Naoya Matsuoka (松岡直也, Matsuoka Naoya) was a pianist, composer and arranger and a leading figure of Latin fusion in Japan. He taught himself piano as a boy, was working professionally at fifteen, led Latin bands through the late 1950s and 1960s, and made his first album as a leader at forty. In 1979 he formed the horn-heavy Latin jazz band Naoya Matsuoka & Wesing, took it to the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1980, and in 1982 had a compilation of its music reach number two on the Oricon chart, a rare result for an instrumental record. In between he worked as a pop arranger and composer, and he wrote the Akina Nakamori song that won the Japan Record Award in 1985. He passed away on 29 April 2014, aged 76.

He was born on 9 May 1937 in Yokohama and was largely self-taught at the piano from about the age of seven. In 1952, at fifteen, he turned professional as pianist in the Marquis Trio led by the performer Pan Igari, and in 1953 he formed the first group under his own name, the Naoya Matsuoka Quartet. He then moved toward Latin music and led a succession of Latin bands: Cuban Speciosa, Latin Speciosa, and Havana Beats, founded in 1957 and enlarged into an orchestra in 1959. For the next two decades most of his recorded work was for other people's names. Japanese Wikipedia credits him with the arrangement of Golden Half's 1970 hit "Kiiroi Sakuranbo" and of Blue Triangle's "Taiyo ga Kureta Kisetsu" (1972), which won the New Artist Award at the 14th Japan Record Awards, and with composing Ayumi Ishida's "Chiisana Ai no Rekishi" (1973), which earned him the Koga Prize at the Japan Composers Awards. His jazz-side credits from the same years are quieter: in 1972 he played piano and Hammond organ and wrote the arrangements for Akira Ishikawa's Count Buffaloes on the Toshiba album Dynamic Latin Exotic Sound, with Ishikawa on drums.

His first album as a leader, Joyful Feet, was recorded on 24 to 26 August 1976 at Victor Studio in Tokyo and released in March 1977 under the name Naoya Matsuoka & His All Stars. He played electric piano, piano, synthesizer and timbales and arranged the set, with Hidefumi Toki on alto saxophone and clarinet, Akira Miyazawa on alto, tenor and soprano saxophones and flute, and Larry Sunaga on congas. His official profile calls it the birth of Japan's first original salsa record. Steffanie De Praia followed on Discomate in March 1978, a Latin-fusion date on which Jiro Inagaki is credited as associate producer, and the All Stars' Day Break (Union Records, 1979, recorded in 1978) added Yasuaki Shimizu on tenor saxophone and Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami on drums.

The band that made his name was Naoya Matsuoka & Wesing (ウィシング, rendered "Wishing" in many Japanese sources), formed in 1979 as a large Latin jazz and fusion ensemble with a full horn section and several percussionists. Its Warner Bros. albums came quickly. The Wind Whispers, recorded in January and February 1979, has Murakami on drums and percussion and Masayoshi Takanaka on guitar. Majorca followed later in 1979 with Murakami and Shimizu again. Kaleidoscope (September 1979) was billed to Matsuoka with the harmonica player Toots Thielemans and the guitarist Tsunehide Matsuki, and Murakami and Shimizu were among the players, along with trombonist Shigeharu Mukai and guitarist Kiyoshi Sugimoto. Son (1980) brought in Tito Puente on timbales, Carlos "Patato" Valdes on congas, Andy Gonzalez on bass and Johnny Rodriguez on bongos beside the Japanese horns and rhythm section, with Shimizu again on tenor. Japanese Wikipedia also lists the guitarists Kenji Omura and Kazumi Watanabe among Wesing's members.

Wesing played the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1980, and the performance was issued that year as Live at Montreux Festival (Warner Bros., M-6001-2W); Discogs credits Mongo Santamaria and Toots Thielemans as performers on it. Danzon and The Show followed in 1981, the latter with Murakami, Hidefumi Toki, Akira Wada on guitar and a large horn section. In 1981 he also co-produced and arranged the Los Angeles-recorded Pacific Jam with the saxophonist Toki, which features the Brazilian singer Flora Purim, and he played electric piano on pianist Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's Ma Memoire (Warner Bros., 1981) alongside Murakami on drums, Getao Takahashi on electric bass and the singer Ann Young. A one-off in 1979, the 12-inch single "Lovin' Mighty Fire" with the singer Minako Yoshida, was a disco record with Wesing credited as the performers.

