Masami Nakagawa (中川昌三) is a Tokyo-born flautist who has worked on two tracks at once for more than fifty years: as a jazz player, and as a classical and contemporary-music soloist. The two careers carry two spellings of the same name. In jazz, Brazilian music and pop he writes his given name 昌三; in classical and contemporary music he writes it 昌巳. Both are read Masami. His own official profile is headed 中川昌三（昌巳）, Discogs keeps a single page for him that lists both spellings as name variations and says outright that the choice depends on the genre, and MusicBrainz splits the same man into two entries, one for each spelling, each noting that the other is for the other kind of music. The classical flautist 中川昌巳 is not a namesake. He is the same musician, and that second career is the competing identity weighed under Style & Influences.

He was born in Tokyo in 1947 and began flute lessons with Ririko Hayashi while still in junior high school. He went through the music high school attached to Tokyo University of the Arts, entered the university in 1965 and graduated in 1969, and went on to study with Takeshi Koizumi, Ryu Noguchi, Jean-Pierre Rampal and András Adorján. By his own account he was drawn to jazz as a student. After graduation he worked as an orchestral player by day and went to jazz clubs and sessions at night, sometimes carrying a saxophone rather than a flute. His profile names the Gil Evans Orchestra as the first band he joined, and he says he also studied the essence of jazz with Sadao Watanabe and Masahiko Satoh.

The earliest recording credit on Discogs is a Gil Evans session. On July 5, 1972, at Victor Studio in Tokyo, Masabumi Kikuchi recorded an album for Philips with Gil Evans arranging, conducting and playing piano. Evans brought Billy Harper on tenor saxophone, flute and chimes and Hannibal Marvin Peterson on trumpet and flugelhorn, and the Japanese players included Kohsuke Mine on saxophones, Masayuki Takayanagi and Sadanori Nakamure on electric guitars, Yoshio Suzuki on bass and Masahiko Togashi on drums. Nakagawa is credited on piccolo, alto and bass flutes, in a three-flute section with Takashi Asahi and Yukio Eto.

The percussionist Togashi became the centre of his jazz life in the middle of the decade. In his own telling, Togashi invited him to play alto saxophone in free jazz and he stayed about four years. The records bear that out. He is a flautist on Togashi's Spiritual Nature (East Wind, recorded live on April 9, 1975, with Sadao Watanabe, Satoh and Sabu Toyozumi); a woodwind player on Guild for Human Music (Denon, recorded in May 1976) and its companion Essence (recorded that November, where he plays flute, alto saxophone and soprano saxophone); and a member of the 1977 trio and quartet records Motion and Sketch. He also plays on pianist Takashi Kako's Legend of the Sea - Myself, recorded live at the ABC Hall in Tokyo on January 10, 1977, and he is the soprano saxophonist on Togashi's "Alternate" at the Denen Colosseum festival on July 24, 1977, issued as Jazz of Japan: Live Under the Sky '77. The association ran on: he is on Togashi's 1980 Al-Alaph, recorded live at Yubin Chokin Hall in Tokyo on April 30, 1980 with Satoh conducting, and on Follow the Dream in 1985.

One 1976 session put his name on a sleeve alongside two others. For Nayutagenjo (Columbia, recorded June 22 and 26 to 28, 1976), Satoh composed and arranged a large-scale work for Toshiyuki Miyama and the New Herd, and the record is billed to Satoh, Nakagawa and Toyozumi together with the orchestra. He plays alto saxophone and flute on it; the album has five pieces, the longest running 15 minutes 27 seconds. Nine months later, on March 17, 1977, he and the American percussionist Warren Smith cut Kaiko / Saiun for RCA at Victor Studio as a direct-to-disc recording: two side-long pieces of flute, piccolo, alto flute and bass flute set against drums, timpani and marimba.

The contemporary-music side of his career took shape in the same months. On January 31, 1977 he recorded Teruyuki Noda's Eclogue for flute and percussion with Sumire Yoshihara at Iruma Public Hall, a live direct-to-disc release on RCA coupled with Stockhausen's Zyklus. According to his profile he took second prize at the 1977 Pan Music Festival's international contemporary-music competition, and the same year formed the Ensemble Vent d'Orient (アンサンブル・ヴァン・ドリアン) with Yoshihara and others, a group that won the Kenzo Nakajima Prize. In 1978 he gave the Japanese premiere of Isang Yun's flute concerto. Later recitals and festival appearances took him to France, Mexico, the United States, Sweden, Korea and elsewhere.

