Iori Kimura (木村イオリ) is a pianist, keyboardist, composer and arranger from Aomori City, in the north of Honshu, who came up on the Yokohama scene while studying at Yokohama National University. He is the pianist of two bands on the Playwright label: bohemianvoodoo, a Yokohama instrumental quartet he helped found in 2008, and Primitive Art Orchestra, a piano trio formed in 2011. Away from the bands he records duo albums with the bassist Kohei Morita and with his younger brother, the pianist Nisei Kimura (木村仁星).

Japanese Wikipedia's account of his early life says he started piano at five, met jazz through his father, and wrote his first piece at six; that piece was later played at a solo concert at Motion Blue Yokohama. He played soccer in junior high school. In high school he played clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone and percussion in the wind band and drums in the light music club, and for a time vaguely expected to become a drummer. The same article credits that spread of instruments with feeding his composing. At Yokohama National University he belonged to the Modern Jazz Society, and as a student he studied under Shihiro Ito (伊藤志宏), whose first assignment was Billy Reid's "I'll Close My Eyes."

bohemianvoodoo began, according to the band's Japanese Wikipedia entry, with a bar Kimura was running during his university years. He met the guitarist bashiry there and the two hit it off at once; they recruited the drummer Takatoshi Inoue, whom they also met at a bar, and the bassist Nassy, a friend of bashiry's from a university music circle, joined to complete the quartet. The first concert was in Isezakicho, Yokohama, in 2008. A mini-album, bohemian bazaar, went on iTunes in December of that year and had a nationwide release in January 2009. In July 2010 P-Vine issued the debut album Lapis Lazuli, produced, per Japanese Wikipedia, by the trumpeter Yusuke Shima of Silent Jazz Case. The Discogs credits list Shima as a performer on all eight tracks and credit Kimura with composing "Padmini" and "Star Trip" and co-writing "Hookah Smokers" and "Jet Setter" with bashiry. His official site carries the title STAR TRIP, the name of his composition on that record.

Live attendance records followed. A November 2010 show at Jazz Spot Dolphy in Yokohama's Noge district drew the largest crowd at that club since it opened in 1980, and in January 2011 the band sold out Motion Blue Yokohama with more than 250 people in the room; the concert was later issued as a live album sold only at venues. Playwright, the Disk Union imprint founded in October 2012 by Keisuke Taniguchi, released the second album, SCENES, in December 2012 and has been the label of both of Kimura's bands since. Inoue left in May 2013 and Takuya Yamamoto joined as drummer in June. That October the band put out Color & Monochrome, a split mini-album with the Playwright piano trio fox capture plan, on which Kimura wrote "Nomad."

On 25 January 2014 bohemianvoodoo played Blue Note Tokyo for the first time, in "BLUE NOTE plays BLUE NOTE" for Blue Note Records' 75th anniversary, on a bill that also had Terumasa Hino, Ron Carter and the Chihiro Yamanaka Trio. The band's own diary of the night calls it their first all-standards set, and says Takahiro "Matzz" Matsuoka and Reiko Yamamoto shared the stage with them; the pair also feature on "Nica's Dream," the band's track on Playwright's Family compilation that September. In May 2014 Kimura arranged and played piano on bohemianvoodoo's Chrono Trigger medley for Square Enix's SQ Swing, alongside bashiry's guitar and arrangement. Their 2014 album Aromatic followed in November.

Awards and milestones followed. echoes, a live best-of with a DVD released in June 2017, won Album of the Year in the New Jazz category at the JAZZ JAPAN AWARD 2017, announced in February 2018. A one-man show at Blue Note Tokyo in December 2017 sold out, the Singapore International Festival of Arts in April 2018 was their first overseas booking, and the group played the TOKYO JAZZ Festival in 2015 and again in 2019. MOMENTS appeared in March 2019, the mini-album Bouquet in December 2020, and CROSSING, recorded over three days in May at BAGUS Recording Studio, in September 2023 on CD and December 2023 on LP. The band's best-known piece, "Adria Blue" from SCENES, spread beyond the jazz audience after a Shimbashi office worker was found listening to it in a street interview on Nippon TV's Getsuyo Kara Yofukashi; the official video has passed 5.4 million views.

