jazz solo in public at a school festival, on "Take Five". In 1969 he entered Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, studied history, and skipped the wind orchestra for the university's jazz research society, on the grounds that the orchestra was not good enough to be interesting. At the same time he played in a Noda rock band, the Demons, and won a special prize at the Chiba round of the Yamaha Light Music Contest, where the judge was the clarinettist Eiji Kitamura, according to the same friend.

He left the university without finishing and turned professional in the first half of the 1970s. At a senior student's graduation session he met the trumpeter Itaru Oki, who took him into his combo, and he began working the jazz kissaten of Tokyo, Shinjuku Pit Inn among them, as a newcomer to the "new jazz" scene. For a time he also played in a cabaret house band and drove a delivery truck for a doughnut chain to pay for the music. The earliest record credit that survives is the triple-LP Inspiration & Power 14: Free Jazz Festival 1, issued by Trio Records from concerts at the Shinjuku Art Theater in June and July 1973, on which he played in the Now Music Ensemble of the saxophonist Yoshiaki Fujikawa and the cellist Keiki Midorikawa.

The decade ended with two groups that defined the Tokyo free-jazz and big-band scene. He was a founding member of Seikatsu Kojo Iinkai Orchestra (the "Living Improvement Committee" orchestra) with the pianist Yoriyuki Harada and the saxophonist Kazutoki Umezu; their album This Is Music Is This!? was released on Union Records in February 1980 with Katayama on tenor and baritone saxophones. In April 1979 he recorded The Masterpiece in a quartet led by the drummer Sabu Toyozumi, with Umezu and the trombonist Haruki Sato, at Tachikawa; it was issued in 1981. By then he had also begun a second career in rock. Around the end of the 1970s he grew close to RC Succession, the band of Kiyoshiro Imawano, and for years afterward he recorded and toured with them, as part of the horn section known as the Blue Day Horns. He is on RC Succession's Please (1980), on The Day of R&B (1982, shared with Chuck Berry and Sam Moore) and on a long run of albums through Cobra in Trouble (1988).

In the 1980s his main jazz outlet was Umezu's Doctor Umezu Band (D.U.B), where he and Umezu shared the saxophone chairs with the bassist Takeharu Hayakawa and the drummer Takashi Kikuchi. The band recorded Danger (1982) with Imawano singing, and Live at Moers Festival, taped on May 21, 1983 at the 12th International New Jazz Festival Moers in West Germany and issued on Moers Music in 1984. He also played reeds in Fujikawa's Eastasia Orchestra on Shoyoh Jurin (recorded March 14, 1983) and on the band's concert at the Volksbühne in East Berlin on June 17, 1984, released in 1991 as Jazzbühne Berlin '84.

His own first record was a solo statement. Equator (Music Box, 1983) was recorded on September 13, 1982, and it is one man with saxophones, tenor, baritone and alto, in two sides called the North Pole Side and the South Pole Side, each cut into four pieces named Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. A trio record with Hayakawa and the drummer Ken Tsunoda, Drei Sherry, followed in 1987, with "Good Bye Pork Pie Hat" and "My One and Only Love" among its eight tracks. In 1992 So-Kana (Omagatoki) added the guitarist Takayuki Kato, the bassist Hideaki Mochizuki and the drummer Ryojiro Furusawa; the rock guitarist and singer Reichi Nakaido, known as Chabo, wrote one of its liner notes.

The 1990s belonged to groups. He joined the Shibusashirazu Orchestra, the huge improvising ensemble run by the bassist Daisuke Fuwa, for its second album Dettaramen, and his place in it was settled quickly: Fuwa has called him the band's cleanup hitter (the fourth batter in a baseball lineup). He stayed through the band's 2006 major-label debut and beyond, and Discogs credits him on its 2017 album Juju. In 1994 he and the alto saxophonist Eiichi Hayashi formed De-ga-show, with Furusawa on drums, a band that mixed free jazz with funk. When Imawano wrote in the liner notes of the second album asking why Katayama had not invited him, the result was Hospital (1997), credited to Kiyoshiro meets De-ga-show. In 1998 he and Hayashi launched the two-saxophone quintet CO2 with Kato, Hayakawa and the drummer Yasuhiro Yoshigaki, and the same year he assembled a long cast of friends for Instant Groove, a five-track album whose guests ranged from Umezu and Hayashi to the bassist Nobuyoshi Ino. In pianist Fumio Itabashi's band he played on The Mix Dynamite Yu (1995).

