Rie Furuse (古瀬里恵, ふるせ りえ) is a Japanese singer, pianist and composer who has lived in Paris since 2009. She records and performs as Rié FURUSE and leads the Rié FURUSE Trio with the guitarist Gabriel Gosse and the percussionist Marc Pujol. Her recorded output is short, two releases so far, the EP Semba (2018) and the album Écho d'Azur (2021), but the career around them is well documented through her own site and blog, a long Japanese interview, concert listings in Tokyo, Paris and Kumamoto, and the credits printed with both records.

She was born on 7 February 1982 in Kumamoto and is the youngest of four siblings. At three she began electone lessons, following an older sister; at seven she switched to piano and kept playing until she left Kumamoto for Tokyo at eighteen. For about twelve years, from age six in mathematics and age eight in English, she also studied the Kumon method, through her second year of high school, and in a 2018 interview on Kumon's website she credited that routine with the confidence to take on new challenges.

At university she entered the French department of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Dokkyo University (獨協大学). She had applied to English departments and was admitted only to French, which she had treated as a fallback. A friend took her to a jazz club, she asked to be allowed to sing there in English, and she began working as a jazz vocalist while still a student. Her official biography says she started with Ella Fitzgerald repertoire and then grew interested in French song, including Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour and Dalida. In her second year she decided against the usual job hunt. After graduating she worked as a temporary employee at a foreign-owned company and as an interpreter for visiting singers while she kept singing in Tokyo clubs; at one point the personnel director of a French company who had seen her perform offered her a job, and she talked it over with her father before choosing music. Wikidata dates her active years from 2001.

Her teacher in this period was Diva Gray, the American singer known as a backing vocalist with Chic. Furuse says Gray introduced her to American pop, gospel and funk and helped her start an international career. At 25 she became Gray's full-time interpreter, and through Gray's circle she attended concerts and backstage gatherings with artists including Roberta Flack and Marcus Miller. Japanese Wikipedia records regular appearances at the Roppongi Hills Club in 2006 and 2007, and in the Kumon interview she describes accepting an offer to sing and play solo, voice and piano, at a members-only club, a format she had never tried, practising for two weeks and staying on for more than a year. Her official press page lists a review in the magazine Jazz World (January 2003), a notice in Tokyo Headline (June 2004) and a comment from James Harber, producer of the radio programme thejazzintersection.com (March 2007), alongside remarks from Diva Gray, the lyricist Chris Mosdell and the journalist Glenn Davis. Her first concert abroad came at 25, in Hawaii; Japanese Wikipedia dates the Hawaii tour to 2007, and her official biography says she was welcomed by local media.

In 2009 she moved to Paris, intending to stay a year, and chose France partly because of her French studies. Extending her visa proved difficult and she considered returning to Japan; a friend's question led her to contact people she had worked with in France and submit documentation of her activities, and the visa was granted. In December of that first year she sang in Singapore, a booking she won by researching venues on a private visit and pitching herself directly. In 2010, at the 48 Hour Film Project in Ho Chi Minh City, a short film using her song "The One" received the Best Music Award. Her official biography names the film as Postcards from Heaven and the song as a collaboration with Chris Mosdell, the British lyricist based in Tokyo and New York who is best known for his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra. Her materials list his credits as including Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Japanese Wikipedia also lists an appearance on NHK Radio 1's Chikyu Radio on 5 August 2012.

From Paris she kept working abroad, often as a resident singer-pianist in hotel lounges. Her blog documents Park Hyatt Saigon from March 2013 for two months, a run at the Boudoir Lounge of Sofitel Saigon Plaza in November 2013 that Viet Nam News previewed on 14 November, and a final Saigon appearance that December at IDECAF, the French cultural institute in Ho Chi Minh City, for the 40th anniversary of the re-establishment of France-Vietnam and Japan-Vietnam diplomatic relations. Harper's Bazaar Vietnam (January 2014) and Le Courrier du Vietnam (24 December 2013) carried reviews. In late May 2013 she played Sunside in Paris and then Ronnie Scott's in London. In 2015 she was resident at the Park Hyatt Busan (April to mid-May) and the Park Hyatt Seoul (mid-May to the end of August), her first performances in South Korea. She returned to the Park Hyatt Saigon from September 2016 to January 2017, and in January 2016 she was scheduled for solo evenings in the lobby of the Peninsula Paris. In 2018 she spent about two and a half months on an exclusive contract at the Grand Hyatt Abu Dhabi's Pearl Lounge. In the Kumon interview she said she spends four to six months of each year performing abroad, including in Japan, and the rest in Paris, and that she had by then performed in eight countries.

The Paris trio is documented from early 2014, when her blog thanks the audience for a Sunside concert with Marc Pujol on percussion, Gabriel Gosse on guitar and the violinist Utaco Ichise as guest. Sunside, the Paris jazz club on the rue des Lombards, is her regular Paris room: her blog records further dates there in September 2014, February 2015 (on her birthday), June 2018 and June 2019, the last with the guitarist Vladimir Médail in Gosse's place.