Primitive Art Orchestra was formed in 2011 by Kimura, the bassist Kohei Morita (from Kagoshima) and the drummer Takao Ito (from Toyama, also a member of TRI4TH). The debut album HELIX (Playwright, 24 September 2014) won the JAZZ JAPAN AWARD 2014 Album of the Year in the New Star category. qualia followed on 9 December 2015 and Artifact on 10 October 2018. Discogs credits Kimura with composing or co-composing six of the twelve pieces on qualia ("Heart of Cosmos," "Night Haze," "Synapse," "Perseus" with Morita, "Depth 'Tree Is Me and You'," and "Act" with Morita) and four on Artifact ("Gardenia," "May in Singapore," "Anthology Dub" and "'It' Is Rainy"), with Morita writing the rest and the trio credited jointly for "Neuron" and the arrangement of "Moon River." The trio's first overseas date was Tokyo JAZZ in Singapore in May 2016. After Artifact the group went quiet; Japanese Wikipedia describes a January 2024 appearance at Blue Note Tokyo as a full comeback after a five-year gap, and in January 2025 the trio released "Zero," its first new song in seven years, followed by "Noisia" in February and, in May, a recording of the duo piece "Japanese Suite Spring III. Rakujitsu (One's Dusk)" under the trio's name. Primitive Art Orchestra is scheduled to play Cotton Club in Tokyo on October 23, 2026, in a show billed as new material.

The duo with Morita is the other main thread of his own writing. Blessings -in Yatsugatake Kogen Ongakudo- (Playwright / Disk Union, 21 October 2020) is a piano and bass duo recording made at the Yatsugatake Kogen Ongakudo in Nagano. A run of digital releases followed: the Another Blessings EP (March 2021), a three-part "Japanese Suite" for spring (September 2021), "Lavender Night Sky" (December 2021) and a summer suite (August 2022). The second full album, Common Nostalgia (23 March 2022, eleven tracks, six by Kimura and five by Morita), was described in a January 2022 Natalie report as joining jazz with post-classical elements; the same report called a summer release the third work in a project themed on the four seasons. Lost Summer Blue (June 2023) gathered the summer suite with six further pieces.

With his brother he made MOONFLIGHT (Playwright, 19 October 2022): six tracks, "Moonflight," "Under the Azure Sky," "異邦人," "To Be Continued," "Spain" and "A Home," followed by the singles "石の教会 -雨音の二重奏-" (February 2023) and "Epilogue" (March 2023). Nisei Kimura, born in Aomori in 1991, also studied at Yokohama National University. He has said that he began piano at four because of his older brother the pianist, that the family home had a grand piano with classical music and jazz always playing, and that Iori's regular invitations to play concerts together are what led him to perform as a pianist himself. His website lists a "Kimura brothers" event at Kinshicho PARCO on 21 March 2026.

Kimura's sideman and guest credits run well outside jazz. He played electric piano on both of Yusuke Shima's 2013 Meikyoku wo Fuku albums, a feature on "Get Dressed Up" on Swing-O's 2017 promo CD Radio CST ウタウピアノ#01, and guest piano on "Strawberry Girl" on the idol group BiS's Brand-new Idol Society in 2019, and he is featured on two 2023 hip-hop tracks by DJ Krutch, "#723" and a remix of "Mirror Ball." Japanese Wikipedia also lists him as a support musician for the groups tsukuyomi and Udagawa Bekkan Band; with the latter he released piano-duo versions of "Rasuichi" (March 2022) and "Laphroaig" (June 2022) and appears on the April 2026 single "Barairo no Hibi." He remains active. Billboard JAPAN's artist page for bohemianvoodoo lists a roundtable dated 6 December 2024 with Kimura, the bohemianvoodoo drummer Takuya Yamamoto and JABBERLOOP's Melten and Makoto, held to mark a joint performance.

Primitive Art Orchestra is the more openly jazz of his two bands. Japanese Wikipedia says its work draws often on 1970s jazz, European jazz, 1990s club music, rock and ambient music, and explains the name as setting the simple, primal sense of "primitive" against the wish to give a trio the scale of an orchestra. The trio's 2026 concert listing calls it a "minimum-ensemble orchestra." Composing is split almost evenly with Morita: on qualia and Artifact each wrote about as many pieces as the other.

bohemianvoodoo plays from the same club-jazz and instrumental-band world. Its own site describes emotional melodies with a refreshing sense of drive, and a 2018 concert listing calls it a melodic instrumental band whose songs suggest a range of landscapes. Discogs files Lapis Lazuli under Future Jazz, Jazzdance and Jazz-Funk, and the split with fox capture plan under Contemporary Jazz and Fusion. His official profile is four sentences long and names no influences. Japanese Wikipedia's account is that his father introduced him to jazz in childhood, and that he spent his youth in a wind band, a light music club and a university jazz society.

The duo records are quieter and more chamber-like, and the Natalie report on Common Nostalgia puts the post-classical element next to jazz. Apple Music files the Morita duo albums as contemporary jazz and, in the case of Blessings, classical crossover.

He is not a jazz-only musician, and the credits show it: idol pop, hip-hop, electronic and game-music arrangements sit beside his own jazz releases. The jazz case rests on his own releases, which Apple Music files under jazz, on the two JAZZ JAPAN AWARDS won by his bands, and on the clubs and festivals they play, among them Blue Note Tokyo, the TOKYO JAZZ Festival and Billboard Live.