He also travelled in jazz's more international rooms. On October 10, 1994 he was in Berlin for the Aki Takase Septet's Oriental Express, recorded at DeutschlandRadio Funkhaus, with the pianist Aki Takase leading. In the summer of 1996 he was one of the Japanese horns in the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra that Takase and Alexander von Schlippenbach brought to Japan, with Evan Parker, Gerd Dudek, Paul Rutherford and Axel Dörner in the band; the concerts, on July 31 and August 6, were issued as Live in Japan '96. For Satoko Fujii's Orchestra Tokyo he played tenor on the double album Double Take (recorded October 27, 1999) and on Before the Dawn, recorded on June 16, 2002 at the Yamaha Jazz Festival in Hamamatsu.

From 2002 he made records under his own name for the small labels that kept the Tokyo scene going. Quatre (Studio Wee, 2002), recorded in two days at a concert hall in Kobuchisawa, put him in a quartet with Itabashi on piano, Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and Yoshigaki on drums, and closes with "Nairobi Star", dedicated to Akira Ishikawa. Katayama Hiroaki with Shibusashirazu (2006) recorded a standards-and-originals set live at Buddy, Tokyo, in October 2005, ranging from "Fables of Faubus" to "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy". With Dust Off (Chitei Records, 2007) a run of records for Chitei began, among them Isoshigi (2009), made from two live tapes of 1977 and 1978, Happy Hour (2015) and Happy Hour - Live at Clop Clop - Last Order (2018). He fronted the brass-and-rhythm band Tokyo Slim, and made duo and trio records in the 2010s with the drummer Masataka Fujikake and the guitarist Akihiro Ishiwatari.

His last years were as busy as his first. He is on Itabashi's Fumio69 Rock & Ballade, released in September 2018, and in July of that year he was still playing in Itabashi's large band at Pit Inn. Hiroaki Katayama passed away on November 13, 2018, at the age of 67. Chitei Records, which had released five of his albums from Dust Off onward, announced the news the same day, remembering him as a player whose thick tenor tone nobody else could produce.

Katayama began on alto saxophone in school bands and settled on tenor, with the baritone saxophone as a regular second horn on records and in big bands. His sound is described on both sides of his career as large and individual: the label that issued his last albums wrote of a "thick tenor sound" that only he made, and a friend who knew him from boyhood remembered that he could make an instrument that would not sound speak at once. He shared front lines for decades with the alto saxophonists Umezu and Hayashi, and the two-horn, tenor-and-alto sound is the one he returns to most.

What marks him out is the range of rooms he worked in. He played free improvisation (Discogs files Equator, Quatre and Fiktion under Free Improvisation and Free Jazz), jazz-funk (the De-ga-show records), a big band of improvisers (Shibusashirazu), and the horn section of a rock-and-R&B group (RC Succession), and he recorded standards throughout: "Star Dust", "Dinah" and "Softly As in a Morning Sunrise" on his own records, "The Shadow of Your Smile" on Isoshigi, "Por Una Cabeza" and "Hymne à l'amour" on the Happy Hour albums. He wrote tunes with titles such as "Drunkenstein", which appears on So-Kana, Instant Groove, the 2006 Shibusashirazu album and Last Order, and "Nakama Ja Naika" ("Aren't we friends").

His bands were rarely stable and rarely named after him. The owner of Chitei Records wrote fondly that he kept changing the band's name for each new record, which is why the discography lists Tokyo Slim, Happy Hour, CO2, De-ga-show and the Hiroaki Katayama Quartet as separate entries rather than one catalogue.