Makoto Ozone grew up in Kobe playing organ before he could read. He started at age two, was improvising well enough to appear on Japanese television alongside his pianist father by seven, and switched to piano at twelve after hearing Oscar Peterson's recordings. He enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1980, where vibraphonist Gary Burton noticed him and pulled him into his working band. Three years later, fresh out of Berklee, Ozone played a solo recital at Carnegie Hall and became the first Japanese musician signed exclusively to CBS. His 1984 debut album, Ozone, was produced by Burton himself, with Eddie Gomez on bass, and released worldwide.

The Burton partnership never really closed. Face To Face followed in 1995, then Virtuosi in 2002, a duo record crossing jazz and classical repertoire that earned Ozone a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Crossover Album the following year. They cut Time Thread for Verve a decade after that, in 2013. Nearly thirty years after a Berklee student got noticed by his teacher, the two were still recording as equals.

That classical side runs well beyond one Grammy-nominated duo record. Ozone released his first classical-crossover album, Road To Chopin, in 2009, marking the 200th anniversary of Chopin's birth; the Chopin Institute certified the recording, which led to a Frederic Chopin Passport award in 2010. He has since recorded Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra (Jeunehomme, 2015) and Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf (2019), and performs regularly with orchestras including the LA Philharmonic, on top of an unbroken jazz touring calendar.

The jazz side has its own institution: No Name Horses, the fifteen-piece big band Ozone formed in Japan in 2005. Twenty years later, in 2025, the band dropped "featuring" from its billing to become simply Makoto Ozone No Name Horses, brought in three new members (trumpeter Shutaro Matsui, tenor saxophonist Yu Riku, bassist Shinpei Ogawa), and released its first new studio album in five years, Day 1. A second album, For Someone, came out of sessions at Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg, Germany, following a spring 2025 European tour, and features Polish vocalist Anna Maria Jopek, her first appearance on an Ozone project in fifteen years. Both albums anchor a 20th Anniversary Tour that carried the band across Japan and Europe through 2025 and into 2026.

Alongside a solo catalog of more than fifty leader albums and a 2021 duo record with Chick Corea (Resonance, recorded live across three Japanese concert halls), Ozone has built a second act as a mentor and institution-builder. Since 2010 he has been visiting professor of jazz at Kunitachi College of Music, where his students have included pianist Haruka Yabuno, whose own path from Kunitachi to a 2010 Berklee scholarship (on Ozone's recommendation) is already told on this project. In 2022 he launched "From Ozone till Dawn," a program built to give emerging musicians stage time and mentorship, and in 2023 that work produced a working trio of its own, TRiNFiNiTY, whose self-titled debut album came out in 2024. His honors include a 2003 honorary doctorate from Berklee, the 2014 Minister's Prize for Arts Encouragement, and the 2018 Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon, one of Japan's national honors.

One of Ozone's newer partnerships runs outside Japan entirely. In February 2023, at Blue Note Tokyo, he and Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen debuted the "Amity Duet," a two-man set built on almost no rehearsal and a shared musical vocabulary neither had tested together before. The two kept playing it through 2023 and 2024, including a stop at Blue Note New York, an unplanned first meeting turned into a touring project.

Ozone's own style draws first from Oscar Peterson, the pianist whose records pulled him from organ to piano at twelve, and from a career-defining apprenticeship under Gary Burton, whose vibraphone-and-piano duo format Ozone has returned to across four decades and three different labels (CBS/Sony, GRP, Concord, Verve). His playing sits comfortably in both a straight-ahead jazz idiom and a classical one, arranging and orchestrating full concerto repertoire (Mozart, and jazz-orchestra treatments more broadly) with the same facility he brings to big-band swing writing for No Name Horses. That range, moving between a fifteen-piece jazz big band and solo/duo classical crossover work in the same working year, is the throughline of his catalog rather than an occasional detour.