Semba was recorded in September and October 2017 at Studio de Meudon near Paris and issued in January 2018. Its five tracks put two Kumamoto songs from her childhood into a jazz idiom: "Otemoyan", a Kumamoto folk song (minyo) about a Meiji-era young woman in love with a man scarred by smallpox, and "Semba (Antagata Dokosa)", an Edo-period children's ball-bouncing song whose title is a Kumamoto place name, the neighbourhood where, by her own account, she grew up. The other three are her own: "Signals From the Lighthouse of Love", written around the age of twenty with words by Chris Mosdell; "Toi et Moi", her first lyric, written a few years after the move to Paris and polished by Mosdell; and "Vis Ta Vie" (Live Your Life), words and music hers. She celebrated the release at Sunside on 23 June 2018. That November the trio, with Utaco Ichise on violin, toured Japan: Saravah Tokyo on 7 November (the Tokyo club produced by the late Pierre Barouh), the former Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Nagasaki Branch Museum on 9 November, and the Kumamoto Shintoshin Plaza Hall on 12 November, where the Uto Amagoi Taiko, an ensemble named for the rain-prayer drums of Uto (the drums carry national designation as an important tangible folk-cultural property), joined as special guests. The tour had the backing of the Embassy of France in Japan and the Institut français du Japon, and was framed by the 160th anniversary of Franco-Japanese relations. Japanese promotional text reports more than 500 attendees across the three cities. On 17 March 2019 she and Ichise played with the taiko group again at Uto Civic Hall, in a concert marking the 60th anniversary of Uto city. As a duo of voice-and-piano and violin they also played the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on 17 February 2018 and on 23 March 2019.

The second album was made during the French lockdowns. She funded it through a Ulule crowdfunding project, open from 4 November to 20 December 2020, which passed its 2,500 euro goal on 10 November and closed at 3,180 euros from 25 backers. Écho d'Azur was recorded in December 2020 and January 2021 at Studio de Meudon and released on 13 February 2021. She wrote all the music and the lyrics to six of its eight songs; Mosdell wrote the words to "Sugarcane Rain" and "The One"; three young French singers, Sarah-Amélie Tiki-Koum, Maéna Corbex and Térence Populo, join her on background vocals. The opening "Tuning" takes its first two notes from the piano tuner who came to tune her piano when France reopened in May, and the closing "Le Vent de Demain (Ashita no Kazé)" uses the Ryukyu scale as a wind from her home region. By her own report the album ranked thirteenth among Apple Music France's jazz albums in 2021, and Radio-Canada's ICI Musique programme Quand le Jazz est là played three of its tracks in February 2021. For November 2021 she announced her first live shows of the new songs in her two favourite cities: the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on 6 November, billed with the saxophonist Andy Wulf, and Sunside in Paris, listed for 18 and 27 November. The album's Japan tour came in autumn 2022; its Tokyo date was at JZ Brat Sound of Tokyo in Shibuya on 28 October 2022, and she wrote that she had played the club several times before leaving for France and was looking forward to returning after more than fifteen years. Live videos from that night were posted that November. On 4 March 2023 she was listed again at the Foreign Correspondents' Club with Andy Wulf, and in 2023 the trio, with Simon Clavel on drums, was billed at the Festival solidaire des Arènes de Montmartre in Paris.

What is not documented is as plain as what is. No recordings before 2018 can be traced, neither release carries a label or catalogue number (both are issued under the trio's own name), and no credits on other artists' records are known. No dated concert after 2023 appears in the sources listed below, and the latest of them still place her in Paris.

Furuse describes her own music as a mix of contemporary jazz, fusion, funk and jazz-pop, and names Roberta Flack, Eva Cassidy and Lalah Hathaway as the voices audiences hear behind it. Her Bandcamp page calls the trio's work a crossover from jazz and fusion to pop, and the Ulule project called it contemporary jazz-pop at the crossroads of French and Japanese cultures. She sings in Japanese, English, French and, according to Japanese Wikipedia, Italian. Streaming services and Bandcamp file both of her releases under jazz, and her stages have been jazz rooms such as Sunside in Paris, Ronnie Scott's in London and JZ Brat in Tokyo, but her own descriptions place her at the crossover between jazz and pop, and she is profiled here on that basis rather than as a straight-ahead or improvising player.

The distinctive move is on Semba, and she repeats it in concert: traditional Japanese regional songs, rebuilt for a piano, guitar and percussion trio. "Otemoyan" and "Semba" come from Kumamoto, and on stage she has also played "Nagasaki Bura Bura Bushi", a traditional song from Nagasaki, in the same treatment. Her own songs carry titles in French, English and Japanese, among them "Toi et Moi", "Fly High" and "Le Vent de Demain (Ashita no Kazé)", and she is credited with most of her own lyrics, with Mosdell credited on four songs across the two releases. She has also posted a video of herself singing tunes associated with Joe Sample and Grover Washington Jr.