Wanting to learn standards as well, he then spent five years in the pianist Hideo Ichikawa's trio, by his own account a member who had talked his way in, and he released his first jazz-flute album as a leader at about forty, which he describes as very late. Those albums came in a different register. Prelude for Autumn (JVC, 1986) was recorded at JVC Aoyama Studios in Tokyo in April 1986 with Satoh on keyboards and arrangements, Ikuo Sakurai on bass and Hideo Yamaki on drums, with Togashi sitting in on drums for two tracks. It set classical repertoire as jazz pieces, among them a Symphony No. 40 movement, a prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier and a piece from Scenes from Childhood, a recipe he and Satoh kept for the next decade: Touch of Spring (1988, recorded November and December 1987, and used in a Japan Tobacco television commercial in which he also appeared), Winter Moments (1989), and Summer Sketch (1989), which his profile says was recorded in Los Angeles and which brings Frank Gambale on guitar, Jimmy Johnson on electric bass, Carlos Vega on drums and Paulinho Da Costa on percussion alongside Satoh. In New York on September 7 to 9, 1991, at Clinton Recording Studios, he recorded something different, a straight jazz quartet date with Richie Beirach on piano and arrangements, George Mraz on bass and Lewis Nash on drums, taped direct to two-track analog. It came out in Japan as Poesy (JVC, 1992), and a JVC XRCD edition followed in the United States in 1996. Four Seasons (JVC, 1996), a compilation drawn from the classical-themes albums, reached American listeners the same year; a Japan Foundation page says it was well received in the United States.

Alongside the albums he built a large studio career. His profile says he has played the flute on Yuji Ohno's Lupin III music from the beginning, and Discogs credits him on Ohno's score for The Inugami Clan (1976) and on Lupin and other Ohno albums through to 2023. He recorded with the pop and city-pop singers of the late 1970s and 1980s, among them Taeko Onuki, Minako Yoshida, Yumi Matsutoya (Yuming), Tatsuro Yamashita and Mariya Takeuchi, and with jazz-leaning leaders such as Kimiko Itoh, Himiko Kikuchi, Kei Marimura, Fumio Karashima, Hiroko Kokubu and Kazumi Watanabe.

After 2002 he turned to Brazilian music and formed Fonte with the guitarist Kazuhiko Obata and the percussionist Gennoshin Yasui. The trio recorded Live at Corcovado (Saidera Records, 2005), and his profile lists later albums Conforto, Enerugia and Mikazuki (2020). Fonte played in India in March 2016, with a short set in New Delhi on March 18 and a main concert on March 19, a jazz evening organised by the Japan Foundation there. Other projects listed on his profile include a one-man multitracked flute orchestra record, Pavane (2002), and a duo album with the singer and pianist Mami Ishizuka, My Funny Valentine (2007). In December 2021 a free-jazz record by the Sabu Toyozumi Unit, Cosmos Has Spirit / Phase One, credited him on flute and alto saxophone alongside Kazutoki Umezu and Hiroaki Katayama.

He is still performing. In 2026 he played a duo with the pianist Hakuei Kim at Body & Soul in Shibuya on July 16, a quartet date in Yurigaoka on August 23, a Fonte concert at Kichijoji Strings on September 27 with Mami Ishizuka as guest, and a quartet night with Kazuhiko Obata at Our Delight in Warabi on October 10. He has taught as a lecturer at Tokyo University of the Arts and its attached music high school, at Tokyo Junshin Women's Junior College and at Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music, and held a special-appointment professorship at Toho College of Music.

Nakagawa is a flautist first, with the 1970s detour onto alto and soprano saxophone, and the two sound worlds feed each other. The free-jazz records with Togashi and with Warren Smith use the flute family (piccolo, alto and bass flutes) as a breath-and-texture instrument as much as a melodic one. The albums under his own name do the opposite: warm, lyrical, closely arranged, with the flute carrying a tune over a working piano trio. Satoh is the constant behind most of them, as arranger and pianist, and the repertoire borrows from the concert hall, which is why the Third Stream and Crossover Jazz tags fit. Poesy is the exception, a Richie Beirach-arranged standards date (including "All the Things You Are" and "Round Midnight") that places him in the post-bop mainstream with Mraz and Nash.

The question of how primarily jazz he is deserves a plain answer. In his favour: his own profile says he threw himself into the jazz world as a student and lists the Gil Evans Orchestra first; Discogs files eight of the ten releases it credits to him as leader or co-leader under jazz, with only two (the Zyklus / Eclogue coupling and Flute Music Today, Camerata, 1990) classified as contemporary classical; he has an unbroken jazz sideman record with Togashi, Kikuchi and Gil Evans, Kazumi Watanabe and Toyozumi, and he leads a jazz trio, Fonte. Against: he holds a second, parallel career as a classical and contemporary soloist (the 1977 Pan Music prize, recordings for Camerata Tokyo, orchestral engagements with Japanese symphony orchestras), a large share of his roughly 140 other credits are Lupin III scores, pop and city-pop sessions and contemporary-classical recordings, and several of his own jazz albums are built from classical themes. He sits at the line where jazz and classical flute meet, closer to jazz in what he records and in how he describes his own start.