Osamu Kawakami (河上修) has been one of Tokyo's working jazz bassists since the middle of the 1970s, and he answers to the name "Mr. Double Bass," a nickname that comes from the title of his 1984 album. He was born on March 25, 1952, in Akita Prefecture and left for Tokyo at sixteen. Japanese Wikipedia credits him with more than 200 jazz recording sessions and a long list of pop and "new music" dates besides, and the Discogs credits bear out the scale of it: roughly a hundred and ten releases, from Three Blind Mice quartet sessions to a 2021 vocal duo record.

According to Japanese Wikipedia, his debut came in 1974 with the Sadao Watanabe Quartet, and the earliest recording credit that can be dated to the day is from that same autumn. On November 18 and 19, 1974, at Aoi Studio in Tokyo, Isao Suzuki's quartet recorded All Right! for Three Blind Mice (TBM-36), with Kazumi Watanabe on guitar, Shinji Mori on drums, and two bassists on the date, Kawakami and Akira Okazawa on electric bass, while Suzuki himself moved between cello, electric piano, organ and vibraphone. Five months later, on April 4, 1975, the same label recorded Suzuki's Orang-Utan (TBM-44), a jazz-funk date with Kunihiko Sugano on piano and Fender organ, Kenji Mori on reeds, and the singer Mari Nakamoto on "Where Are You Going?". Another night from that spring, May 26, 1975 at the "5 Days In Jazz 1975" concert at Nihon Toshi Center Hall in Tokyo, stayed in the can until Days of Delight issued it in 2022 as Blue Road.

On July 18, 1975, Kawakami was in Switzerland. Sadao Watanabe's quartet, with Takehiro Honda on piano, Mori on drums and Kawakami on bass, played the Montreux Jazz Festival, and CBS/Sony put the set out as Swiss Air. Sadao Watanabe played alto and sopranino saxophones and flute on it, and the record runs through "Masai Steppe," "Tanzania E," "Sway," "Way" and "Pagamoyo."

The next two years are where his name starts turning up on almost everything made in Tokyo's small-label jazz scene. With Sugano he recorded a duo concert at the White Palace in Ashikaga on March 20, 1976 (released as Duo Live In Ashikaga - The Party), then the quartet date Shiny Stockings on March 28 at Victor Studio with Hideyuki Kikuchi on alto saxophone and Hiroshi Murakami on drums, and, on July 18, the live Date In Daté, with Murakami again on drums. In April and June 1976 he played electric bass on Mikio Masuda's Mickey's Mouth for East Wind, alongside Kohsuke Mine on soprano saxophone, and wrote one of its tracks, "Hello Jess." On October 20, 1976, at a venue called ab ab in Imabari, Ehime, he recorded Prelude To A Kiss with the pianist Sadayasu Fujii and Murakami, a live album for which Discogs also lists him as producer. In the same stretch he was the bassist for the pianist Kazuo Yashiro on Audio Lab Record: Yardbird Suite (1976), with Konosuke Saijo on tenor saxophone and Masahiko Ozu on drums; Lady Bird (recorded March 8, 1977, with the drummer Hajime Ishimatsu and the guitarist Shoji Yokouchi); and the Saijo date West 8th Street On Castle Ave. Vol.II (recorded May 10, 1977, at Iruma Civic Hall).

His first record under his own name, Jump For Joy (1977), was made for the same label as "Osamu Kawakami And His Group," and it has the shape of a bandleader's first statement: a front line of Kikuchi on alto saxophone and flute, Yasuaki Shimizu on tenor saxophone and Hiroshi Murata on trumpet, two pianists in Toshiyuki Sekine and Masanori Sasaji, and Hideo Yamaki on drums. Three of its six pieces are his own, "Soplyca" (written with Fujii), "Gazing Eyes Samba" and "Half And Half." The following year Sekine and Yamaki returned for the trio album Love For Sale (Audio Lab Record, 1978).

From 1979 he spent five years in the pianist Yuzuru Sera's trio, according to Japanese Wikipedia, and the Sera records of those years carry his name: Night In Tunisia (recorded March 4, 1978, with Ozu on drums and Yasuaki Shimizu on tenor saxophone), A Lady's Man (recorded August 1978), Bei Mir Bist Du Schon (1980) and Piano Daddy (1983). In 1980 he was the bassist on the American pianist Eddie Higgins's Toshiba album Sweet Lorraine, with Jimmy Takeuchi on drums, and on Masuda's Silver Shadow, where he played both electric and acoustic bass in a band that also had Toshiyuki Honda on alto saxophone and Shunzo Ohno on trumpet. On February 3, 1981, at Iino Hall in Tokyo, he recorded Straight No Chaser with the pianist Naoki Nishi and Tatsuya Takahashi on tenor saxophone, with Takeshi Inomata on drums. Nishi's A Giant From West (1980), Day By Day (1981), Have You Met Miss Jones (1982) and Laid Back Mind (1985) also carry his bass. The singer Martha Miyake put him among the performers on her 1983 anniversary album Memories 30th, together with Masahiko Satoh, Motohiko Hino, Nobuyoshi Ino and Sera. He played on Hidehiko Matsumoto and Junko Mine's I Wish You Love (1979) too, on one track.

