Konosuke Saijo (西條孝之介, Saijō Kōnosuke) was a Japanese tenor saxophonist and bandleader, born in Yokohama on December 26, 1931. He graduated from Keio University and began performing while still a student; Keio's Light Music Society lists him among its notable alumni, as a tenor saxophonist. After graduating he played with groups such as the Midnight Sons, and then formed the West Liners, a band that became popular in Tokyo. Takeshi Inomata remembered being called into it in a hurry as a young drummer, in the house band of the Manuela nightclub in Tamuracho, with Norio Maeda at the piano; Tadayuki Harada joined on baritone saxophone in 1957. The band was later billed under Inomata's name, but Saijo stayed in its tenor chair on records for decades.

His name turns up early in the Tokyo jazz-record boom. In 1956 he was a member of the Swing Journal all-star band, whose first records were made that year, and in 1957 he is credited on tenor saxophone on three tracks of King's Jazz Message From Tokyo. In 1958 the West Liners were one of the four Tokyo combos on the Video Hall concert LP Modern Jazz Concert At Video Hall, and in 1964 Columbia issued the group's Modern Jazz Screen Mood, a set of film themes. A biographical sketch on CDJournal says he stepped away from music for a time in the 1960s and came back a few years later.

By 1966 he was recording again under his own name. Harlem Nocturne (King, 1966) is a standards album with the guitarist Shungo Sawada and the pianist You Tokuyama, on which Discogs credits him with soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones. In 1967 he was one of two tenor saxophonists, with Ichiro Mimori, in the Tokyo band on Helen Merrill's Autumn Love (Victor, recorded August 31 and September 7), a session that put Masaru Imada at the piano, Masao Yagi among the arrangers, and Inomata's West Liners behind the singer. On December 14, 1967 he recorded Drum Shot for the Takt label, a date billed to Inomata and Maeda that also had the trombonist Hiroshi Suzuki and Sadanori Nakamure on guitar. In 1968 he was one of the two tenors, with Akira Miyazawa, on Maeda's five-saxophone date 5 Saxophones (Takt) and the leader of Massachusetts In Bossa Nova (Crown, May 1968), a bossa nova quintet record with Nakamure and a second guitarist, Yasunori Suzuki.

The 1970s were his most documented decade. He is the tenor saxophonist on "Kitto Ieru," the fifth track of Yumi Arai's debut album Hikō-Ki Gumo (Express, November 1973). In 1974 RCA issued Resurrection, his quartet record with Maeda, the bassist Yasuo Arakawa and Inomata. Audio Lab's series of live-in-the-hall recordings then gave him a run of dates. On June 6, 1975 he was in the septet at Iino Hall for Alone Together, with Inomata, Maeda, Arakawa, the alto saxophonist Akitoshi Igarashi, the trumpeter Tetsuo Fushimi and Harada on baritone saxophone. On July 15, 1975 he recorded Incarnation with the pianist Kunihiko Sugano. On October 5, 1975 he was one of the four tenors on the live Opus de Four Tenors, alongside Hidehiko Matsumoto, Teruo Yoda and Junichi Sugihara, issued by RCA in 1977. On February 16, 1976 he and Matsumoto faced each other at Birdland in Roppongi for Teichiku's K.Saijo Vs. H.Matsumoto, with Maeda, Arakawa and Inomata as the rhythm section.

That same year he made Yardbird Suite (Yupiteru) as the featured tenor of the pianist Kazuo Yashiro's quartet, with Masahiko Ozu on drums, and, on May 10 and 11, an album of love songs for Offbeat with the Hachiro Kurita Trio, Let Me Love You. Two more dates with Yashiro followed at Iruma Civic Hall, on December 17, 1976 and May 10, 1977, and became the first two volumes of West 8th Street On Castle Ave. A third volume came out in 1986. In 1978 King issued two Saijo records: Early Autumn, billed to Saijo and the West Liners with Maeda arranging, and Blues For Friends, a three-tenor date on which he stood next to the Americans Budd Johnson and Buddy Collette, with Nat Pierce, Mundell Lowe, George Duvivier and Gus Johnson behind them. On December 5, 1978 he and the trumpeter Tetsuo Fushimi were the two horns on The Drum Battle, a record for four drummers: George Kawaguchi, Jimmy Takeuchi, Donald Bailey and Shingo Okudaira. In April 1979 he played tenor on two tracks of Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's Smoke A Moto's Blues, a date with Ray Brown on bass and Bailey on drums.

Manhattan Showcase (Full House, 1980) is the leader album that Universal Music Japan later singled out as one of the standouts among his few dates under his own name. It was recorded on May 30, 1980 at Iino Hall in Tokyo with Toshihiko Ogawa on piano, Kunimitsu Inaba on bass and Jun Shimizu on drums, and Universal reissued it on CD in 2014. In the same years he sat in the tenor section of Maeda's Wind-Breakers, with Jiro Inagaki beside him, on Wind-Breaker (Discomate, 1980), I'll Remember April (1981) and Misty (1983). In 1986 he played tenor saxophone on Yasuko Agawa's Melodies (Victor), a record built around Ron Carter, Roland Hanna and Lewis Nash. On the GML label's Right Enough! (1988) he shared the tenor front line with Tatsuya Takahashi, with Inomata on drums.

His later records reach across the Pacific and back. On May 22, 1992, at Kanagawa Kokaido in Yokohama, he recorded Saijoh's Serenade with the American tenor saxophonist Herb Steward, one of the original Four Brothers of Woody Herman's band, and with Gene DiNovi on piano, Dave Young on bass and Yukio Kimura on drums; it came out on the M & I label in 2001. The same year he was first tenor in Ichiro Masuda's Super Big Band for an NHK-FM radio session. A later leader record was The Good Life (Skip Records), a quartet album with Maeda, the bassist Makoto Saito and the drummer Masahiko Osaka, recorded in September 2008, when he was 76, and released that December.

Konosuke Saijo passed away on November 27, 2023, in a hospital in Tokyo, at the age of 91. Tokyo Shimbun reported that the cause was pneumonia, and that the funeral was held for close family only.

Saijo played a light, singing tenor in the cool tradition. The Universal Music Japan notes for the 2014 reissue of Manhattan Showcase liken his lyrical, flowing phrasing to Stan Getz and describe the programme as handled in a relaxed, West Coast-leaning manner, and the repertoire of Early Autumn (1978) says the same thing in song titles: "Four Brothers," "Dear Old Stockholm," "Stan Getz Blues" and the title tune, all played by a West Liners front line with Maeda's arrangements. Harada recalled the West Liners of the late 1950s as a band built on the West Coast sound of Stan Getz and Lee Konitz. Discogs files most of his own albums under Cool Jazz or Post Bop.

The range around that centre is wide. He made a bossa nova quintet record in 1968, ballad and love-song albums with a pianist and with a rhythm trio in 1976 and 1977, and tenor-battle records with Matsumoto and a four-tenor concert. He worked as a big-band section player under Maeda and Masuda, and as a studio tenor on pop sessions of the 1970s and 1980s, among them Yumi Arai's first album, Franky Sakai's Kono Subarashii Sekai and Harumi Kaneko's New York State Of Mind. German Wikipedia adds soprano saxophone and flute to his instruments.