Masami Shinoda (篠田昌已, Shinoda Masami in Japanese order) was a Tokyo-born alto saxophonist who moved through a free-jazz big band, a funk-rock horn section, a street-advertising chindon troupe and a klezmer-flavoured brass trio in a career of fourteen years, and who passed away on December 9, 1992, at the age of 34. (The last character of his given name is 已; the spellings 昌巳 and 昌己 that turn up in print are errors.)

He was born in Tokyo on December 8, 1958, and made his professional debut in 1978 with Seikatsu Kojo Iinkai (生活向上委員会, the Living Improvement Committee), a big band that also doubled as the horn section of the rock band RC Succession. Kazutoki Umezu was in its saxophone section, and so was Hiroaki Katayama. The record that carries Shinoda's name from that period is This Is Music Is This!? (Union Records, 1980), a thirteen-piece date on which he is credited on alto saxophone and flute alongside Umezu, Junji Mori and Katayama, and which includes a nine-minute "Take the 'A' Train."

In 1982 he joined Jagatara, the Tokyo funk-rock band fronted by Edo Akemi, and he is credited on its albums of 1985, 1987 and 1989 before the group ended in 1990 following Edo's death. Around the same time he turned up in some of the most experimental corners of the Tokyo underground: the group A-Musik, Tori Kudo's Maher Shalal Hash Baz (a June 1987 concert with him was issued on DVD in 2008 as 腰くだけの犬), and a duo with the pianist and vocalist Kyoko Kuroda, recorded live at Manda-La2 in Kichijoji on August 30, 1988.

The turn that shaped everything after it came in 1983, when he heard the chindon troupe Hasegawa Sendensha playing in the street in Shimokitazawa and joined them. Chindon are the costumed street bands, with clarinet, saxophone, drums and bell, that advertise shops and pachinko parlours across Japan. A reviewer of the later book about him wrote that this encounter changed his way of playing more than anything else did. In 1988 he formed the Shinoda Masami Unit, which played four concerts, and in 1989 he founded Compostela with Takerou Sekijima on tuba and Kanji Nakao on reeds, trombone and drums, a sax-sax-tuba trio with no chordal instrument.

His first record under his own name, Compostela (Puff Up, 1990), was recorded over five days in May and June 1990 at Manda-La2 in Kichijoji. It is a band record rather than a trio one: Takuya Nishimura on electric bass, Yoshio Kuge on drums, Hiroki Komazawa on pedal steel and acoustic guitar, Kenji Kitamura on piano and organ, and Wataru Okuma on piano, xylophone and clarinet, with Nakao and Sekijima. The repertoire runs from Yiddish tunes ("Freylekhe Yidelekh," "Yiddish Blues") to tangos, marches and his own compositions. The trio's own album, Sign of 1 (Puff Up, 1990), was made that August and September at Space Velio.

He kept playing in the street. Tokyo Chin Don Vol.1 (Puff Up, 1992), a two-disc set produced by Shinoda with his own liner notes, puts a chindon line-up (a second alto saxophonist in Masao Hasegawa, clarinets, taiko and drums) through popular songs and marches, one disc cut in the studio and the other recorded in the street. It is billed as the first chindon album, and according to Japanese Wikipedia many younger chindon players came to the form from jazz and pop backgrounds after its release.

In his final year or so he played a run of concerts that were later released on the Compostela live albums, including Kyoto University's Seibukodo (October 1991), Seoul (June 27, 1992), Hirosaki (September 12, 1992), Manda-La2 in Tokyo (October 7, 1992) and Kamakura (November 10, 1992). On October 23, 1992, at R's Art Court in Tokyo, he sat in as a guest with the avant-rock group Cassiber (Chris Cutler, Heiner Goebbels and Christoph Anders). Cutler later wrote that it was Shinoda's last performance and that he died very shortly after the band left Japan. Shinoda passed away on December 9, 1992. The label that issued his posthumous recordings, Off Note, gives the same date and his age as 34.

The recordings kept arriving. Aruku Hito (Off Note, 1995) and Wadachi (Tzadik, 1997, with John Zorn as executive producer) collected Compostela concerts from 1991 and 1992; Duo (Off Note, 1996), made with the bassist Nishimura at a department-store opening in Maebashi on September 17, 1987, appeared after his death; and the Cassiber concert came out in 1998 as half of Live In Tokyo, the second disc being a remix of the same tapes by Otomo Yoshihide and Ground Zero. The clarinettist Wataru Okuma, whom Shinoda influenced, edited the book 我方他方 サックス吹き・篠田昌已読本 (Kyowakoku, 2022), which was reviewed in the Mainichi Shimbun on April 29, 2023. In October 2024 Otomo Yoshihide's Special Big Band played Shinoda's "Shinoshin 3/4" at Cafe OTO in London, and his Puff Up albums have begun returning on vinyl.

The first thing the sources say about his sound is the instrument. Shinoda played a Buffet Crampon alto saxophone, a French make that was an unusual choice among jazz players. The Mainichi reviewer of Okuma's book describes a young man who blew hot in punk rock and free jazz and later arrived at a tone "like wind blowing," and Shinoda himself said in a 1991 interview that he wanted music that was neither drowned out by other sounds nor drowned them out.

His jazz identity is real but is one thread among several. Wikipedia and Wikidata file him as a jazz saxophonist, the Compostela albums are catalogued as avant-garde jazz, and his sideman work with Seikatsu Kojo Iinkai sits inside the Japanese free-jazz big-band tradition. The same career also includes funk and rock horn writing with Jagatara, street music with chindon troupes, Yiddish and Eastern European melodies, and experimental underground groups, so those who come to him for jazz should expect it filtered through folk, brass-band and marching music. A review of Wadachi in The Free Jazz Collective's Tzadik survey describes a blend of Japanese folk, klezmer, Eastern European dance music, 1930s trad jazz, protest ballads and avant-garde ideas.