Ryo Kusunose (楠瀬亮) is a saxophonist from Kochi Prefecture who graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2021. He has played alto saxophone in a Tokyo jazz-club quartet, as a featured guest on a big-band album by Keio University's Light Music Society, and, since 2023, in a duo with the percussionist Tomo Ando, which has played improvised and cross-genre concerts around the southern Boso Peninsula in Chiba. No album under his own name is listed on Apple Music, Spotify or MusicBrainz. His one commercial recording credit is the 2023 Light Music Society record described below.

He was born and raised in Konan, a city in Kochi Prefecture. His own biography says that as a child he spent his time running through fields and hills, swimming in the sea and flying boomerangs he had made himself, and that he did not start music until junior high school. His birth date and year are not published anywhere that has been found.

He studied in the instrumental music department of the Faculty of Music at the Tokyo University of the Arts, where, according to his own biography, he majored in the saxophone. A biography from April 2024 says that he graduated in 2021 and that, besides classical music, he threw himself into the things that interested him on his own: jazz, composition, improvisation and beat-making. Tomo Ando, the percussionist with whom he later formed a duo, was a university classmate.

His earliest documented credit is outside jazz clubs altogether. The architecture firm Kengo Kuma and Associates (KKAA) published an account, dated 5 January 2023, of the music concert it staged for its China touring exhibition "Architecture of the Five Senses." Musicians played in KKAA buildings, among them SUNNY HILLS and COEDA HOUSE, and the performance was streamed to the exhibition hall in Beijing, where a stage held 100 LED speakers that change their light with the sound. The post names three musicians as the makers of the exhibition's music: Yuya Haryu on composition and keyboard, Tomoe Ando (the same Tomo Ando) on composition and percussion, and Ryo Kusunose on arrangement and saxophone. The page does not give the date of the performance.

His one release credit came seven weeks after that post. From Where The Sun Rises is by the Light Music Society, the big-band circle of Keio University, a student band with a 76-year history at the time of its announcement and the most wins in the history of the national student big-band contest. It came out as a CD digipak (catalogue number LMS-001) on 22 February 2023 and on streaming services on 29 March 2023. The six tracks each feature a different guest: the drummer Shun Ishiwaka on "TOKYO," Hiroyuki Ishikawa on "Sylphide of The Watermill," the tenor saxophonist Yu Kuga on "Good Thing Will Happen," the saxophonist Tomoaki Baba on "Awake," Kusunose on "Dancer In Nowhere," and the guitarist Taka Nawashiro on "Breath of the City 'Seattle'." The Tower Records listing credits "Dancer In Nowhere" as composed and arranged by Miho Hazama. It is the title piece of her own 2018 album Dancer in Nowhere, and the Light Music Society version runs 9 minutes 27 seconds, the second-longest track on the record after the 13 minute 48 second closer. The band's announcement also says that it has performed with the trumpeter Takuya Kuroda and the saxophonists Remy Le Boeuf and Ben Wendel.

On 19 June 2023 he played alto saxophone with the Yuka Konishi Quartet at the Tokyo jazz club BODY&SOUL, with Yuka Konishi on bass, Yuki Hirate on piano and Shutaro Akimoto on drums. The club's own listing bills the evening as "Modern Jazz, Standard/Original" and gives two stages, at 19:30 and 21:00. He is also credited on alto saxophone, with Konishi on bass, in a video of "Le Petit Prince," a piece by the trombonist Kazuho Murakami, played by Ensemble Red Currant under the conductor Yutaro Takakuwa and titled as recorded live at Body and Soul. The video is undated; the 14 players include a three-man saxophone section, two trumpets, two trombones, piano, bass, drums and a string quartet.

