Ken Tsunoda (角田健) is a Tokyo drummer and percussionist who has worked the city's jazz and improvised-music clubs since the 1980s. He was born on 26 February 1964 in Nishi-Shinjuku, Tokyo. Concert listings and credits also give his name as Tsunoken (つのけん), and until 2008 he played under the stage name Tsuno-inu (つの犬 or ツノ犬), a pun on his surname and the Japanese word for dog. On 26 February 2008, his 44th birthday, a post on his blog titled "From Dog to Human" announced that the stage name was being dropped in favour of the spelling つのだ健, Tsunoda Ken.

He grew up in Nishi-Shinjuku, then known as Yodobashi, in a wooden two-storey building where his grandmother ran a barber shop, the Miyuki Riyoshitsu, on the ground floor. His grandparents had come back there after the war with eight children, and upstairs lived most of the shop's staff, many of them young people who had come down from Tohoku straight after junior high school, together with his aunts and uncles who were still students, and Ken and his brothers. In a 2014 blog post he traced his link to the alto saxophonist Eiichi Hayashi back to that house. One of his uncles, a drummer who had been fired up by the film Arashi o Yobu Otoko and played in his high school brass band, used to bring band mates home to practise jazz, and Hayashi was one of them. Tsunoda was two or three years old and remembers none of it; he knows it from Hayashi, who recalled a child with a runny nose wandering into the practice room, and from a former employee who remembered him bouncing and dancing whenever the uncle started to play. He names that uncle as the rock drummer Hiro Tsunoda (つのだ☆ひろ), who he says was picked young for Sadao Watanabe's band, while Hayashi went on to join Yosuke Yamashita's trio at the height of its fame. Japanese Wikipedia's entry for Hiro Tsunoda fits the details: he was the youngest of eight children, raised in Shinjuku, and played in Watanabe's quartet in the late 1960s.

He bought his first drum kit in junior high school, spent high school practising and playing in bands, and understood by then that he wanted no other job. In his first year of high school he formed Kikyo (ききょう), a three-piece rock band in which all three members sing their own songs; by his own account it was still playing together in 2014. After graduating he sharpened his playing in university jazz clubs and live houses, and work in musicals and dinner shows eventually let him live from music. At a live house where he had a part-time job, he asked Hayashi, who was on the bill, whether he could sit in, his first ever request of that kind, and he still calls Hayashi his shishō, his master. He met the pianist Jojun Hasegawa (長谷川淨潤), who leads a body-work non-profit and still plays free jazz, while both were visiting university jazz clubs in their teens, and calls him his elder brother in music. The bassist Toshiki Nagata has been a friend since those years, and Tsunoda says his first recording session, and his first tour of Germany, made while East Germany still existed, were both with Nagata.

The earliest record credit listed for him is a 1982 live double LP, East West '82 / Live, recorded at Nakano Sun Plaza Hall on 7 and 8 August 1982, where Discogs credits 角田健 on drums for a band called Magic Stick. He was 18. By 1987 he was in the trio heard on Drei Sherry, with the tenor saxophonist Hiroaki Katayama and the bassist Takeharu Hayakawa, recorded at Yamaha's Meguro studio on 5 and 6 August 1987 and issued by the No Trunks label; the jacket prints the title Drei Sherry and the record label prints Dry Sherry. In 2009, announcing a one-night reunion of that trio at No Trunks in Kunitachi, he recalled being given the chance to join its recording more than twenty years before.

Between November 1987 and January 1988 he recorded Free Fight, the first album by Sachi Hayasaka and her band Stir Up!, issued on Mobys Record in 1988, with Toshiki Nagata on bass and Tomohiro Yahiro on percussion. He stayed with Stir Up! for years and is credited on 2.26 (Enja, 1994), taken from the Stir Up! concert at Buddy in Ekoda on 26 February 1992 with Yosuke Yamashita as guest pianist; on Milagros (Off Note, 1996), with the violinist Asuka Kaneko and the pianist and accordionist Kyoko Kuroda; and on Black Out! (Live At Buddy / 1999 2.26) (Nbagi Record, 1999), with the tenor saxophonist Naruyoshi Kikuchi and Eiichi Hayashi on baritone. The Jazz.com encyclopedia explains the concert's name: 26 February is the shared birthday of Hayasaka, of Tsunoda and of Yamashita, and the date has become an annual Stir Up! event.

