Kohsuke Mine (峰厚介) was born February 6, 1944, in the Yushima district of Tokyo's Bunkyō ward, the son of a sushi restaurant owner. His family evacuated to Miyako, Iwate during the war while he was still an infant, returning to Tokyo before he started elementary school. Music entered his life almost by accident twice over: a boys' choir at eight that his mother pushed him into to cure his shyness, and a middle-school brass band where a scheduling conflict, not a choice, assigned him to clarinet. He attended Toho College of Music's affiliated high school, and while still a student he was already working nights, playing in a seven-piece dance band at a cabaret called Chinatown atop the Nichigeki building in Yurakucho for around 3,000 yen a month.

He turned pro for real in 1962, at eighteen, leaving his high school's clarinet program behind to join a working quintet led by saxophonist Katō, playing alto saxophone nightly at the Milano Club, in the basement of Shinjuku's Milano-za theater. He stayed roughly six years, self-taught on the horn — "I didn't take lessons," he said later — and largely formed by what he heard at the jazz cafés of the era: Paul Desmond, and the funky-boom hard bop of Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Donald Byrd.

By 1969 he was recognized as a member of pianist Masabumi Kikuchi's band, the relationship that shaped the next phase of his career. He debuted as a leader in 1970 with two records at once: First on Philips, and Mine on a brand-new label called Three Blind Mice, where his LP became TBM's very first catalog release. First paired him with Kikuchi on electric piano and two visiting American players, bassist Larry Ridley and drummer Lenny McBrowne, cut June 17 and 18, 1970 at Victor Studio in Tokyo — an internationally assembled rhythm section brought to him, three years before he went to them. The following year, on August 5, 1971, he joined Joe Henderson, Kikuchi, and trumpeter Terumasa Hino for a concert at Tokyo Toshi Center Hall, released on Philips as In Concert and later reissued as Sunrise in Tokyo. That same year he also co-billed a Three Blind Mice date with vocalist Kimiko Kasai, Yellow Carcass in the Blue.

Mine moved to New York in 1973, spending roughly two years there focused more on practicing than performing. His first recorded tenor saxophone appearance came that May, as a sideman on bassist Yoshio Suzuki's Friends; he'd taken up the horn in 1971 after becoming devoted to John Coltrane, and by the time he returned to Japan in 1975 it had become close to his primary voice, alto increasingly set aside. He came home with electric sounds in his ear, having absorbed soul and church music while in the States, and the mid-1970s East Wind run that followed shows it directly: Out of Chaos (1974), then Solid and Sunshower (both 1976), records that lean into Fender Rhodes, wah-wah, and a modal-to-fusion sound that's become one of the reissue era's most-cited threads. In between, in May and June 1976, he played tenor alongside George Adams, Lew Soloff, and Tom Malone in Gil Evans's orchestra for two nights at Tokyo's Nakano Sun Plaza Hall, later documented as Tokyo Concert.

In 1978 Mine co-founded Native Son, a jazz-funk band built around pianist Takehiro Honda's Fender Rhodes and clavinet, alongside guitarist Motonobu Ohde, bassist Tamio Kawabata, drummer Hiroshi Murakami, and percussionist Thomas Colon. It wasn't a side project: Native Son released eleven albums on JVC and Polydor between 1979 and 1987, debuting that first year with Savanna Hot-Line and the self-titled Native Son. Mine has since described the band with a certain lightness — "I was enjoying it" — rather than as his main commitment, even as it became one of the defining Japanese fusion catalogs of the period.

He kept a foot in straight-ahead jazz throughout, and by the 1990s it was back at the center. His Verve years produced Major to Minor (1993), recorded live at the Tokyo club Body And Soul and honored with the Japan Jazz Disc Award, followed by In a Maze (1995) with the same working quintet — guitarist Kazumasa Akiyama, pianist Junichiro Ohkuchi, bassist Tsutomu Okada, drummer Ryojiro Furusawa. In 1994 he also recorded Duo, a joint-billed session with Masabumi Kikuchi, the pianist who'd been a constant presence in his career since 1969. Balancez followed in 1997.

The catalog kept extending into the new century: the three-way session Rendezvous with pianist Takeshi Shibuya and altoist Eiichi Hayashi in 2004, With Your Soul in 2011 with a newer quartet built around pianist Eriko Shimizu, and Bamboo Grove in 2019, again with Shimizu, his first new leader session in seven years at that point. He remained a documented studio presence into 2025, well past his eightieth birthday and more than six decades after he first turned pro at eighteen in a Shinjuku basement club.

Mine's alto voice formed inside hard bop's funky-boom moment — Paul Desmond's tone on one side, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Donald Byrd's groove-forward hard bop on the other — absorbed entirely by ear in Tokyo's jazz cafés and on the bandstand rather than through formal lessons. The turn that reshaped his sound came in 1971, when devotion to John Coltrane pulled him onto tenor saxophone; within a few years alto had receded almost entirely from his own leader dates. Reviewers of his 1970 debut First have heard that hard-bop foundation clearly, alongside "scale-based themes that give way to expansive and exploratory improvisations" — an assessment that places him inside the same modernizing wave that was pulling Japanese jazz away from straight hard-bop repertoire circa 1970.

His mid-1970s East Wind records show the widest stylistic swing in the catalog: Solid has been described as carrying "Miles In a Silent Way vibes," while Sunshower mixes "dissonant funky riffs and intense energy" with synthesizer textures, Mine's sax lines running long and melodic against increasingly electric backing. That fusion period, and the Native Son years that followed it, sit in real contrast to his 1990s return to acoustic quintet writing: critics describe the 1993 Major to Minor as a shift "from a Wayne Shorter/Weather Report approach to Sonny Rollins's rhythmic bop style," his tenor delivering "fluid horn flights... soulful and jaunty" inside a straight-ahead frame. Few saxophonists from the same TBM/East Wind generation moved this deliberately between acoustic post-bop, electric fusion, and jazz-funk and then back again without ever fully leaving any of them behind.