Mari Nakamoto (中本マリ) is a Japanese jazz singer, born on March 26, 1947, in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture. She studied piano and classical ballet from the age of three and joined the Tohoku Children's Chorus at ten. In 1962 she entered the vocal course at the high school attached to Toho Music School, and she began working professionally in a four-woman vocal group, The Scarlet, managed by the Watanabe Productions agency.

In 1970 she turned to jazz and started singing at VIPA ROOM, an upmarket club in Akasaka, Tokyo. The pianist Yasuro Osawa and the guitarist Shoji Yokouchi were her accompanists there, and they are the backbone of her first records. Her debut, Unforgettable! (Three Blind Mice, TBM-21), was recorded on September 12 and 14, 1973, with Osawa, Yokouchi, the bassist Kunimitsu Inaba, the drummer Tetsujiro Obara and Akira Miyazawa on tenor saxophone and flute, and was produced for the label by Takeshi Fujii. She was the third female jazz singer on Three Blind Mice, the label that issued much of the best-known Japanese jazz of the decade. The same year she sang on a promotional LP for the Micro company, Micro Live Session at the Hotel New Otani, with the all-star sextet of the clarinetist Eiji Kitamura.

Little Girl Blue (1974) paired her with Yokouchi's trio and the organist Yuri Tashiro. In 1975 she began recording for Toshiba EMI's Express label as well, first with First, a set of pop and soul material that includes songs associated with Aretha Franklin, and with the single "描いてごらん海の色で" (Egaite goran umi no iro de), which was used in a 1975 Shiseido Aquair television commercial. Just In Time followed, a standards album with a trio led from the piano by Sadayasu Fujii and the bassist Masanaga Harada. Back at Three Blind Mice she cut Mari Nakamoto III at Epicurus Studio in Tokyo on November 25 and 26, 1975, accompanied only by the bassist Isao Suzuki and the guitarist Kazumi Watanabe, with no drummer. It remains the record most often singled out from her early catalogue and was reissued again in 2024. She had already sung "Where Are You Going?" on Suzuki's quartet album Orang-Utan (recorded April 4, 1975, with Kunihiko Sugano on piano), and a live performance with the same quartet from the "5 Days in Jazz" series on May 26, 1975 was issued decades later as Blue Road (2022).

Shigeko & Mari (1976) is a live split LP from "5 Days in Jazz '76" at Ginza Yamaha Hall, with the pianist Shigeko Toya on one side and Nakamoto on the other with the trio of Tsuyoshi Yamamoto. That Old Feeling (Toshiba EMI, recorded in August 1976) puts her in front of an all-star big band arranged by Yokouchi and conducted by Hiroshi Yoshizawa, with Inaba and Harada on bass and Miyazawa among the tenor saxophonists. In 1977 she moved to Victor (JVC) for Nice Feeling, a collection of contemporary pop covers, and Love Touch, while still making records for Three Blind Mice, among them Mari (1977) with Yokouchi's trio and sextet, which features the tenor saxophonist Konosuke Saijo.

1978 was the year she became the country's leading vocalist. Japanese reference sources report that she topped the reader poll of the magazine Swing Journal in the vocal category in 1978 and held the top spot for eight consecutive years, and that she won it again in 1992. Just Fine (Victor's Zen label, ZEN-1003), her first all-standards album for Victor, has Norio Maeda on piano and arrangements, Sadanori Nakamure on guitar, Takeshi Inomata on drums and Saijo on tenor saxophone. That summer she travelled to the Montreux Jazz Festival with Tatsuya Takahashi and his big band Tokyo Union, and the set was released as Montreux The Best '78. Her side of the split LP Mari Vs Anli (Toshiba, September 1978) was shared with the singer Anli Sugano. In 1979 she returned to Montreux with the composer and arranger Bingo Miki and his Inner Galaxy Orchestra, and she is the vocalist on their live album The Eve (1980), on which the pianist Himiko Kikuchi also plays.

Aphrodite (1979), arranged by Miki, won a special prize at the Swing Journal Jazz Disc Awards and is described in Japanese sources as the album that cemented her popularity, and those sources say it is built from songs written for her, including material by Janis Ian and Stevie Wonder. Something Blue (1980) was recorded in London in May 1979 with an American rhythm section: Harold Mabern on acoustic piano, Jamil Nasser on bass and Louis Hayes on drums, with Frank Strozier on alto saxophone and flute, Joe Beck on guitar and Barry Miles on electric piano, and Miki arranging and producing. The ballad set includes "Morgana King and Me" and "My Funny Valentine".

