Kozo Suganuma (菅沼孝三, Suganuma Kōzō in Japanese order) was an Osaka-born drummer known across Japan as 手数王 (Tekazu-ō), "the king of many strokes," for fast, dense, odd-meter playing built on rudiments and a very large kit. He toured and recorded behind some of the biggest names in Japanese pop and rock, ran a national chain of drum schools, and led a second career in jazz fusion that is documented on five albums under his own name and on the trio records of Fragile and W.I.N.S. He passed away on November 8, 2021, at the age of 62.

He began on drums at eight, appeared on television as a child drummer, and turned professional at fifteen, in 1975, playing the dance halls, cabarets and clubs of Osaka's Umeda and Namba districts. The contest wins came quickly: a special judges' prize at the Yamaha Drummers Championship in 1977, best drummer at the "88 Rock Day" event in 1978 and best drummer at the A-ROCK contest in 1979. In 1981 he joined a big band billed as the New Sonic Jazz Orchestra, and in 1982 the fusion band 99.99. A 1986 album with the progressive band Black Page, Open the Next Page, was followed in 1987 by the job that made him a fixture on Japanese stages: he was a founding member of BLACK EYES, the backing band for the duo Chage and Aska, and played most of its tours until it wound down at the end of 1999.

In 1991 he opened the Kozo Suganuma Drum Dojo at Yamaha's Shibuya store. It grew to six locations, and the instructional videos, books and DVDs that came with it ran from Tekazu-ō (1992) to Jazz Drum Daijiten (2004) and a 1998 book whose Japanese title translates as "Jazz Course for Rock Drummers." The jazz-fusion work ran alongside. In 1992 he formed W.I.N.S, a progressive fusion group with guitarist Akira Wada, bassist Toshimi Nagai and keyboardist Akira Ishiguro, whose self-titled album came out on June 21, 1995. The same year he started his own unit Fragile, which by its first album in 1996 was a trio with guitarist Koichi Yabori and bassist Masatoshi Mizuno. Fragile released eleven albums between 1996 and 2011, among them Handle With Care (1997) and No Wet (1999), on which the American guitarist Mike Stern guests on three tracks. In 1993 he recorded Broken Barricade in Tokyo with the group Paradox, whose guitarist and composer was Yoichi Tanabe, for Verve Forecast. Japanese Wikipedia credits him in 1997 as the first Japanese drummer to appear at the Montreal Drum Fest.

His first record under his own name, Kozo (Jewel Sound, 2001), was recorded in New York with the bassist Lincoln Goines, the keyboardist Scott Kinsey, the saxophonist Bob Malach, the saxophonist Hiroyuki Yagi and Yabori on guitar; it includes a reading of John Coltrane's "Moment's Notice." Pai-Patiroma (2004) paired him with Nagai, the guitarist Kazuhiko Michishita and the keyboardist and saxophonist Makoto Aoyagi, and has him on trumpet as well as drums and percussion. Convergence (2010), his most rock-oriented album, brought in the bassist Billy Sheehan and Loudness guitarist Akira Takasaki, and it came two years after he deputised for Loudness's ailing drummer Munetaka Higuchi in 2008. Sunset Cruise (2014) reunited the Pai-Patiroma quartet, with a didgeridoo feature on "La Musica."

In July 2014 he played the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, as a member of Akikazu Nakamura's band FOREST, and the same year the Drum Summit in Beijing. He spent the middle of the decade in KKK-CORE, a drum-and-organ trio with his student Senri Kawaguchi and the organist Kaori Hirohara (a CD in 2016, two live DVDs in 2015 and 2016), and marked fifty years as a drummer with Drum Paradise (King Records, 2018), a nine-track album on which fellow drummers including Riku Taira, Satoshi Bandoh and Kawaguchi join him. He toured with ASKA in 2019 and celebrated his sixtieth birthday that October with a run of concerts across Japan.

In June 2020 he was rushed to hospital with abdominal pain and had emergency surgery. On September 26, 2021, he announced that he was stepping back from performing to concentrate on treatment for stage 4 colorectal cancer, and he passed away on November 8, 2021. His daughter, the drummer SATOKO of the band FUZZY CONTROL, announced his death the next day. The wake drew a line of mourners that stretched toward the station, and ASKA attended the funeral.

Japanese Wikipedia lists among the alumni of his drum school Satoshi Bandoh of T-Square, Senri Kawaguchi, SATOKO and Casiopea's drummer Yoshinori Imai. English Wikipedia's account of Casiopea also says he played with that band for a time after drummer Noriaki Kumagai left in 1996 and before Akira Jimbo returned as a supporting member in 1997.

Suganuma's playing was built on speed and density: rapid single and double strokes, odd meters, trick patterns, and two-bass-drum footwork that he documented in his instructional videos. He named Billy Cobham as his inspiration, which is why he used such large kits. His working vocabulary also reached outside the drum kit. He played the didgeridoo (it appears on four Fragile albums, on Sunset Cruise and on the KKK-CORE record), the tabla and the patica, and on Pai-Patiroma the trumpet, and he was skilled at the Mongolian throat-singing technique known as homii.

His place in jazz is real but not the whole story. The albums he led are catalogued as jazz fusion, as are Fragile, W.I.N.S, Paradox and KKK-CORE, and he taught jazz drumming, appeared at jazz festivals and recorded with Mike Stern and Bob Malach. A large share of his recorded credits, however, are on pop, rock, metal and game-music releases, for artists such as Chage and Aska, Acid Black Cherry, Gackt and AAA. The through-line is the technique: the same hands that drove a stadium pop show played the odd-meter fusion of W.I.N.S and Fragile.