Minoru Muraoka (村岡実, Muraoka Minoru in Japanese order) was a shakuhachi player who spent most of his career making the bamboo flute sound popular, and a smaller, much-reissued part of it making the flute sound like jazz. He passed away on 2 January 2014, aged 90.

Sources disagree on when and where he was born. English Wikipedia gives 1923 and Yamada in Iwate Prefecture. Japanese Wikipedia, Wikidata and Discogs give 1924 and Miyazaki Prefecture, with Discogs and Wikidata naming Miyakonojo. His record company, Nippon Columbia, says he came from the town of Yamada in Kitamorokata District, Miyazaki, a district that has since become part of Miyakonojo, and it gives no birth year but says he died at 90, which fits 1923 (or the first days of 1924). A 2012 NPR piece by the collector Egon also says 1923. This profile therefore gives both years and places him in Miyazaki.

He learned folk-song shakuhachi from Kikuchi Tansui and classical playing in the Tozan school, and worked in the editorial department of the music publisher Zen-On. In 1959 he left the Tozan school to concentrate on improving the instrument and modernising its technique. In 1962 he formed a trio with Katsuya Yokoyama and Kohachiro Miyata, and its concerts fed into the founding of the contemporary-music ensemble Nihon Ongaku Shudan (known in English as Pro Musica Nipponia) in 1964. Nippon Columbia credits him with a central part in that founding. He left it after the first concert, according to Japanese Wikipedia before the second one in 1965, because he wanted to take the shakuhachi to a mass audience, and he went freelance into the record business.

That meant accompanying singers. Nippon Columbia says he first drew attention playing on hit songs such as Hibari Misora's "Yawara", "Oyaji no Umi" and "Yosaku", and Japanese Wikipedia says the Misora connection led to work behind Saburo Kitajima and Hideo Murata. Discogs shows how large that side of his career was: it lists 322 entries under his name, and most are enka, kayokyoku, folk-song, military-song and pop-cover records on shakuhachi, many of them in the series of LPs and singles Columbia, Teichiku, Victor, Toshiba and Crown put out through the late 1960s and 1970s. Nippon Columbia counts more than 150 LPs and CDs featuring the instrument.

Jazz is the thread within that catalogue. In 1967 Columbia issued Harlem Nocturne, arranged by Kiyoshi Yamaya, a programme of jazz and film standards ("Take Five", "Autumn Leaves", "Summertime", "Meditation") that the label's own profile calls the first popular-jazz LP in the shakuhachi world and says was well received in New York. This Is Modern Shakuhachi Vol. 2 followed in 1968 with Yamaya's All Stars; Discogs credits Akira Ishikawa on drums, Akira Miyazawa and Jiro Inagaki on flutes and Hiromasa Suzuki on piano for a set that runs from "Caravan" and "The In Crowd" to "Mas Que Nada". In 1968 he also cut a Denon single, "Muraiki" and "Oiwake", with a group billed as the New Jazz Players, with George Otsuka credited on drums for "Muraiki" and Masahiko Togashi on drums and arrangement for "Oiwake". In 1969 Shakuhachi Blue Light Yokohama (Denon), a record of Japanese pop hits, credits Ishikawa on drums and Masahiko Satoh on piano.

The turn came in 1970. Between 1970 and 1971 Columbia released four Shakuhachi Rock LPs with a group called The Life Theaters, each built on one kind of Japanese song: ninkyo (chivalry) film themes, enka, 1960s pop and sailors' songs. Discogs files them under jazz-rock and jazz-funk, and the pop volume carries the label's Takt Jazz Series logo. Egon, writing for NPR, called the set uneven. On 7 April 1970 he recorded a live concert dedicated to Mount Osore, the volcanic area in northern Japan that Japanese tradition treats as an entrance to the underworld. That album, Osorezan, came out on Daiei Records; the credits on its 1978 reissue name the drummer Akira Ishikawa, the guitarists Ryo Kawasaki and Sadanori Nakamure, and his new group New Dimension Group. It includes "Take Five", the long "Osorezan" itself, and "Bamboo Rock", based on a traditional shakuhachi piece. Yupiteru reissued it, without "Take Five", as Osorezan Suite in 1978.

Bamboo, released the same year on United Artists' New Emotional Work Series, is the record that outlasted the others. Of its nine tracks, most are folk songs and pop or jazz covers: "Take Five", "And I Love Her", "The House of the Rising Sun", "Do You Know the Way to San Jose", "Scarborough Fair" and the Yamagata boat song "Mogamigawa Funauta". The two originals are "The Positive and the Negative" (credited on Discogs to the arranger Takashi Ikeda, about nine and a half minutes on streaming services) and the soul-jazz piece "Soul Bamboo" (credited to Kozaburo Yamaki, played with a group called The New Emotions). On side A the New Dimension Group's koto, biwa, taiko and tsuzumi sit alongside a bass player. Egon noted that United Artists also issued "The Positive and the Negative" as a 7-inch single and read that as the label's own sign that it was Muraoka's masterwork. Mr Bongo reissued Bamboo in 2019, and the label followed it with a 7-inch (listed on Discogs as 2022) pairing a Surprise Chef cover with an edit of Muraoka's original. Discogs also lists him on later compilations that file his work as jazz, among them the Japan volume of the Spiritual Jazz series (2018) and Japanese Jazz Spectacle Vol. I (2022).