The early 1980s took her toward fusion and adult contemporary. Lady in Love (1981) and Moods of a Lady (1982) were arranged mostly by the American keyboardist Barry Miles; the first also has arrangements by Don Grusin and Gary Herbig, and the second, recorded in the Los Angeles area in July 1982, brings in Ernie Watts, Robben Ford, Abraham Laboriel and Jerry Hey and yielded the single "Zoot Suit Stomp". Grusin arranged TV (1984), a techno-flavoured fusion album. Alongside the records she worked across media: a monologue drama at the Sanbyaku-nin Theatre in 1980, the hosting of the TBS Radio programme Jazz Time from 1981, the stage production Honmoku Meruhen in 1982, and a jazz singer in a 1983 television drama directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. In 1985 she won the first grand prix of the Mizushima Sanae Jazz Vocal Award, now the Japan Jazz Vocal Award.

Memories (1987) was her first album after the birth of her child and went back to standards, with the pianist Jimmy Rowles, the guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves, the bassist John Heard and the drummer Donald Bailey. New Swing Street (1988) sang pop songs, among them Sting's "Englishman in New York", in a jazz setting with the pianist Fumio Karashima. In 1990 she organised the benefit event All Japan Jazz Aid, and Japanese biographies place her that year at the Seoul Jazz Train '90 concerts with the trumpeter Terumasa Hino and the drummer George Kawaguchi, and on a Tokyo bill with the guitarist George Benson. Voice (1991), a set of standards from musicals and films recorded in March and April 1991, won the Japan Vocal Award at the 25th Swing Journal Jazz Disc Awards. Japanese biographies add a 1991 Japan tour with the New York City All Stars and the trio of Don Friedman. In 1991 she also sang on the pianist Masahiko Satoh's Impression of Hikone, which also features the shakuhachi player Hozan Yamamoto.

Her New York recordings of the 1990s were made with American trios. Summertime (1995) has her with the bassist Reggie Workman's trio, with Ronnie Mathews on piano and Charlie Persip on drums, and she toured Japan with the group. What Is Love? (1996) was recorded at Clinton Recording Studios in New York on June 21 and 22, 1996, with the pianist Cedar Walton, the bassist David Williams and the drummer Kenny Washington. That same year she was one of the guest singers on the bassist Hideaki Kanazawa's Bass Perspective, alongside Keiko Lee, the trumpeter Terumasa Hino and the trombonist Shigeharu Mukai. She was a regular on the NHK BS2 programme BS Jazz Kissa from 1996 to 1998, and in 1995 she started a charity concert for victims of the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake.

NADECICO (2003) marked 35 years in music and is a set of duets with leading Japanese players. Morning Star (2012), a duo album with the guitarist Yuji Ota, was recorded to analogue open-reel tape without headphones, and Self Cover (2013) revisited her 1980s songs in the same duo format. Her most recent album, MUSE 1 (2023), re-records original songs from the 1970s and 1980s. She remains active as a live performer, and her official blog announces club and hall dates around Japan.

Nakamoto's records fall into three stretches. The Three Blind Mice and Toshiba years (1973 to 1977) are small-group and big-band standards sung in a warm, slightly husky voice that Japanese catalogue copy describes as sweet and husky. The Victor years from 1977 add contemporary songs, fusion and adult-contemporary arrangements by American players (Barry Miles, Don Grusin), and a taste for pop material treated as jazz: Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly" on Nice Feeling, Sting on New Swing Street, and an entire album of Burt Bacharach songs, In Style (1993), recorded with the group Del Marre. From the 1990s she returns to the American standards repertoire with New York rhythm sections, and from 2012 to small duo settings with a guitar.

She is a jazz singer first. Japanese Wikipedia describes her as a jazz, fusion and popular singer, and a handful of her late-1970s records, Nice Feeling and Love Touch among them, lean toward contemporary pop. Discogs nonetheless files the great majority of her catalogue under Jazz, her career is built on Three Blind Mice, the Swing Journal reader polls and jazz awards, and her festival and touring work has been with jazz musicians throughout.