Mitsuaki Kanno (菅野光亮, Kanno Mitsuaki in Japanese order) is best known for one piece of film music: "Shukumei" (Destiny), the suite for piano and orchestra that he wrote and played for Yoshitaro Nomura's 1974 film Castle of Sand (Suna no Utsuwa). That is not jazz fame, and a profile on a jazz site should say so plainly. Kanno was also a working jazz pianist for the whole of his short career. He led or co-led five jazz records between 1973 and 1981, played on and arranged for other people's sessions, and was mourned in the jazz press and by the jazz players who recorded a memorial concert for him after he passed away in 1983, at 44.

He was born on 10 July 1939 in Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture. He studied at the high school attached to the Kunitachi College of Music and then in the composition department of the Tokyo University of the Arts under Yoshio Hasegawa. In 1966, still a student, his String Quartet No. 3, Op. 24 took third place in the chamber-music division of the 35th Japan Music Competition.

After graduating he worked chiefly as a jazz pianist. His first steady touring job was with the Royal Knights (ロイヤルナイツ), a Japanese male vocal quartet. He went with them on their first Soviet tour, from December 1966 to January 1967, and on the long run of Eastern European and Soviet dates from late May to September 1968 as the pianist of the Kanno Mitsuaki Quintet, a tour that was extended with extra concerts and brought the group home later than planned. Two Soviet Melodiya discs of the quartet, from 1967 and 1968, credit an instrumental ensemble under his direction.

His own first record as a leader was recorded on 8 December 1970 and released in 1973 by RCA. Shisendo no Aki is credited to Mitsuaki Kanno and Group (菅野光亮九重奏団, a nonet) and holds four long pieces, all composed and arranged by him: "Busho", "Kumo no Ito", "Jakko" and the title track. The band is a flute and shinobue player (Yasutoshi Inamori), saxophones (Osamu Oyama on soprano and tenor, Hiroyuki Yamakawa on tenor), a trumpeter and flugelhorn player (Tomoya Haneo), guitar (Yasushi Mitsui), cello and bass (Masanobu Asakura), bass (Shizuo Hashimoto) and drums and percussion (Junichi Mitobe). In 2018 the London label Jazzman chose "Kumo no Ito" for Spiritual Jazz 8: Japan, Part One, a compilation of modal, esoteric and progressive Japanese jazz from 1961 to 1983. In 1973 Kanno also wrote a piece for traditional instruments, "Wa" (倭), for the shakuhachi player Hozan Yamamoto's album Kankyu (RCA Red Seal, 1973); the setting is shakuhachi, 17-string koto and percussion, with Tadao Sawai on koto.

Castle of Sand came out on 19 October 1974 from Shochiku, with Yasushi Akutagawa as music director. In the film's story the suite "Shukumei" is the work of the pianist-composer at its centre. Kanno wrote it and played it himself, with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hiroshi Kumagai, and Polydor released the suite as an LP the same year. It earned the music prize at the 29th Mainichi Film Concours (credited jointly to Akutagawa and Kanno) and, according to Japanese Wikipedia, the Soviet Composers' Union prize at the Moscow Film Festival. The pianist Keisuke Toyama, who performed the suite with the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra in 2014, has said he was told that Kanno wrote it with Rachmaninoff strongly in mind. Shochiku Records marked the film's 40th anniversary the same year with a full CD of its music, including five piano sketches of "Shukumei" and unedited original takes.

The score made him a film and television composer. He scored Kumokiri Nizaemon (1978), Toei's Makai Tensho (Samurai Reincarnation, 1981), Kiryuin Hanako no Shogai (1982) and Shochiku's Amagi-goe (1983), along with Fuji TV's Daikuko (大空港, 1978 to 1980) and a long run of mystery dramas for TV Asahi. The Makai Tensho soundtrack, reissued on CD in 2020, is billed to him and Hozan Yamamoto. His concert music continued alongside: a viola sonata (1977), String Quartet No. 6 (1978), three movements for cello and piano (1979), A Promise of the Sea for viola and cello (1980) and a violin sonata (1982).

