Sadanori Nakamure (中牟礼貞則, read Nakamure Sadanori) was one of the pioneers of Japanese jazz guitar, a player whose recording career ran from the mid-1960s to the early 2020s and whose stage career lasted until his nineties. He was born on March 15, 1933, in Izumi, in Kagoshima Prefecture, at the southern end of Kyushu. Japanese Wikipedia says he built wooden guitars as a schoolchild, and Kyodo News reported that he taught himself the instrument before moving to Tokyo, where he attended Aoyama Gakuin University and turned professional in 1952 while still a student. He passed away on June 4, 2026, at the age of 93.

The early years are thinly documented in English. A 2021 Guitar Magazine article places him in a two-guitar format with Masayuki Takayanagi in the 1950s, and Japanese Wikipedia lists him among the participants in the 1963 session at the Ginza club Ginparis, a night later released by Three Blind Mice as Ginparis Session under Takayanagi's New Century Music Institute, though the album's own credits name only Takayanagi's group.

The 1960s are where the recorded story starts. On November 25, November 30 and December 4, 1966, Sadao Watanabe's group recorded Jazz & Bossa for the Takt label, with Nakamure on guitar, Masabumi Kikuchi on piano, Eijiro Hagiwara on bass, Masahiko Togashi on drums and Hideo Miyata on percussion. The same guitarist and the same Kikuchi and Togashi are on Victor's Bossa Nova '67 the following year, and on the Victor date by the American alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano, Folk Soul (1967). Kyodo credits the Watanabe group with setting off Japan's bossa nova boom, and Nakamure was its guitarist at that moment.

In June 1967, over three days from the 12th to the 14th, he made his own first record. Guitar Samba (Takt, JAZZ-10) is a sextet album of Brazilian material, "Felicidade", "Mais Que Nada", "One Note Samba" and "Tico Tico" among its twelve tracks, with a second guitarist in Mitsuo Yamashita, Masaoki Terakawa on bass, George Otsuka on drums and Hideo Miyata and Masami Kawahara on percussion. RCA pressed it again in 1974 as Sadanori Nakamure & His Group. Also in 1967 he joined the band of drummer Takeshi Inomata on Liner Note and on the Takt date Drum Shot, and the association lasted for more than fifteen years. He is on Inomata and the West Liners' Come Together! (1969), on Jazz Rock in Stravinsky (1970), on the arranger Norio Maeda's big band The Third from its first LP in 1971 through Take the "A" Train (1977), and on Inomata's Drummer Man (1975) and Urusei Yatsura (1983). Between 1970 and 1973 the same group of players, with Inomata on drums and Maeda arranging, recorded a series of albums with the koto players Tadao and Kazue Sawai and the shakuhachi master Hozan Yamamoto, among them J. S. Bach Is Alive and Well and Doing His Thing on the Koto, on which Nakamure played guitar. In 1968 he and the vibraphonist Hiroshi Matsumoto, a different musician from the saxophonist Hidehiko Matsumoto, made My Funny Valentine / Vibraphone & Guitar for Columbia as the Matsumoto = Nakamure All Stars.

On July 5, 1972, at Victor Studio in Tokyo, he was one of two electric guitarists, with Takayanagi, on Masabumi Kikuchi + Gil Evans, a session led by Gil Evans on his Japanese visit, with Billy Harper on tenor saxophone, Kohsuke Mine on alto and soprano saxophone, Yoshio Suzuki on bass and Togashi among the drummers. That year he also appeared on Warner's The Summit of Guitar Quartet beside Shungo Sawada, Kiyoshi Sugimoto and Kimio Mizutani, a four-guitar album arranged by Norio Maeda.

