Hiroshi Ozone (小曽根啓) is a saxophonist from Kobe who spent nearly four decades teaching and playing around the Kansai region before his first album, Unison, came out in January 2023. He is the younger brother of the pianist Makoto Ozone and the second son of the Kobe jazz pianist and Hammond organist Minoru Ozone (1934-2018), who is described on the family's music school page as a central figure in Kobe jazz. The character 啓 is read Hiroshi, as the school and the Kobe press give it; a few listings romanise the same name as Kei Ozone.

He was born in Kobe in 1964, according to his label biography and the teacher profile on the Ozone Music School site. Kobe Shimbun gave his age as 58 in January 2023, which fits. He started on saxophone in the brass band at Ikuei High School, and in 1982 went to Boston to study at Berklee College of Music, where his teacher was Jimmy Mosher. Like his brother, who had enrolled there two years earlier, he made the trip. He graduated in 1985 and came back to Kobe, and the school's own history page dates the opening of a saxophone class under his name to that same year. The school itself was founded in November 1965. In a 2023 interview he said his father started it, his mother took it over, and his son now runs it, with Hiroshi as a lecturer. The history page also records that the school was hit by the January 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake and reopened that April, and that it moved to Kobe's old foreign settlement in 2011. By the school's account the saxophone, flute and clarinet class has sent several students abroad, and Kobe Shimbun reported that he had taught more than 100 students.

Outside the classroom, his label biography lists a short run of dates beside his brother. In 1993 and 1994 he took part in the Osaka and Fukuoka Blue Note tour of the Newport Jazz Orchestra, the band Makoto led at the time. In 2012 and 2013 he is listed as playing with Makoto's trio and quartet alongside Branford Marsalis, Christian McBride and Jeff "Tain" Watts. In 2013 he played the Kobe Jazz Festival with the clarinetist Eiji Kitamura and others, and the same biography says he has appeared there every year since. These are statements from the biography; no recording from any of them is documented.

Why the first album took so long is something he has spoken about plainly. He told Kobe Shimbun he had lacked the ability, and that at Berklee he watched the saxophonist Donny McCaslin (rendered Danny McCaslin in the article) play and felt the distance between them. He chose practice over the spotlight, with a line from his brother in the back of his mind: everyone gets one or two real chances in life, and the only question is whether you are ready when it comes. In July 2021, in the hospital room where their mother, Michiko, was dying, he blurted out a promise that he and his brother would make a CD. The album's title comes from the funeral. When the coffin was closed, he and Makoto each said "thank you" at the same moment, in unison.

The album was recorded on 30 and 31 May 2022 in Tokyo. Makoto produced it, played piano and Hammond B3 organ, and arranged one track. The rhythm section was the bassist Kengo Nakamura and the drummer Shinnosuke Takahashi, the pair from Makoto's big band No Name Horses. Hiroshi played soprano and alto saxophone, arranged the material, wrote the liner notes and is credited as executive producer. Neeraj Khajanchi recorded, mixed and mastered it. Nine tracks run just over an hour: five originals by Hiroshi ("Egg On The Roof," "Green Salad," "Aquarius," "Back Street," "Madam Leo"), three standards ("Invitation," "In A Mellow Tone," "What Is This Thing Called Love?"), and Mitchel Forman's "Gorgeous," which closes the record as a duo with his brother. He has said Makoto taught him that tune when he was in his twenties. The opening track grew out of a childhood summer prank in which the brothers threw eggs onto a neighbour's tiled roof to fry them in the heat.

He explained a few of the choices in a 2023 interview. He had planned to play mostly alto, but on the first recording day the alto was not speaking well, so he switched to soprano for most of the album, and only "Madam Leo" and "Back Street" are on alto. That is also why "What Is This Thing Called Love?" was played in a higher key. "In A Mellow Tone" was not planned: after the first day, over drinks, he and Nakamura decided to try it, and it was recorded in a single take. The band had rehearsed just twice, once a little before and once the day before the sessions, and the record was close to one take per tune. The interviewer noted that Makoto had praised all five originals as well made, and had urged the audience to buy the album from the stage at a No Name Horses concert in 2023.

Universal Classics & Jazz released Unison in Japan on 25 January 2023 as UCCJ-2219, billed to Hiroshi Ozone with Makoto Ozone featured. Kobe Shimbun reported that the NHK radio programme Radio Shinya Bin would carry a live performance by the brothers on 21 January, and that NHK's Hyogo broadcast of Jazz Live KOBE would air one on 27 January; release concerts were planned for April in Kobe and Tokyo. On 15 October 2023 he was scheduled to lead a quartet at Kobe Asahi Hall, in the reopened old foreign settlement, with the pianist 堀智彦, the bassist 時安吉宏 and the drummer 引田裕路, who he said regularly back him. On 21 September 2024, he and Makoto played a duo concert billed as "Unison" OZONE Brothers Live at Seishin-Chuo Hall in Kobe. That is the most recent dated appearance on record.

Several things are simply not published. His exact birth date is not given anywhere. Unison is the only release under his name, and Discogs credits him on no other record, as leader or sideman. He told the interviewer that what he wants next is relaxed local gigs in Kobe, something like a beer garden with no announcements, rather than big stages.

Hiroshi Ozone traces his music to the Carpenters, and says he wants to write songs that move a listener every time they are played. He uses the word "listenable" for the aim: melody first, the kind of jazz a listener who does not know the idiom can still enjoy. He says his father and Makoto share that outlook. His father, as he remembers it, wanted newcomers to leave glad they had come, not thinking the playing was probably skilled but impossible to follow.

He has described a change of mind. When young he thought fast passages and many notes were what made jazz impressive. Then Makoto told him that a rest counts as a note, and he began to leave space. Kobe Shimbun described the originals on Unison as melodic and approachable, and the label's own description speaks of a plain, airy sound and interplay among the four players. The tune "Aquarius" is a lyrical ballad that Makoto singled out for praise.

His approach to teaching is the same discipline seen from the other side. He says students should be able to play any tune in every key and know all the chords, the way arithmetic comes before mathematics, because improvisation is play with notes and play needs a foundation.