Hiroshi Suzuki spent most of his working life as a sideman, and for a long time that looked like the whole story. Through the 1950s and 1960s he was a trombone-for-hire in Tokyo's big-band and Latin-jazz circuit: the Tokyo Cuban Boys, Nobuo Hara and His Sharps & Flats, Toshiyuki Miyama & His New Herd. It was steady, unglamorous work, and it put him in rooms with the musicians who would later matter most to his own records — saxophonist Takeru Muraoka, bassist Kunimitsu Inaba, drummer Akira Ishikawa, keyboardist Hiromasa Suzuki.

He started stepping out as a leader in 1969, a busy year that produced three records under his own name: Trombone Standard Deluxe on Columbia, Variation with the Masahiko Togashi Quintet (reportedly among the first Japanese albums built around new, freely improvised jazz material), and Up Up and Away, credited to Hiroshi Suzuki & His Happy Cats. Trombone Deluxe, a separate record from Trombone Standard Deluxe despite the near-identical title, followed in 1970 on Philips. Around the same time he became the trombonist in Freedom Unity, a Japanese jazz-rock band built on the same rhythm section he kept returning to — Muraoka, Inaba, Ishikawa, and Hiromasa Suzuki — which cut two studio albums in 1971: Something (Liberty/Toshiba) and a second LP the same year, Down By The Naked City (Victor World Group).

Then, in his late 30s, he left Japan. He moved to the United States to play trombone in Buddy Rich's big band, settling in Las Vegas for several years. It's a strange gap in the story: one of Japan's working big-band trombonists spending much of the 1970s inside an American drummer's orchestra, off the Japanese scene entirely.

He came back to Japan in 1975, and in October of that year he booked two days at Nippon Columbia's Tokyo studio with the same four musicians who had backed him in Freedom Unity. The result was Cat, five tracks named partly for Suzuki's own nickname, "Neko" — Japanese for cat. Released February 26, 1976, it did almost nothing commercially. Suzuki never recorded another album as a leader. He continued to work, but the story of Hiroshi Suzuki the recording artist effectively ends in 1976, at 42.

What happened afterward is the part that makes him worth writing about outside a discography footnote. Columbia reissued Cat in Japan in 2015, thirty-nine years after its original, unnoticed release. A further official reissue followed from We Release Jazz Records (WRWTFWW), sourced from the original masters. Lofi-beat and study-music communities on YouTube found the record and pulled it into rooms it was never made for, and it became one of the more sought-after Japanese jazz records among collectors, original 1976 pressings scarce and expensive. In 2023, an official music video went up for "Romance," the album's closing track; it has since passed 11 million views and streams, by a wide margin the largest audience Suzuki's trombone playing has ever reached. He died January 16, 2020, in Las Vegas, at 86 — three years before that number existed, though he lived to see the 2015 reissue that started the record's second life.

Suzuki's sound sits in soul jazz and jazz-funk, built on the loose, groove-first sensibility that ran through Japan's early-1970s jazz-rock scene — the same sensibility that powered Freedom Unity. Cat in particular is often described as warm and unhurried: relaxed tempos, a soul-jazz backbone, and trombone and saxophone solos (Suzuki alongside Takeru Muraoka) that read as gentle and melodic rather than showy. That sound didn't come from nowhere — it's the product of two decades inside Tokyo's big-band and Latin-jazz session world before he ever led a date of his own, and of the specific chemistry of the rhythm section he kept working with across Trombone Deluxe, Freedom Unity, and Cat.