Ryo Kawasaki grew up in Kōenji, Tokyo, the son of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs diplomat and a multilingual mother who started him on piano and voice at four and violin at five. He earned a physics degree from Nippon University while working as a guitarist around Tokyo through the late 1960s, releasing several records in Japan before he ever set foot in New York.

He moved to New York in 1973 and found steady work fast: the Gil Evans Orchestra, Elvin Jones's Jazz Machine, Chico Hamilton's group, and the band Tarika Blue all had him on guitar within a few years. His first record after the move, "Prism," was recorded at Vanguard Studio in July 1975, partly written on tour with Elvin Jones; it was followed in 1976 by his American-label debut, "Juice," on RCA. "Juice" has become one of the most sampled and sought-after titles in jazz-funk reissue culture, a seven-track set of guitar over synth and disco groove cut with session players including Hugh McCracken and Stu Woods. The same year brought "Eight Mile Road" on the Japanese East Wind label, followed by 1977's "Ring Toss," recorded in the gaps of the Elvin Jones tour schedule, and 1978's "Trinkets and Things," a duo record with pianist Joanne Brackeen. His 1979 big-band album "Mirror of My Mind," cut at Power Station in New York, brought together Michael Brecker, Harvey Mason, and Anthony Jackson.

Starting in 1979, at the height of that run, Kawasaki stepped back from touring for roughly a decade to work directly with Roland and Korg on guitar synthesizer technology, an interest that began with a Roland GR-500 he bought while still playing standard electric guitar. He built his own guitar-synthesizer rig by the early 1980s (heard across "Little Tree," 1980, and "Featuring 'Concierto de Aranjuez,'" 1982, both liner-noted as using no keyboard synthesizer at all) and wrote four original music programs for the Commodore 64 between 1983 and 1986, alongside running his own dance-single label, Satellites Records.

He returned to acoustic and electric jazz-fusion through the 1990s, releasing records like "Cosmic Rhythm" (1999) and two tribute albums to Antonio Carlos Jobim. Sometime in the 2000s he relocated to Tallinn, Estonia, a move that reportedly surprised even his own fans, and stayed there for the rest of his life. In Tallinn he recorded "Reval" (2001) with local musicians, composed a jazz ballet, "Still Point," for the Estonian National Opera, and in 2016 formed a new fusion quartet, Level 8, with a group of Estonian musicians decades younger than him. Level 8's self-titled studio debut arrived in March 2017, timed to his 70th birthday, and their Kumu Hall concert in Tallinn that same February was released two years later as a live album.

Ryo Kawasaki passed away in Tallinn on April 13, 2020, at 73, having released more than thirty albums as a leader across five decades, from 1970s New York jazz-funk to Estonian fusion in his final years.

Kawasaki's playing sits at the intersection of straight-ahead jazz guitar and hands-on electronic invention. His early New York records ("Juice," "Prism," "Eight Mile Road") are built on the jazz-funk and fusion vocabulary of their moment, dense horn-and-rhythm-section arrangements over a guitar lead, the same commercial fusion current that carried Weather Report and Return to Forever. What sets him apart from most of his fusion-era peers is that he didn't just play synthesizer parts, he built the instrument: his custom guitar synthesizer, developed in partnership with Roland and Korg from the late 1970s, let him generate every synthetic sound on records like "Little Tree" and "Featuring 'Concierto de Aranjuez'" from the guitar itself, with no keyboard synth in the signal chain at all. That same hands-on-the-hardware instinct carried into his Commodore 64 composition software in the mid-1980s. His later Estonia-era work with Level 8 revisited his own 1970s-80s compositions in a leaner, working-band format with a new generation of players.