Two trio albums for the Lob label carry his leader billing from those years. Dear, Old Goodwin (1983, Lob LDC-1039) is a bass, piano and drums record with Hajime Ohno and Jun Shimizu, built around standards and jazz repertoire ("Spring Is Here," "My One And Only Love," "Lady Bird," "Confirmation") plus "Greensleeves." Mr. Double Bass (1984, Lob LDC-1044), issued in a limited run as part of the label's audiophile "Super disc series" with technical supervision from Pioneer, is the record that gave him his nickname. Naoki Kitajima and Yoichi Yoshiwara share the piano chair, Hideo Sekine plays drums and Sayoko Mori sings; the program runs from "Greensleeves" and Russ Freeman's "Double Play" to Lionel Richie's "Three Times A Lady" and his own "Dew Drops," "Brightness Of Peace Forever" and "Little N." Japanese Wikipedia adds that the album broke new ground by setting more than ten double basses against one another in an ensemble, and an insert came with it showing how the instruments were arranged. The same trio was filmed for Dew Drops, a laserdisc released on August 25, 1990. The same biography calls him the original "singing and dancing bassist."

Much of his later career is session work that sits at the edge of jazz. His Discogs credits include Pizzicato Five and the producer Yasuharu Konishi's circle (he plays wood bass on Tokyo's Coolest Combo In Tokyo, 1993, beside Okazawa), Kahimi Karie, Kyoko Koizumi's Koizumi Chansonier (2012), the soundtrack of the video game Gran Turismo 5 (2010) and the SMAP album Pop Up! SMAP (2006).

The jazz thread stayed unbroken. In 2005 he recorded with the pianist Senri Oe, a Japanese pop star of the 1980s who later turned to jazz: Ghost Note (October 2005, with the drummer Michael Kawai), and the live trio album Live "Ghost Note" At Motion Blue Yokohama, recorded on November 4, 5 and 6, 2005, on which Discogs lists him on bass and whistle. For the pianist Keiko Kurita he played on Duo - K's Walk (2009) and produced and directed NY Stomp (2013, with Junshi Koyama on drums, and including his composition "K's Dream"), and the pair made Duo - K's Walk Again in 2020. On October 24, 2010, he played a concert at Roppongi Sweet Basil to mark forty years in music. In the summer of that year, on June 29, 2010, he and Oe had recorded Duo, a set of eight pieces that includes "Stella By Starlight," "All The Things You Are," "In A Sentimental Mood," "Black Orpheus" and "Anthropology," which Jah! Jah! Jah! Records released on CD in 2011. He was a member of the Kanji Ohta Trio on A Day In New York (recorded in New York on January 11, 2016, with Leroy Williams on drums) and recorded the vocal duo album Funky Duo with Chie Nishimura in 2021. He turned 74 in March 2026.

Kawakami's career runs across the Japanese studio-jazz scene of the 1970s and 1980s, and the range is what the credits show. He is the acoustic bassist on the piano-led trio and quartet dates for Kazuo Yashiro, Yuzuru Sera and Naoki Nishi, records that Discogs files under Contemporary Jazz, Bop and Cool Jazz, and he is the electric bassist on Mikio Masuda's soul-jazz and fusion Mickey's Mouth and on the jazz-funk of Isao Suzuki's Orang-Utan. On Silver Shadow and on Blue Road the credits give him both instruments within one session.

As a leader he also writes. Jump For Joy carries three of his own pieces, "Soplyca" (written with Sadayasu Fujii), "Gazing Eyes Samba" and "Half And Half," and across the Lob trio records and the later Keiko Kurita albums he is credited with titles such as "Dew Drops," "Little N" and "K's Dream." The Mr. Double Bass project, with its ensemble of ten or more upright basses, treats the instrument as a sound in its own right and not only as a support for the piano, and the whistle credited on the 2005 Senri Oe live recording fits the showman side that Japanese Wikipedia sums up as the original "singing and dancing bassist."

He plays with pop musicians as comfortably as with jazz leaders. The Discogs history lists the Pizzicato Five circle, SMAP and a video-game soundtrack beside Eddie Higgins and Sadao Watanabe, and Japanese Wikipedia says plainly that he has been a regular on pop and new-music records. His jazz identity is the dominant one: his own albums, his band memberships and the great majority of his credits are jazz.