Norio Maeda (前田憲男) was a pianist, arranger and conductor whose career ran for more than six decades across Japanese jazz and Japanese television. The jazz side of the record is a piano trio that lasted from the 1960s into the 2000s, a run of arranger-led big bands and saxophone ensembles, and a string of albums that put Bach, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky and Gershwin through a jazz band. The other side is theme music for late-night and variety shows, and arrangements for popular singers of the 1970s.

He was born on December 6, 1934 in Osaka Prefecture. His father, an elementary school teacher, taught him to read music as a child, and he learned piano and conducting largely on his own. He turned professional as a jazz pianist straight after high school, and in 1955 he moved to Tokyo. There he played with the guitarist Shungo Sawada's ensemble and joined the West Liners, the band of the tenor saxophonist Konosuke Saijo, as pianist and arranger. By 1957 and 1958 Discogs places him on the Swing Journal all-star recordings made by the leading Japanese jazz magazine of the day.

The West Liners are where he met the drummer Takeshi Inomata, who in his own account had first met Maeda at a Kansai jam session when he was sixteen and Maeda eighteen. When a jazz coffee house opened in Ginza, the owner wanted a small group, and the rhythm section of Maeda, Inomata and the bassist Tatsuro Takimoto went in alone. That was the first WE3, a name Inomata chose to mean three equals with no leader on the marquee. The trio recorded, broadcast and played Fridays on Nippon Television's late-night show 11PM, and the bass chair later passed through Jun Suzuki to Yasuo Arakawa. Their first album, Alpha Ray, was recorded on October 3, 1968 at Teichiku Kaikan Studio in Tokyo and released by Columbia in February 1969 as the Norio Maeda Trio. It was the first piano trio record Maeda made as a pianist in his own right, and it mixes mainstream-leaning themes with prepared-piano passages, with up to seven microphones placed inside the piano. Nippon Columbia is returning it to vinyl in its J-DIGS reissue series, with a release date of November 3, 2026.

Through the late 1960s he was also the arranger Tokyo's jazz producers called. He arranged Inomata's West Liners albums, among them Paint It, Black (1966), played piano with the band on Come Together (1969), and played and arranged Drum Shot (Takt, 1967), a date billed to Inomata and Maeda with Saijo on tenor saxophone and the trombonist Hiroshi Suzuki among four trombones. In 1968 he was the arranger and organist on Exciting Jazz Spirit (Union Records), a ten-standard date with Hidehiko Matsumoto on tenor saxophone, Masabumi Kikuchi on piano and Masahiko Togashi and George Otsuka on drums. That same year came 5 Saxophones (Takt JAZZ-15), an ensemble of five saxophonists, among them Akira Miyazawa, over a Maeda-Takimoto-Inomata rhythm section, later reissued as Saxophone Unity; and This Is Jazz-Rock, the Columbia album credited to Jiro Inagaki & The All-Stars and Maeda. In 1969 he returned to Miyazawa for Musical Play in Jazz, a quartet record of ten Broadway show tunes with Masahiko Togashi on drums, and wrote and arranged for Toshiyuki Miyama's big band, the New Herd.

The 1970s were the decade of the large ensembles. For Inomata's Jazz Rock in Stravinsky (Liberty, 1970) he arranged and conducted Petrushka and The Rite of Spring for 26 credited musicians, one ballet to each side of the LP. He composed and arranged for Inomata's big band The Third and played piano with it; its December 4, 1974 concert at Shibuya Kokaido was released as two RCA albums, one of Duke Ellington repertoire and one of Maeda's own compositions. He made his own records at the same time. Revolution (Columbia, 1972) reworks Bach fugues and preludes for a quintet that has Maeda at the Hammond organ and piano. The Four Seasons: Modern Vivaldi (Warner Bros., 1972) turns Vivaldi's cycle into a trio record. Jazz in Symphony (Columbia, recorded September 1972) plays Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony with his trio, a jazz company that included Jiro Inagaki and the keyboardist Kentaro Haneda, and a pops orchestra. In 1972 he also took part in Big 4: A Competitive Performance, a Warner Bros. contest between four pianists and arrangers, himself, Hachidai Nakamura, Hiroshi Miyagawa and Kunihiko Suzuki. And alongside the shakuhachi player Hozan Yamamoto and the koto players Tadao and Kazue Sawai he arranged and played on Jazz Rock Koto / Japanese Folk Songs (RCA, 1973).