New Dimension Group, formed in 1970, became his main vehicle. Nippon Columbia says it released 11 LPs; they include Naruto (King, 1972), the double LP Heike Monogatari (Columbia, 1972, with the poetry chanter 鈴木鶯風), Jigen (MCA, 1972), Yuri Furi Suri (Victor, 1972), So (Victor, 1973), Recital (Victor, 1973), Lupus (Victor, 1974) and the live Yomigaeru Wagakki no Hibiki (King, recorded at Shibuya Public Hall on 29 July 1975). Jigen is where Discogs uses its free-jazz and free-improvisation tags, and it contains a studio version of "Osorezan". So, recorded on 13, 14 and 15 August 1973, runs to a 17-minute closing piece, "Hakyou". He also played on other musicians' jazz and fusion sessions: Kokezaru Suite (1971), led by the composer and arranger Keitaro Miho, with Satoh, Ryo Kawasaki, Takeshi Inomata, Ishikawa and Takeru Muraoka in the band; Ishikawa's Power Rock With Drums (1971), with Hiromasa Suzuki arranging and Kunimitsu Inaba on bass; and the 1972 Columbia record 幻想組曲 日本 led by the arranger Nozomi Aoki, with Kiyoshi Sugimoto on guitar. In 1978 King issued Memories of Chi Yo under the billing Minoru Muraoka and His Group with Joe, a fusion album with Chikara Ueda on piano and synthesizer. Takeru Muraoka, the saxophonist, is a different musician with the same surname.

The American connection came in 1974. Herbie Mann recorded Gagaku & Beyond at Mori Studio in Tokyo that year, with Tony Levin on bass, Steve Gadd on drums, Sam Brown on guitar and Pat Rebillot on keyboards, Muraoka and the players of his New Dimension Group, and a group of Buddhist chanters. Atlantic's Finnadar label did not release it until 1976. Discogs also credits Muraoka on shakuhachi on the Japanese Mann album Pop Impression (Atlantic, 1974) and on "The Sound of Windwood" on Surprises (1976). Nippon Columbia adds that from 1975 to 1978 he recorded with Leon Russell (Discogs credits him on "Can't Get Over Losing You" on Will O' The Wisp, 1975), appeared on stage with Odetta, and played on NHK behind Helen Merrill. In 1979 he performed with Toshi Ichiyanagi at an international design conference in Aspen, and in 1981 he played jazz clubs in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

He also taught, and the work is on record: the five-volume Modern Shakuhachi Playing Technique series (Toshiba and Columbia) includes a volume called "Popular Jazz", and an LP called Modern Shakuhachi Method (Columbia, 1972) points the same way. The last new own-name records listed for him on Discogs date from the early 1980s.

He died at 90 of multiple organ failure. The Nikkei reported his death on 13 February 2014, after a funeral attended by close family only; he had been living in Miyazaki City. The shakuhachi world lost Hozan Yamamoto, the other great jazz-minded player of his generation, on 10 February 2014, five weeks after Muraoka.

Muraoka's catalogue is a borderline case for a jazz site, and it is treated as one here. Discogs lists 127 entries with Muraoka or one of his groups as lead artist and tags 82 of them Jazz, but that tag is loose: judging by the titles, most of the entries are programmes of enka, kayokyoku, military songs, folk songs and pop covers played on shakuhachi, and Discogs itself describes him as a popular shakuhachi player. Japanese Wikipedia likewise opens by describing him as a player of enka and popular music. The case for his place in a jazz catalogue is the stretch from Harlem Nocturne in 1967 to the New Dimension Group's So and Recital in 1973 and the Herbie Mann date of 1974. Wikidata calls him a Japanese jazz musician, Nippon Columbia names jazz as one of the three fields (kayokyoku, popular music and jazz) he moved into when he went freelance, and he was a sideman on several Tokyo jazz sessions with players who are profiled elsewhere on this site. Egon, who championed his records, described the music as something filed under jazz mostly for want of a better shelf.

The sound moves a long way inside that window. Harlem Nocturne and Vol. 2 are standards with an arranger's band behind a shakuhachi lead. Bamboo puts koto, biwa and Japanese drums over a bass line and a funk-tinged kit, and in the Spectrum Culture review of the reissue the "Take Five" reworking is said to use mostly Japanese instruments, with the percussionists breaking out of the original's 5/4 for a stretch. Osorezan, Jigen and So go further, mixing folk material, rock instrumentation and long improvised or semi-composed forms; Discogs tags So as psychedelic jazz-rock and min'yo and Recital as avant-garde jazz and psychedelic rock. Nippon Columbia dates his modernising work to 1959, when he left the Tozan school to rework the instrument and its technique, and the teaching records bear that out.

Egon calls the Herbie Mann date the last of his great 1970s experiments, an East-West exchange between the two flute players with Rebillot's piano in the middle. The Takt Jazz Series logo on one of the Shakuhachi Rock sleeves, the New Emotional Work Series label on Bamboo and the Free Jazz tag on Jigen are the clearest signs that the Japanese record industry itself sold part of this work as jazz.