Kazutoki Umezu (梅津和時) belongs to the generation of Japanese improvisers whose records the reissue world has spent the last decade rediscovering, and he is the one who never went away. He has been recording since 1975 and playing continuously since before that, and in March 2026 he was still running the annual concert series he started in 1990.

He was born in Sendai on 17 October 1949 and formed his first band, Seikatsu Kōjyō Iinkai, with the pianist Yoriyuki Harada in 1970 while he was a student at Kunitachi College of Music. The name translates roughly as "Lifestyle Improvement Committee," a joke at the expense of the committee language then circulating among radical students.

In 1974 he moved to the United States and worked the New York loft scene, the musician-run circuit that had grown up because the established clubs would not book free jazz. Harada followed him over, and on 11 August 1975 the band recorded at Studio We, the loft at 193 Eldridge Street run by Juma Sultan and James DuBoise. They released the result themselves as Ski No. 1, credited to 生活向上委員会ニューヨーク支部, the New York Branch. The band on that record is Umezu on alto, Harada on piano and bass clarinet, and three musicians from the American side of the scene: William Parker on bass, Ahmed Abdullah on trumpet, Rashid Sinan on drums. Parker was 23. The record was reissued by Off Note in Japan in 2016 and by the Belgian label Aguirre in 2022, which is how most listeners outside Japan encountered it.

He had already been playing in Tokyo before he left. A tape from a 1974 concert at VAN99, released only in 2022 as Live Concert Tokyo 1974, catches him on alto beside Toshinori Kondo on trumpet and Toshi Tsuchitori on drums.

Back in Japan from 1976, he formed the band 集団疎開 and, in 1977, joined Masahiko Togashi's group and rebuilt Seikatsu Kōjyō Iinkai as a full orchestra. That version made its major-label debut with This Is Music Is This!? (Union Records, 1980), thirteen musicians moving between original material and "Take the A Train." The same year brought his first album under his own name, Bamboo Village (Next Wave), recorded at Onkio Haus on 21 and 22 March 1980 in a trio with Togashi on percussion and the American bassist David Friesen. By 1981 he was also playing in Akira Sakata's big band on 4 O'Clock.

Then the career widened in a way few jazz careers do. In 1980 Umezu joined RC Succession by way of their live album Rhapsody, taking a horn section in under the name 生向委ホーンズ, later the Blue Day Horns. He appears on the band's records from 1980 through the 2005 Rhapsody Naked remix, and on the two-disc live album from Kiyoshiro Imawano's comeback concert at Nippon Budokan in 2008. The exchange ran both ways: Danger (Barca / London, 1982) is credited to the Doctor Umezu Band with Imawano singing, playing guitar, writing the lyrics and co-producing. The following year the same band played the 12th International New Jazz Festival at Moers on 21 May 1983, released by Moers Music in 1984. Between those poles he recorded Another Step on 21 and 22 April 1982, a quartet date with Mal Waldron at the piano, Takeharu Hayakawa on bass and Takashi Kikuchi on drums.

In 1990 he began the residency that defines him in Japan. He took 16 consecutive nights at Aketa no Mise, the basement club in Nishi-Ogikubo opened in 1974 by the pianist Shoji Aketagawa, and called the run 大仕事, "The Big Job." He extended it by one night a year: 17 in 1991 as 続大仕事, 18 in 1992, 19 in 1993, and 20 in 1994 under the accumulated title 続々続々大仕事. In 1995 he split the run across two venues, ten nights each. A compact version, プチ大仕事, still runs, and played Shinjuku Pit Inn on 18 March 2026.

The same decade took him in several directions at once. He formed the trio Third Person with the American cellist Tom Cora and percussionist Samm Bennett and toured Japan, recorded Eclecticism at the Knitting Factory in New York in 1992, and joined Susumu Hirasawa's band. He started the klezmer group Betsuni Nanmo Klezmer in 1992, and after playing a street festival in an Okinawan market arcade in 1996 he grew a second klezmer band, Komatcha Klezmer, out of it. He toured Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka in 1995 and the United Kingdom in 1998 as a member of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and toured the Netherlands in 1999 and 2002 with the Dutch saxophone ensemble De Zes Winden. He also became a producer, most consistently for the Okinawan singer Tetsuhiro Daiku.

The KIKI Band, the group he has led longest, debuted at Shinjuku Pit Inn in 1998 and was assembled properly the following year for a tour of Singapore, Kenya, Zanzibar and South Africa. Its international breakthrough came at Moers in 2003. The current lineup is Umezu on alto, soprano, clarinet and bass clarinet, Natsuki Kido on guitar, Takeharu Hayakawa on bass and the American drummer Joe Trump, who replaced Kozo Niida in 2004. The band's album Reawakening appeared in 2023 and was followed by eight UK and Ireland dates that October.

He has also worked steadily outside his own projects: with Masahiko Satoh in the Randooga ensemble across three albums between 1990 and 1993, with Kazumi Watanabe's Mobo band in 1985, with George Russell's Living Time Orchestra in 1988, with B.B. King on a 1990 Japanese live album, with Butch Morris on the Testament conduction set in 1995, with the taiko ensemble Za Ondekoza in 2004, and on Otomo Yoshihide's soundtrack to the NHK drama Amachan in 2013.

His most recent release is One Night At The Classics, a double CD recorded live at Koen-Dori Classics in Shibuya on 20 November 2025 and issued on 3 May 2026, with the violinist Keisuke Ohta and the pianist Kazuto Shimizu.

Umezu came up inside the American free jazz tradition rather than alongside it. His formative years were spent on the New York loft circuit in 1974 and 1975, playing with musicians who were themselves building that scene, and the alto voice he brought home is closer to the loft players than to the hard bop lineage most Japanese saxophonists of his generation came through.

What separates him from his peers is refusal to specialise. The same player leads a free jazz orchestra, blows a horn section behind a stadium rock band, runs two klezmer ensembles, records unaccompanied bass clarinet, and puts out an album of solo woodwind readings of enka, the Japanese popular ballad. The KIKI Band, his longest-running group, sits deliberately between progressive rock and jazz, built on irregular metres and folk material from several traditions.

He works across four instruments, and the bass clarinet in particular has become a solo vehicle for him rather than a colour. Show The Frog (2005) is a full album of unaccompanied bass clarinet, and Auratus / Fake Sax (2006) is its saxophone companion.