In September 2023 he moved to Kyonan, a town in the Awa district at the southern end of Chiba Prefecture, and the duo "Tomo Ando and Ryo Kusunose" (安藤巴と楠瀬亮) dates from the same year. Ando, born in 1997 in Kashiwa, Chiba, studied percussion at Geidai and won first place in the percussion division of the 37th Japan Wind and Percussion Competition. The duo's billing is usually "percussion, saxophone and others," and its documented concerts have been in a croquette shop, a roadside station, a farm stand, galleries and an arts venue rather than in jazz clubs. The venues named in the duo's biography include Tsubame Studio in Kodenmacho, bonobo in Jingumae, the Horikawa Kaigishitsu in Kyoto, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa and the Chiba City Museum of Art, and it lists among their fellow performers the artist Atsuhiro Ito, Kota Yamauchi, the bassist Joji Sawada, はながっつ and Momose Yasunaga.

The dated engagements announced for the duo run as follows, taken from the organisers' own pages. A short set with Atsuhiro Ito was billed for 27 April 2024 at the "Shishishika Kyonkyonan" exhibition at the roadside station Hota Elementary School in Kyonan, and on 29 April and 5 May 2024 the pair were billed for "Oto no Matataki," a free roaming improvisation event across the station and its kindergarten grounds. On 10 and 11 February 2025 they organised "In Awa," two days at SuperDeluxe's Kamogawa SupernaturalDeluxe venue in Chiba, with the percussionists Manami Kakudo and Ryotaro Miyasaka as guests; the second day was billed as the premiere of a score the pair had written after poems by Yaso Saijo, who left traces in Kyonan. On 11 March 2025 they were billed with the contrabassist Jyoji Sawada, the vocalist Lico and the clarinetist Noriyuki Imanishi at the croquette shop 3103 croquette, and on 18 May 2025 with the vocalist Aoi Tagami at SANGA Soba and Coffee Stand in Futtsu. On 27 September 2025 they shared a bill with Sawada, Lico, Yae and Imanishi at naeme farmers stand in Kamogawa, and on 18 October 2025 they were billed for a session there with the Buenos Aires artists QOA and Primeiro. On 6 January 2026 they were billed with Takahiro Kawaguchi, who works mainly with self-made instruments and modified devices, at HoiPoi in Koenji, Tokyo, during the Tokyo leg of the "Look Back Kyonan" exhibition.

In early summer 2026 he moved his base from Kyonan to the Yamanashi and Nagano area. A one-man concert by the duo, "Tomo Ando and Ryo Kusunose and Croquette," is scheduled for 28 October 2026 at 3103 croquette on Dairoku beach in Kyonan, with doors at 17:00, music at 18:00 and a capacity of 50. The shop's announcement bills it as the pair's "LAST GIGS" and as the culmination of their activity in the area. His 2026 biography lists the saxophone, singing, coffee roasting and making small objects among his activities and says they are all "climbing the same mountain."

Kusunose is a working improviser with a jazz-club side, not a bandleader with a recorded body of work, and the sources describe his playing only in outline. The dated evidence for jazz is the June 2023 quartet night at BODY&SOUL, billed as modern jazz with standards and originals, his alto saxophone chair in Ensemble Red Currant, his feature on a Light Music Society big-band record filed under jazz by Apple Music and Tower Records, and his own statement that jazz was one of the interests he pursued at Geidai alongside the classical curriculum. Apple Music files his artist page under Jazz and MusicBrainz tags him jazz.

The other side of his work is documented just as clearly. SuperDeluxe tags the February 2025 concerts Acoustic, Ambient, Experimental and Improvisation, and describes the musicians of the first night's session as moving lightly across contemporary music, jazz, experimental music and pop. The duo is a percussionist and a saxophonist, and its programmes are built from improvisation, composed scores and sessions with guests from Brazilian-music, ambient and experimental backgrounds. He names no influences in any biography that has been found, and no review of his playing has been located, so none is claimed here.

His instrument is the alto saxophone in the jazz settings and "saxophone and others" in the duo. His April 2024 biography says he had been busy collecting percussion instruments and whistles or flutes, and an October 2025 biography says his performing formats range from singing to his own accompaniment all the way to a fish tank.