Koichi Matsukaze (松風鉱一) was born on August 6, 1948, in Shizuoka Prefecture. In 1968 he entered the saxophone department of Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo, and in his second year he was already playing jazz in a bass-less trio with Fumio Itabashi and Shunji Tsuda. Through the saxophonist Seiichi Nakamura he met the pianist Yosuke Yamashita, and the two later played together, though only informally.

For roughly ten years, across his twenties and thirties, he also held down a very different job. He was a horn player in Ebony West, a soul band with several horns and a rotation of vocalists, working the clubs of Akasaka and the American military towns of Tachikawa, Fussa, Yokohama and Misawa, sometimes playing past two or three in the morning alongside visiting American bands. He told interviewers that he advised young jazz players that playing only jazz limits them, and the credits bear that out: he was a member of the rock band Godiego, played reeds on its album Kathmandu (Columbia, 1980), and appears on records by the rock band Creation (1977), Hideto Kano (1978), the singer Eri Ohno (1980) and the singer-songwriter Kingo Hamada (1981 to 2001).

His own music was something else. On 21 November 1975 his trio played a live set at the Chuo University festival, in a classroom known as Room 427, recorded by Yukio Kojima, the founder of the small ALM label. The trio was Matsukaze on saxophones, Koichi Yamazaki on bass and Ryojiro Furusawa on drums. ALM issued it in 1976 as At the Room 427, his first record as a leader. Five tracks, one of them a twenty-minute opener called "Acoustic Chicken," one a deconstructed "Lover Man," and two versions of a theme named for the Seikatsu Kojo Iinkai, the group he led under that name (the title translates roughly as "Life Improvement Committee"). A live recording from Masuda in Shimane, made on 5 June 1976 by that group with Shoji Aketagawa on piano, Yamazaki on bass and Takashi Miyasaka on drums, followed on Aketa's Disk in 1978. By his own account, two classmates, Yoriyuki Harada and Kazutoki Umezu, had gone to New York in the loft-jazz years and recorded a Seikatsu Kojo Iinkai album there in 1975; Matsukaze was invited to go to the United States with Harada and declined, preferring to develop slowly in Japan rather than struggle in a hard scene.

Earth Mother (ALM, 1978) is the record most people meet him through. It adds the pianist Toshiyuki Daitoku, on acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, to Matsukaze with the bassist Tamio Kawabata and Furusawa, and it runs to five pieces including "Images In Alone," a version of "'Round Midnight," and a tune called "Zekatsuma Selbst." Matsukaze produced it himself, playing alto and tenor saxophones and flute.

In 1980 he joined the drummer Takeo Moriyama as a guest on Smile (recorded 10 to 12 November 1980, Denon, 1981). Moriyama returned the favour on Good Nature (Trio Records, PAP-25008), cut on 9 and 11 May 1981 with Hideaki Mochizuki on bass, Hiroshi Hatsuyama on vibraphone and Moriyama on drums. Six pieces, with the composing credit his alone. One of them, "Under Construction," has since been picked up for compilations twice: Gilles Peterson's Shibuya Jazz Classics in 2003 and Jazzman's Spiritual Jazz 8: Japan in 2018. In 1982 he played alto saxophone on a Yosuke Yamashita date, Live, And Then... Picasso (Teichiku, 1983), and on 7 November 1984 he played baritone saxophone and flute in Masahiko Togashi's Improvisation Jazz Orchestra at Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo, a concert released as Follow the Dream in 1985. He also took part in the saxophone group Sax Workshop, which, by his account, was active from the late 1970s into the early 1980s and recorded an album in 1982 alongside Umezu and the saxophonist Genji Sawai.

From 1987 he was a regular in the Shibuya Takeshi Orchestra, led by the pianist Takeshi Shibuya, where he played baritone saxophone. He also appears on Shibuya's Ellington project Essential Ellington and on records by the trombonist Hiroshi Itaya's Guilty Physic (1991, 1995). He led a quartet of his own as well, and from the mid-1990s onward he recorded for small labels: the Aketa's Disk trio date A Day in Aketa (1994), a record billed to pianist Shoji Aketagawa's Unit with Matsukaze featured, Sangaibushi (1995), Kaleidoscope with the guitarist Isao Miyoshi (Off Note, 1997), a free-jazz duo with Harada called Mu-Myo (Ohrai Records, 2003), the quartet pair Private Notes (2005) and Guesthouse De Hirune (2006) on Studio Wee; the Zekatsuma Akustik Trio's Lindenbaum Session (2009); and and Blue Blackの階段 (Carco, 2009), co-billed with Takeshi Shibuya.

Late in life he was rediscovered by the reissue market. The London label BBE reissued Earth Mother in 2018 as the third title in its J Jazz Masterclass series and At the Room 427 in 2022 as the ninth, and the same year DownBeat's Philip Freeman compared Matsukaze's full tone and forceful playing to Arthur Blythe and the New York loft scene. Koichi Matsukaze passed away on March 29, 2023, at the age of 74. He was still performing in the weeks before.

The BBE reissues file him under post-modal bop and free jazz, and the label's own copy calls his approach angular and deconstructive. That description fits the two ALM albums. At the Room 427 is a live club-and-classroom set, and Freeman's review called it as fierce and exciting as anything played at Studio Rivbea in New York in those years. Earth Mother is catalogued as modal, and reviewers have heard spiritual jazz and post-bop in it, along with some Dolphy-style experimentation and the 'Round Midnight' cover.

What makes him more than a reissue-era footnote is how little he stopped writing. The same short list of tunes recurs across thirty years of records: "Images In Alone" from Earth Mother returns on A Day in Aketa; "What Masa Is... She Is Out To Lunch" from Good Nature returns there too; "Yellow Sands," also from Good Nature, is on Kaleidoscope (1997) and again on Lindenbaum Session (2009); "Blue-Black Stairs," recorded on Private Notes, is the title of his 2009 duo with Shibuya and also appears as "The Stairway in Blue Black" on Mu-Myo; "W.W.W." from Private Notes was recorded by the pianist Chihiro Yamanaka on her 2010 album Forever Begins. He was a player who wrote tunes once and then kept re-presenting them in new rooms with new people.

The other side of his career was as a section player. Asked about his training, he contrasted the rigid, specialist-focused Japanese music education of his youth with a more open American approach, and his own career, spread across free jazz, soul bands, rock sessions and an Ellington repertory band, reads as the opposite of specialisation.