The September Wind (九月の風), a 1982 compilation of Wesing tracks with one newly recorded title piece, reached number two on the Oricon chart and stayed in the top thirty for about six months. By then the band's size was working against it. Japanese Wikipedia says Wesing disbanded in the early 1980s because a group of that size could not keep up a live schedule, and Matsuoka continued with the smaller Naoya Matsuoka Group, which became a training ground for the guitarist Akira Wada, the bassist Getao Takahashi, the percussionist Carlos Kanno and others. The albums of the next few years kept the Latin core and added a pop gloss: Fall On The Avenue (1982), made with American Latin and fusion players including Ray Barretto and Jerry Gonzalez on congas, Omar Hakim and Roland Vazquez on drums and Dean Brown on guitar; A Farewell to the Seashore (1983); Natsu no Tabi (1984); Long for the East (1984), with Toshinobu Kubota singing on "The Latin Man"; Splash & Flash (1985); and Watermelon Dandies (1986). The 1983 double album Welcome was recorded live at Roppongi Pit Inn in Tokyo and at the Montreux festival, which the Naoya Matsuoka Group played for a second time that year.

The commercial side grew alongside the jazz one. In 1985 he composed and arranged "Mi Amore" for Akina Nakamori, included on her album D404ME; it won the Japan Record Award at its 27th ceremony, and Matsuoka received the Japan Composers Award for outstanding composer. The same year he wrote the theme for the television news programme News Station. In 1986 and 1987 he scored the anime series Heart Cocktail, based on Seizo Watase's work, in two soundtrack volumes. He wrote the entrance theme "Rock Me Dragon" for the wrestler Tatsumi Fujinami in 1987. His own albums stayed mostly in the Latin-fusion lane: Majestic (1988), with Lisa Ono and the percussionist Francis Silva among the vocalists; Now's the Time (1989), a piano, bass, drums and percussion set with standards and Latin pieces including "Manteca"; Play 4 You (1990) and Mineral (1993).

He formed the thirteen-piece Naoya Matsuoka Banda Grande in 1993, Super5 in 1998, and a project with Akira Wada called B.F.Unit in 2006. Emerald (1997) marked forty-five years in music and An Affair to Remember (2002) the fiftieth. He was diagnosed with an illness in 2001 and kept performing. Sincerely (2005) has Hidefumi Toki on alto and sopranino saxophones, Shuichi Murakami on drums, Getao Takahashi on bass and Kazumi Watanabe on guitar. He formed the unit Hot & Unique in 2009 and reunited Wesing for concerts in 2012 to mark his sixtieth year as a professional. He was admitted to hospital in late March 2014 after a sudden decline and passed away on 29 April of prostate cancer at a hospital in Kawasaki.

Warner reissued much of his catalogue in remastered form in 2017, and Atoss International has issued video and audio from the 1980 and 1983 Montreux performances and a sixtieth-anniversary Wesing concert. Japanese Wikipedia reports that Murakami played three of his pieces at a 2018 concert with Akira Wada as guest, and that Wada's band Prism included "A First Flight" on its 2017 album What You See as a tribute.

Matsuoka's music is Latin first. The band names in his early career (Cuban Speciosa, Havana Beats), the timbales and congas that crowd the scoring on Joyful Feet and Son, and the guests he brought in, among them Tito Puente, Patato Valdes, Andy Gonzalez, Ray Barretto and Jerry Gonzalez, put him in the line of salsa and Latin jazz rather than the American bop tradition. His own site calls him a pioneer of Latin fusion, and Japanese Wikipedia describes him as a leading Latin pianist. He played acoustic piano, a Fender Rhodes and a changing stack of synthesizers, and from the 1980s he built his arrangements on a rhythm section of bass, drums and two or three percussionists, with a horn choir on top.

Discogs files the Wesing albums under jazz with Latin jazz, fusion and jazz-funk styles, and tags Majorca and Steffanie De Praia with samba and Afro-Cuban jazz as well. The mid-1980s records lean toward polished instrumental pop: Splash & Flash and Watermelon Dandies carry Electronic and Pop genre tags beside Jazz, and Majestic is tagged with synth-pop. That pop side is a large part of his career, with arrangements for kayokyoku acts, television themes and anime scores, and it is why he is not a straightforward jazz artist in the way some of his collaborators are. His standing as a jazz musician rests on the Montreux appearances in 1980 and 1983, the Roppongi Pit Inn live recording, the Latin jazz and fusion band records on Warner and Discomate, his sideman and arranging work on dates such as Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's Ma Memoire, and the players he worked with.