The jazz side of the late 1970s is where his own playing is best documented. He played piano on the singer Takako Ueno's RCA album Good Morning Heartache (1977) and arranged the strings for the singer Yoshiko Kimura's Los Angeles session Memories (RCA, 1978), billed Yoshiko Kimura with the saxophonist Gary Foster, with Clare Fischer on piano, Jim Hughart on bass, John Perett on drums and Dave Koonse on guitar. On 8 June 1978 he recorded When the World Was Young for RCA at Media Studio No. 1 in Tokyo, with the bassist Isoo Fukui and the drummer Michio Noguchi (野口迪生). It is his one record in an unadorned piano-trio format: Jobim's "No More Blues" played as a samba, standards such as "Sweet and Lovely", "I Wish You Love" and "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning", and two Kanno originals, including "Teardrops of the Angel".

On 6 and 7 February 1979, at the Iruma City Auditorium, the same trio recorded A Beautiful Friendship with Gary Foster on alto and soprano saxophone, issued by Insights as Gary Foster with the Mitsuaki Kanno Trio; the bassist this time was Koji Toyama. In 1979 he also wrote the liner notes for the pianist Shigeaki Hoshi's I Remember "Frankie". His last two jazz albums came in 1981. A Song of Don Quixote (Warner, SM-12005) has music and arrangements by Kanno in eleven movements and is billed with Toshio Mori & Blue Coats and Tatsuya Koguma. A La Fin d'Hiver (冬の終わりに, Atlantic, M-12007A) is a trio record with the bassist Nobuyuki Aoshima and the drummer Akira Matsuo, with the alto saxophonist Hideyuki Kikuchi guesting on four tracks. It pairs standards by Jerry Bock, Gilbert Bécaud, Isham Jones and Django Reinhardt with three Kanno originals and tunes by Kikuchi and the guest pianist Hajime Ohno.

Mitsuaki Kanno passed away on 15 August 1983. The October 1983 issue of the magazine Swing Journal reported his death in its Jazz Express column, and Japanese Wikipedia, citing that report, gives the cause as a ruptured esophageal varix. On 26 and 27 June 1984 a group of jazz players recorded a memorial concert, released by Ing Record as 翳 菅野光亮追悼コンサート Live at Alexander, with a set of standards on side A and Kanno's own pieces on side B. Its title is the name of one of his compositions. A two-LP set of his contemporary-music works, 海との約束 (A Promise of the Sea), was issued the same year. In 2019 NHK-FM devoted an episode of its Classical Labyrinth series to him for the 80th anniversary of his birth.

Kanno is a borderline case for a jazz catalogue, and the honest accounting is this. On Discogs his five jazz records as leader or co-leader sit against a pile of film and television scores, a handful of concert-music works and a single classical LP, and the public memory of him is the Castle of Sand piano theme. Against that, Japanese Wikipedia says he worked chiefly as a jazz pianist after graduating, his death was reported by Swing Journal, the people who recorded his memorial concert were jazz musicians, and a 2018 compilation of Japanese modal and progressive jazz chose his 1973 nonet recording. Both halves are set out above, and the jazz half is small but real.

As a pianist he played in a swinging, melodic mainstream style. A review of When the World Was Young on the Japanese shop site Kimama Music praises a strong touch and melodic lines, built up from single notes, octaves and block chords in a way it compares to Teddy Wilson, and calls the album his only piano-trio record, one prized by DJs and record collectors. The 1979 Foster date and the 1981 trio album are in the same mainstream vein: standards, a few ballads and a few originals, with a horn guesting.

Shisendo no Aki is the record that points somewhere else. Discogs tags it Modal, Avant-garde Jazz and Contemporary Jazz, and the Jazzman compilation files it under spiritual jazz. It is an arranged nonet piece with flute and shinobue, where the jazz writing carries a Japanese-instrument colour, and the same instinct shows in "Wa" for Hozan Yamamoto. His classical training under Hasegawa runs through all of it, from the string quartets to the Rachmaninoff-minded Shukumei.

Not to be confused with the pianist Kunihiko Sugano, whose surname is written with the same characters (菅野) but read Sugano, or with the film and game composers Yoko Kanno and Yugo Kanno.