His mid-1970s small-group records are the ones jazz collectors tend to reach for. For the Audio Lab label he recorded Alone Together (June 6, 1975, Iino Hall) with Inomata, Arakawa, Saijo and a four-horn front line, and N.Maeda Meets 5 Saxophones (1976), ten standards with five saxophonists. The Norio Maeda Trio's live Happy Mama was recorded on February 25, 1976 at the Ginza jazz spot "69", and We Three Jazz (Adam, 1978) was a digital PCM recording that added the shakuhachi of John Kaizan Neptune. In February 1977 he recorded three of the nine tracks on Pianic Pianism (Denon, 1977), a PCM solo-piano record on which Masahiko Satoh and Hiromasa Suzuki take the other six.

In 1980 he formed the Wind-Breakers, a big combo built around horns that became his main group in later years. With Inagaki producing and playing tenor saxophone and flute, it recorded I'll Remember April (Discomate, February 1981) and Misty (1983). In 1988 he joined Satoh and Haneda for Play! Gershwin by Triple Piano (CBS/Sony). The Triple Piano unit ended after Haneda's death, with a final concert at Suntory Hall on April 4, 2008. WE3 made a late album, Amazing Grace, in 2001.

The jazz career ran alongside a second one in television and popular song. Maeda wrote theme music for programs including 11PM and Music Fair, the first theme of Music Station and the second theme of News Station; he arranged for singers including Kiyohiko Ozaki (his version of "My Way" in 1972) and Hideki Saijo; he wrote the music for the Star Wolf television drama (1978) and the animated film Crusher Joe (1983); and he served as pops music director of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. He taught at Osaka University of Arts from 2003. The recognition is as varied as the work: a best-arrangement prize at the 1981 Tokyo Music Festival; the Japan Record Awards prize for best arrangement; the Nanri Fumio Prize (南里文雄賞), the jazz award named for the trumpeter Fumio Nanri; a Merit Award from the Japan Record Awards in 2008; a commendation from the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs in 2014; and a special award at the sixth Iwaya Tokiko Award in 2015. A reissue label's biography says he won the arrangement category of the Swing Journal poll 22 years in a row.

Norio Maeda passed away on November 25, 2018 at a Tokyo hospital, of pneumonia, at the age of 83.

Maeda thought as an arranger first. A reissue label's note on Alpha Ray calls him a giant of arranging who could write different parts for his two hands at once, and the pattern of his career supports it: the person at the piano on most of his own records is also the one who scored the horns, the strings or the pops orchestra around him. His own piano playing on the trio records is mainstream post-bop in outline, built on standards, with a taste for experiment that shows up on Alpha Ray in the prepared-piano passages and the unusual microphone placement.

What defines the catalogue is how much material he was willing to put through a jazz band. Bach (Revolution, 1972), Vivaldi (The Four Seasons: Modern Vivaldi, 1972), Tchaikovsky (Jazz in Symphony), Stravinsky (his Jazz Rock in Stravinsky arrangements for Inomata), Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue in 1979 and Play! Gershwin by Triple Piano in 1988), Ellington (The Third Concert), Broadway (Musical Play in Jazz), Japanese folk song (the koto-and-shakuhachi jazz-rock records) and a bossa nova set with Tin Pan Alley's Haruomi Hosono and Shigeru Suzuki (Soul Samba / Holiday in Brazil, 1977) are all on his list. Inomata's own description of WE3 was that the trio's policy was to take on good music of any kind, rather than only jazz standards, and the catalogue bears that out.

The jazz-rock records of 1968 to 1973 (This Is Jazz-Rock, Jazz Rock in Stravinsky, Jazz Rock Koto) show him writing for horn sections and electric rhythm players rather than an acoustic trio. The Wind-Breakers of the 1980s went back to a bop and hard-bop book, with tunes such as "Straight, No Chaser", "A Night in Tunisia" and "Bag's Groove".

His television and popular-song work was extensive, and it means his name turns up on hundreds of Japanese pop, television and film releases that are not jazz records, as arranger, conductor or pianist. The jazz thread is the continuous one all the same: the piano trio from 1968 to 2001, the Nanri Fumio Prize and the Swing Journal poll, and the working relationships with Inomata, Saijo, Inagaki, Satoh and the rest of the Tokyo jazz community.