Nobu Stowe (ノブ・ストウ) is the stage name of Nobuyoshi Sutō (須藤伸義), a pianist who was born in Maebashi, in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, and who has spent his adult life in the United States. He is also a research psychologist with a doctorate and a jazz writer, and the combination shows in how he talks about music: his records are mostly "total improvisations," sets made up on the spot without themes or charts, in the tradition he traces to Keith Jarrett.

He began piano lessons at three and composing at around six. As a boy he led a Boy Scout band called Do-jins, became a devoted Beatles fan at ten or eleven, and in high school moved into progressive rock, forming a band called The Moons and then a trio, Pale Ghosts, with Takashi Kanai and Honyo Ohte. He has said he was not interested in Japanese pop or rock. The name Honyo Ohte turns up again in the credits as the painter and designer of Stowe's albums Brooklyn Moments, Roulette Concert and East Side Banquet.

He left Japan for the University of California, Berkeley, to study composition and psychology, partly because he had confused it with Berklee College of Music, by his own account. He kept Pale Ghosts going by flying back to Japan often and turned down several record contracts while waiting for a bigger label to call. Around graduation his interest shifted from prog to fusion and then to jazz, and the piece that turned him was Jarrett's "Country" from My Song. He went on to the University of Chicago, where he earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 2002 and began practicing total improvisation seriously, forming the Outside-In trio with the bassist Vytis Nivinskas and the drummer Dan Bales.

Work took him to Baltimore for postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, and later to a research post at the University of Maryland. In Baltimore he formed Trio Ricochet with the drummer Alan Munshower and the bassist Tyler Goodwin, a group that has played the Knitting Factory and Blue Note in New York and the Smithsonian Institution, according to his biographies. With Munshower he also worked as the duo A-UN; a Washington, D.C. set from 9 January 2005 is documented on a CD-R issued without a label.

His label releases began in 2007. Brooklyn Moments (Konnex), recorded on 4 September 2005 with the saxophonist Blaise Siwula and the drummer Ray Sage, and New York Moments (Konnex), which adds the guitarist Dom Minasi, were both produced by Manfred Schiek. On 11 and 14 November 2006 he played concerts in Philadelphia and Montclair with the percussionist Andrea Centazzo and the clarinetist Perry Robinson, and Centazzo's Ictus label issued the recordings as The Soul in the Mist. Hommage an Klaus Kinski (Soul Note, 2007), credited to the Nobu Stowe - Lee Pembleton Project, pairs his piano with the sound designer Lee Pembleton and, on different tracks, Robinson, Siwula, the multi-instrumentalist Ross Bonadonna and the drummer John McLellan.

An Die Musik (Soul Note, 2008) is a Jarrett-inspired set of duos and trios with Munshower and the tabla player Badal Roy, played on a Mason & Hamlin grand. Confusion Bleue (Soul Note, 2010) is the larger statement: Stowe on grand piano, Wurlitzer electric piano, glockenspiel and a Japanese Nanbu-tetsu cast-iron bell, with Goodwin, Sage, Bonadonna and Pembleton, and a movement improvised on "Blue in Green." The same group, with the reedman Chris Kelsey as a guest, performed at Roulette in New York on 25 September 2010, a concert Ictus issued as Roulette Concert in 2012. East Side Banquet (Ictus, 2012), recorded on 4 August 2011, adds the trumpeter Brian Groder and the bassist Lisle Ellis. Between them came Moon in Winter (Ictus, 2011), recorded in the Baltimore area in February 2010 with Centazzo, the trumpeter Dave Ballou, the bassist Daniel Barbiero and the reedman Achille Succi.

Stowe has also written about jazz for years, including columns and interviews for the Japanese online magazine Jazz Tokyo, where he credits the editor Kuniya Inaoka with opening doors for him. His biographies list Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Michel Legrand and Bill Frisell among the people he has interviewed; those come from his own biographical accounts and are not matched to specific published pieces here. He wrote the English liner notes for Bridges (Ictus, 2012), a trio record by Centazzo, the saxophonist Akira Sakata and the bassist Kiyoto Fujiwara, recorded in Milan at the JAPZITALY benefit concert "Jazz Aid for Japanese Children"; Inaoka is credited alongside him on the notes and as a producer of the concert.

A 2013 review notes that Stowe had since changed his day job and moved from Baltimore to San Diego to work as an academic scientist, returning to New York now and then to play with his former bandmates. He has since worked mainly behind the scenes on the Ictus catalogue: executive producer and liner-note writer on The Journey (2020), a Centazzo and Robinson duo recorded in San Diego in 2015, executive producer, concert organizer and photographer on The Taoist Concert (2021), and executive producer on the 2025 Elektriktus LP Electronic Mind Waves - Volume 2.

Stowe's central reference is Keith Jarrett's improvising. His own notes describe total improvisation as a blend of free improvisation in the manner of Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley with Misha Mengelberg's "instant composing," and he names Jarrett as his main influence, with My Song, Survivor's Suite and Vienna Concert among his favourite albums. The playing that results is lyrical and tonal rather than dense: a reviewer of the Confusion Bleue band hears Jarrett's piano, Miles Davis's electric period and a classical touch in the same music, calling it "an incredibly eclectic and quite accessible mixture."

His records are shaped by form rather than by tunes. Confusion Bleue is built as numbered movements joined by intermezzi, and the two 2012 Ictus albums use the same "Movement" and "Partie" numbering, with a few pieces improvised on the harmony of "Blue in Green" or "Nardis." Pembleton's sound design appears on all of the Confusion Bleue albums, adding electronic and musique concrete textures around the piano and Bonadonna's guitar and reeds.

The progressive rock of his teenage years, and the fusion that followed it, sit behind the electric keyboards and the band-with-electronics format of his later records. He is first of all a free-jazz and free-improvisation pianist: that is how Discogs and the jazz press file his Soul Note, Konnex and Ictus albums. His career has been spent in the United States, alongside a career in science, rather than on the Japanese jazz circuit.