Makoto Terashita (寺下誠) is a Japanese jazz pianist and composer, born on April 21, 1951 in Hakodate, on the southern tip of Hokkaido. Three records carry his name as leader in the standard accounts: Great Harvest (1978), Topology (1984, with the American tenor saxophonist Harold Land) and the trio album Ihatov (1997). A fourth, the live quartet CD Real Jazz Moments (2010), is also billed to him. He is the kind of musician the reissue market found before any biographer did, and the details of his early life are thin. A retailer's note from the Japanese record shop Strada Records says he played piano in about sixteen groups at his peak, among them those of Hidehiko Matsumoto, Ryojiro Furusawa and Takao Uematsu, and that in 1977 he moved to the United States to keep studying and playing sessions.

The record that follows from that move is Great Harvest. It was recorded in New York and issued in Japan by Union Records (GU-5014) in 1978, with the guitarist Yoshiaki Masuo, who had himself moved to New York in 1971, credited as producer as well as sideman. Terashita led a quartet around Bob Berg on tenor saxophone, with Errol Walters on bass and Jo Jones Jr. on drums, and Masaaki Onuki credited as music director. Three of the five tracks are his own: "Samoa," the title piece "Dai Hosaku (Great Harvest)" at 11:27, and the 12:38 closer to side two, "Tell Me an Old Story, Grand Papa." The other two are Duke Ellington's "Take the Coltrane" and Thelonious Monk's "Ruby, My Dear." The album went back into print in 2014 as a mini-LP CD on Think! Records, and again in 2019 on vinyl from Union and from the European reissue label Le Très Jazz Club, while "Dai Hosaku" was chosen for the second disc of BBE's J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan 1969-1983 (Volume 2) that same year.

By 1980 he was on Japanese records again. Sunburst (Victor, SJX-30026, released October 31, 1980) is the self-titled album of a Tokyo fusion band whose members were the saxophonist Toshiyuki Honda, the guitarist Kazumi Watanabe, the guitarist Yuji Karaki, the bassist Yukio Kodaira, the drummer Keiji Kishida and two keyboardists, Kazushi Makiguchi and Terashita. The trumpeter Shunzo Ohno guests on "Gentle Talk." The programme runs from Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" to the Isley Brothers' "Don't Say Goodnight," and all seven band members share the liner notes.

Topology (Aketa's Disk, AD-16) is the record that made his name abroad. Discogs gives the session date as June 11, 1984, while BBE's reissue copy dates the original release to 1983. He wrote five of its six tracks and played with Land, then in his fifties, with Yasushi Yoneki on bass, Mike Reznikoff on drums and Takayuki Koizumi on percussion. Only 500 copies were pressed. "Dragon Dance," which opens with an extended solo piano introduction, opened BBE's J Jazz Volume 2 in 2019, the same year BBE reissued the full album as the fourth title in its J Jazz Masterclass Series, with sleeve notes by Tony Higgins drawing on interviews with Terashita and Shoji Aketagawa, whose label Aketa's Disk was. The track was anthologised again on a 2004 Tokyorican Soul compilation, BBE's 2019 staff selection and a 2021 Japanese-jazz sampler, and "Takeuma" followed on BBE's Dekantā compilation in 2021 and its 2024 J Jazz box set.

Between those albums he turns up as a sideman. In May 1987 he played piano in Steve Grossman's quartet at The Someday in Tokyo, with Yoshio Suzuki on bass and Masahiro Yoshida on drums; the set came out as "Live" At The Someday Volume 1 in 1990. In 1994 he played piano and wrote the arrangements for the singer Eri Kayama's Lady For Lady, with the drummer Jimmie Smith. For Ihatov, recorded on August 11, 1996, he fronted a trio with the bassist Koji Yamashita and the drummer Masahiro Tajika. Tajika is also on Real Jazz Moments, a live recording from the Karuizawa 1st Call Club, with Ryuichi Takase on trumpet and Moriyoshi Shibuya on bass, which What'sNew Records issued in 2010 and which is the most recent release credited to him on Discogs.

Terashita writes in the modal and post-bop vocabulary of the American small group, with a lean toward the spiritual end of it. Discogs files Topology under Modal, Hard Bop and Spiritual Jazz, and its opening piece, "Dragon Dance," begins with a long solo-piano introduction before the rest of the group enters. Great Harvest is the more outgoing record. A retailer's note says "Samoa" was written with the image of a giraffe running across a prairie, the title piece was inspired by McCoy Tyner, and "Tell Me an Old Story, Grand Papa" sets an African-style six-beat pulse against a Korean melody, on a record that also includes a reading of Ellington's "Take the Coltrane."

The same hands also work in fusion. On Sunburst he shares the keyboard chair in a band that plays Hancock and the Isley Brothers with equal ease, and Discogs tags that album Fusion and Jazz-Funk. On the later trio and quartet records the writing recedes and the standards return, among them "Have You Met Miss Jones?" on Ihatov and "Dolphin Dance," "Here's That Rainy Day" and "Up Jumped Spring" on Real Jazz Moments.