Makiko Hirabayashi (平林牧子) is a Tokyo-born pianist and composer who has lived in Copenhagen since 1990 and built a career in Danish and European jazz. For more than twenty years she led a piano trio with the bassist Klavs Hovman and the percussionist Marilyn Mazur, recording five albums with it, and in recent years she has widened her work to a saxophone quartet, a duo with a Japanese percussionist and solo concerts on prepared piano. Her own account of her music is that it joins jazz, classical, Far Eastern and Nordic elements.

She was born in Tokyo in 1966. Her official biography says she started piano at four and violin at nine, and that she spent the five years of middle and high school in Hong Kong, which she describes as a cultural melting pot. In 1987 she won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She had gone intending to study composition and film scoring, and the live jazz scene in Boston turned her toward improvisation. In 1990 she moved to Copenhagen, where she has lived since.

Her first recordings in Denmark were as a sideperson, and they were varied. In 1995 she won three prizes at the Europ'Jazz Contest in Brussels with the group Sisters, whose album Elk Dance (Intermusic, 1996) credits her on keyboards. The Morten Kargaard Group's Colour of a Moment (1996), with the trumpeter Flemming Agerskov, has her on piano and keyboards. On January 7 and 8, 1997 she was the pianist when the Brande International Music Workshop Orchestra played the Copenhagen Jazzhouse with Marilyn Mazur and with the trombonist Ray Anderson, which produced two Dacapo albums, A Story of Multiplicity and Bimwo Swing. Around them came keyboard and piano work for Vanja Santos, Uno Mundo, the Klüvers Big Band's Go Global project, the accordionist Lelo Nika and the Danish folk group Morild, where she is also credited on violin.

The trio with Hovman and Mazur is the centre of her catalogue. Her website dates it to 2001, and its first album, Makiko (Enja, 2006), was recorded in October 2005 at Sun Studio in Copenhagen and was her debut as a leader. Mazur, the Copenhagen-based drummer and percussionist who had played with Miles Davis and was for years a member of Jan Garbarek's group, was the trio's other composer; on Meteora she wrote or co-wrote five of the eleven pieces. Hide and Seek (Enja, 2009) followed, and her website lists a 2010 Best Instrumental Album award from Japan's Jazz Critique magazine for it and a Jazz Melody Award for the title track. The title piece later turned up on a Polish audio-magazine disc and "Remember the Rain" on an Enja anniversary compilation, and "My Cherry Tree" from Makiko on two Japanese audiophile compilations from Terasima Records.

She has also led groups of her own. Grey to Blue (Stunt, 2008) was co-led with the flautist Mariane Bitran, with the tenor saxophonist Bob Rockwell, the bassist Erik Olevik and the drummer Morten Lund, and was recorded in December 2007. Binocular (Stunt, 2011) is a duo with Agerskov, with the accordionist Francesco Calì as a guest; it was recorded in December 2010 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo with Jan Erik Kongshaug at the desk, and the duo toured Japan in October 2012. The duo with Rockwell began in 2011 at a charity concert for the victims of the Fukushima tsunami, according to her website, and its album Gong (2016) opens with a Fukushima Suite and ends with Horace Silver's "Peace".

The trio's later records came from Yellowbird, the Enja family's sister label. Surely (recorded in Munich in April 2013) includes "Ode to Okinawa". Where the Sea Breaks (recorded in March 2017) adds Jakob Buchanan on trumpet and flugelhorn for four tracks. Her quartet Weavers, with the saxophonist Fredrik Lundin, the bassist Thommy Andersson and the drummer Bjørn Heebøll, recorded its self-titled debut on June 15 and 16, 2020; it was released by Enja on April 16, 2021, ends on Carla Bley's "Vashkar", and won the jazz release of the year prize at the Danish Music Awards Jazz in December 2021. In 2020 she received an honorary award from DJBFA, the Danish society of jazz, beat and folk authors. The trio's fifth album, Meteora (2023), took its title from the Greek monasteries built on rock pillars; DownBeat listed it among the best albums of 2023, and she was nominated for Jazz Composer of the Year at the 2024 Danish Music Awards. Gifts (Enja, January 2025), Weavers' second album, was written for a 2023 commission from the Handel Festival in Halle, and her website calls it a personal tribute to her mother. It is her tenth studio album.

Alongside her own groups she has been a long-term member of Mazur's bands. She plays keyboards on Marilyn Mazur's Future Song's Live Reflections (Stunt, 2020), a largely live album on which Nils Petter Molvær plays trumpet, and keyboards and piano on Marilyn Mazur's Shamania's Shamania (RareNoise, 2019) and Rerooting (CYH, 2022). She is the pianist on Josefine Cronholm's Ember (Stunt, 2018), Pia Boda's Chasing Pixies (2015) and Peter Danstrup's Sacrified (2016), and she co-wrote two pieces on Wishful (2026), the album by Mazur's Special 4 with the singer Norma Winstone, recorded in February 2025. Mazur passed away on December 12, 2025, after a period of illness; Hirabayashi's website dates the trio's touring from 2001 to 2025. Her biography also names the trumpeter Enrico Rava among the musicians she has worked with.

Her newest project is Osmo, a duo with the percussionist Tomoo Nagai that she says began in the summer of 2024, exploring the piano and handmade percussion instruments. Their album Osmo, eleven pieces running about 42 minutes, was released on October 16, 2026. She also plays solo concerts in which she alters the piano's sound by preparing it with unusual objects.

Hirabayashi writes tunes with clear melodic outlines and then lets the trio take them apart. The records move between songlike themes, brief improvised miniatures (on Meteora several tracks run under two minutes, such as "The Door" and "Meaningful Encounter") and longer, rhythmically driven pieces, and the listening notes for Meteora point to minimalist piano figures that reveal more on repeated hearings. With Mazur's percussion and voice the trio sounds closer to the open, chamber-like end of European jazz than to bebop, an impression helped by recordings made at Rainbow Studio, Oslo and mixed or recorded by Kongshaug, the engineer long associated with that room. She still plays inside the tradition: she has recorded Horace Silver and Carla Bley, and Discogs tags most of her recent albums as contemporary jazz.

Japan appears in her titles and subjects as well as in her biography: "Ode to Okinawa" on Surely, "Mou Ikai" on Where the Sea Breaks, and "Dai Dai" and the Fukushima Suite on Gong. Her Bandcamp notes describe classical piano training from childhood, and she cites Handel, whose music she heard as a child, as the starting point for Gifts. The Nordic side comes from three decades in Copenhagen: Danish and Swedish titles such as "Vintervalse" and "Vad Vinkel", and Scandinavian players in nearly every band she has led. Her work as a sideperson is wider than her own catalogue suggests, covering world-music, folk, vocal and free-improvising settings, but all of her own albums are jazz.