Riyoko Takagi (高木里代子, Takagi Riyoko) came to Japanese jazz by an unusual route: a childhood in classical piano, a university degree in computing and information studies, and years of playing piano lounges and bars before a record label noticed. She is now one of the most visible jazz pianists of her generation in Japan, with a run of piano-trio albums that began in 2021 and has reached its seventh numbered release.

She was born on 20 September 1984 in Tokyo. Her mother was an aspiring classical pianist, and Takagi began lessons at four. Her first teacher soon steered her toward composition as well as score-reading, and she went on to the children's program at the Yamaha Music School, studying classical piano and composition. At around 17 she turned seriously to jazz, teaching herself improvisation from live recordings by Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. She entered Keio University's Shonan Fujisawa Campus, graduated in environment and information studies in 2007, and played jazz in Tokyo lounges and live houses throughout her student years.

In 2008 she became the keyboardist of Inner City Jam Orchestra, a club-oriented house unit, and Discogs credits her on piano and keyboards on its 2010 twelve-inch Heaven. Her first own-name record, the piano-trio album After Tears, appeared on HARU Records in 2009, and in 2012 and 2013 she took part in two jazz-arrangement records of anime songs, Cure Jazz (as Riyoko feat. Silent Jazz Case) and Bousou Jazz II (with the Purple Jazz Project).

The breakthrough came in 2014. She won the popularity vote in a video contest run by Diners Club, placed fourth in the piano category of the Six String Theory competition sponsored by the guitarist Lee Ritenour, reached the semifinals of the Montreux Jazz Festival Japan competition, and appeared at Blue Note Tokyo that year on a bill that included Ritenour. On 18 October 2014 she recorded a solo concert on a Bosendorfer grand at Salone Fontana in Tokyo's Seijo district. Released in 2015 on the audiophile label HD Impression as Salone, it was made as a high-resolution recording and brought her to the stage of the 14th Tokyo Jazz festival that September.

In February 2016 Avex Trax issued her major-label debut, The Debut!, a collection of club-jazz and dance-pop tracks on which she also sang. It entered the Oricon chart at No. 37. The jazz press kept its own score: Jazz Japan magazine gave her its New Star prize and put her on its cover, the first of three Jazz Japan covers (the others followed in 2022 and 2023). Back on HD Impression she released two solo-piano albums, Dream of You ~ Salone II (2017, recorded live in front of an audience on 25 December 2016) and Resonance (2019), her first solo album recorded in a studio without an audience.

From 2021 she settled into the format that now defines her catalogue. Celebrity Standards (November 2021) and Jewelry Box (January 2022) are piano-trio albums on Steelpan Records with the bassist Takumi Katsuya and the drummer Yoichiro Yamauchi. The Piano Story (April 2023) and Midnight in Blue (October 2023) brought in two of Tokyo's busiest straight-ahead players, the bassist Yosuke Inoue and the drummer Hiroyuki Noritake, and Midnight in Blue won the jazz prize at the CD Shop Awards, the retail-staff vote, and a cover-design prize from the magazine Jazz Hihyo. The same trio made One Another Day (September 2024) and The Moments (December 2024). On 15 January 2025 she filmed a hall concert at Suntory Hall's Blue Rose with Inoue and the drummer Maoki Yamamoto, released on DVD. In November 2025 her six piano-trio albums were made available on streaming services worldwide.

Her seventh album, Chasing the World, came out on 15 July 2026 with a new rhythm section of the bassist Kazuhiro Matsushita and the drummer Yasushi Fukumori. Eleven of its twelve tracks are her own compositions, the most originals on any of her records, drawn from trips she made in 2024 and 2025 to New York, Montreal, Boston, Shanghai, Beijing and Tokyo, plus a jazz arrangement of Chopin's "Puppy Waltz." She reported that it reached No. 1 on Amazon Japan's jazz chart shortly after its announcement.

Alongside the records she has a large public profile outside the jazz clubs. From January 2022 she played piano on Mondays and Thursdays on the TBS morning programme THE TIME, for about three years, hosts a long-running programme on ShibuyaCross-FM, and runs the YouTube channel Riyo Channel, where she posts jazz arrangements of anime songs and J-pop, some in costume. Her management is Avex, which was also her first major-label home, and part of her public image has been glamour-led, including a 2018 image-video DVD. That work sits beside the jazz recordings described here, not in place of them.

Takagi's trio albums sit in the mainstream, straight-ahead tradition, with classical technique underneath the improvising. Her published biography names Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett as the live recordings she learned improvisation from, and the repertoire echoes that: Midnight in Blue includes Evans's "One for Helen," and the trio records are built on standards, jazz tunes by composers such as Wayne Shorter ("Footprints"), Herbie Hancock ("Tell Me a Bedtime Story"), Lee Morgan ("The Sidewinder"), Bud Powell ("Tempus Fugit") and Duke Ellington ("Caravan" and "C Jam Blues"), and bossa nova by Antonio Carlos Jobim ("Agua de Beber").

What marks her out is the way she carries classical repertoire into the jazz trio. The Piano Story opens with Chopin's Scherzo No. 1, Jewelry Box includes his Ballade No. 1, One Another Day has Debussy's "Clair de Lune," The Moments has Paganini's "La Campanella" and a Nikolai Kapustin prelude, and Chasing the World closes with a Chopin waltz. Her originals run from "Las Velas" and "Lay It Down" on Midnight in Blue to the travel-inspired pieces of her 2026 album, such as "FDR Drive" and "160 Massachusetts Avenue."

The balance of originals to standards varies by album: six of the eleven tracks on The Piano Story are hers, three of eleven on the standards-heavy Midnight in Blue, six of ten on One Another Day, and eleven of twelve on Chasing the World. Outside the trio series she has worked in several other registers, from the audiophile solo piano of Salone to the club-jazz and pop of The Debut! and the anime-song jazz arrangements. Apple Music files all of her albums under jazz and the jazz press has treated her as a jazz pianist (three Jazz Japan covers, a New Star prize), but the pop and club strand is real and is part of her career, not an afterthought.