From 1998 his main band was Fuse, the quartet of the tenor and soprano saxophonist Toshihiko Inoue (born in Yokohama in 1952), the pianist Nobumasa Tanaka and the bassist Benisuke Sakai. Inoue's own site dates the group to 1998 and lists three albums for ewe records with Tsunoda billed as Tsuno-inu: fuse (recorded 8 October 1998, released 1999), Grasshopper (recorded 12 to 15 October 2002, released 2003) and the two-disc Live Fuse (recorded at Yamate Gaiety Theatre and Motion Blue Yokohama in autumn 2005, released 2007). Inoue wrote all the music. A Jazz of Japan review of the live set describes jazz and rock energy running alongside meditative themes and free passages, driven by Tsunoken's drums. In his own words, Fuse was the band in which he learned the most about what a band can be. Inoue passed away in March 2015. The remaining three kept the music going: his blog lists a three-band memorial session for Inoue, recorded for NHK-FM, on 3 December 2015; Kyoto's Live Spot RAG listed the trio of Tanaka, Sakai and Tsunoda in October 2016 and October 2017, each time with the saxophonist Kohsuke Mine as guest; and the band's own site lists dates at the Yokohama club Dolphy in April 2024 and March 2025.

He is also a member of the Shibusashirazu Orchestra (渋さ知らズ), the free-jazz big band founded by the bassist Daisuke Fuwa in 1989, which Japanese Wikipedia lists with つの犬（角田健）on drums. Discogs credits him on its 2004 album Shibuboshi, where he plays on five of the eight tracks alongside Nobuyoshi Ino on contrabass and guests including Marshall Allen and Michael Ray, on the avex io releases Shibuzen (2006) and Shibuki (2007), and on a 2002 live recording from the Yokohama Jazz Promenade. Fuwa is also the bassist in the Yamaguchi Koichi Trio, in which Tsunoda recorded Love Of Life (2010) and Circuit (2011) for Studio Wee; concert listings place the trio at Shinjuku Pit Inn on 12 August 2026.

Around those bands runs a long line of sideman work. He is the drummer on Eiichi Hayashi's trio album Monk's Mood (1996), on the 1999 album of the eight-piece Odun, on Hiroaki Katayama's Instant Groove (1998) and on Shun Sakai's Kaimono Boogie (1996), where Katayama played tenor saxophone and supervised the recording, and on Dub Jazz Jazz Dub (2009), led by the British dub producer Dennis Bovell, with Toshiki Nagata and Hayasaka also in the band. Discogs also lists him on the Africans' 2008 album with the cellist Hiromichi Sakamoto and their 2010 album with Sakamoto and the vocalist and theremin player Koichi Makigami, and on rock, pop and new-wave records for Hikashu, Jazzy Upper Cut and others. His recent credits include two progressive-rock albums led by Kunio Suma, one under his own name (2024) and one by his band Bi Kyo Ran (2025). A Jazz Spot Dolphy profile from 2006 names the pianist Fumio Itabashi, Hiroaki Katayama and Nagata among the musicians he plays sessions with. In 2007 and 2010 his blog also mentions piano-trio records with Kenichiro Shinzawa and Sachiko Nakajima, neither of which Discogs lists.

Outside the clubs he is a drum-circle facilitator, trained by Arthur Hull, whom he describes as the father of the drum circle, and by Kaoru Sasaki. A 2008 profile of his says he also ran a drum coaching practice, and his blog describes visiting nurseries to play drums with children. He says he went to Senegal as a member of Yamashita's Africa tour, where he heard Youssou N'Dour still singing in clubs, though the post does not give a year.

He is still working. Concert listings show him at Shinjuku Pit Inn on 15 June 2026 with the saxophonist Tetsuro Kawashima's quintet Fist and on 12 August 2026 with the Yamaguchi Koichi Trio, with a further Fist date announced there for 28 October 2026.

Tsunoda is a jazz and free-improvisation drummer with an unusually wide range, and nearly all of his documented work sits in the free-leaning end of jazz. The early records are the clearest evidence: Discogs tags Drei Sherry as Free Jazz, Fusion, Post Bop and Jazz-Funk, and Free Fight as Free Jazz. Milagros is tagged Avant-garde Jazz and Fusion, the Africans' records as Free Improvisation, and the avex io album Shibuki as Jazz-Funk and Jazz-Rock. In his own description of his playing, from a 2008 profile, he draws on the social outlook of rock, the freedom of jazz, the tradition and pride of folk music, the dangerous edge of the street, and the example of the great drummers. The Jazz Spot Dolphy profile of 2006 puts the same breadth in practical terms: a craftsman who takes any drumming job, from clubs to nurseries, oldies to free music.

His documented non-jazz work is real but secondary. It includes the new-wave band Hikashu, the hip-hop and rock group Jazzy Upper Cut, a J-pop maxi-single by Girl Girl Girl, and the progressive-rock records of Kunio Suma. Against that, the jazz side includes three albums with the modern-jazz quartet Fuse, four with Hayasaka's Stir Up!, a run of records with the Shibusashirazu Orchestra and two piano-trio albums with the Yamaguchi Koichi Trio, so jazz remains the center of his work.

What is not on record: no album under his own name alone has been found, and his formal training beyond the jazz clubs and teachers named above is not documented.