The mid-1970s produced the records he is best known for among collectors. On April 5, 1975, he and the bassist Kunimitsu Inaba recorded Conversation, the duo album for Three Blind Mice (TBM-43) at Aoi Studio, and that October the same pair backed the singer Yoshiko Goto on A Touch of Love. He met Shungo Sawada head to head on Shungo Sawada vs. Sadanori Nakamure (Teichiku, 1976), and took the second half of Guitar Bossa (RCA, 1977). In 1976 he played electric guitar on Kunihiko Sugano's The Shadow of Your Smile, recorded with strings on July 21.

His own trio record from this period, Live at Shiny Stockings (Victor, 1979), with Masamichi Hosokawa on bass and Takahiro Suzuki on drums, was reissued by Victor in 2018. After it, the recording pace slowed: We'll Be Together Again with Inaba, cut in four sessions in 1994 and released in 1997, then Inter Cross (Zest, 1999), recorded between March and May of that year with Shigeru Iso on bass and Masasuke Watanabe on drums.

The twenty-first century is a late flowering. He was a guest on Kazumi Watanabe's Guitar Renaissance III (2006), on the track "Momo", and Kazumi Watanabe's own biography on Apple Music says he studied for a time with Nakamure at the Yamaha Music School in Tokyo; Kyodo and Japanese Wikipedia both name Watanabe as his pupil. Gentle Three (2008) paired him with Inaba and the drummer Tetsujiro Obara, recorded on October 3 and 4, 2007. The bassist Hiroaki Mizutani made him the guitarist of his phonolite trio and ensemble on While I'm Sleeping (Studio Wee, 2003) and My Heart Belongs to Daddy (Studio Wee, 2006), and wrote "Song 315" for him, a title taken from his birthday, 15 March. Later duo records followed with the pianist Rei Takagi (DUO-one, 2015) and the guitarist Yoshiaki Okayasu (Guitarist, 2016). In October 2019 he recorded with the group Root Bagu and the trumpeter Shunzo Ohno, alongside the guitarist Yoshiaki Okayasu; the album, O@Bag, came out in 2021. A 2020 release, Detour Ahead (Live at Airegin), gathered Yokohama club recordings from 2003 and June 27, 2020, and a 2022 tribute concert, "We Live MURE san Again", at Komorebi Hall in Hoya on April 24 and 25, produced the live album Gen-On. That autumn he made Generations Guitar Trio with the younger guitarists Mitsukuni Tanabe and Fumika Asari, released on November 9, 2022. A 2021 book of his life, 中牟礼貞則 : 孤高のジャズ・インプロヴァイザーの長き旅路, was published by Rittor Music, edited by Yasushi Kuboki. In 2024 the Agency for Cultural Affairs gave him a Commissioner's commendation.

He was still on stage at 93. Videos from Airegin in Yokohama, where he recorded in 2003 and 2020, show him in 2024 playing solo and in trio, and a duo performance of "Autumn Leaves" with the guitarist Hal Takauchi is posted under the title "the 93-year-old guitarist Sadanori Nakamure". According to the official fan page, as reported by Natalie, he had been in hospital for treatment since the spring of 2026 with the aim of returning to the stage, and he passed away with his family beside him. The funeral was held privately for relatives only.

Nakamure's playing came out of the bebop guitar tradition and was then bent toward the cool school. Guitar Magazine reports that he began by studying Charlie Christian, was drawn next to the pianist Lennie Tristano and the saxophonist Lee Konitz, and in the 1970s took harmonic ideas from Jim Hall; the magazine describes him as a studious, theory-minded player. His records bear that out: the leader dates of his later decades are made almost entirely of standards, played by a guitarist who preferred small groups of bass and piano, drums, or a second guitar. Japanese Wikipedia lists the Gibson ES-175 as his signature instrument.

What the same magazine stresses is the way he accompanied. Rather than comping in the background, he wrote counter-melodic lines that answered a singer or a horn, working in the manner of a small horn section, and he used both pick and fingers. The 1975 duo records with Kunimitsu Inaba and Yoshiko Goto are the clearest example, and a 2023 review of his duo with the pianist Takeshi Shibuya singled out his slow, carefully built introductions and endings.

Brazilian music was the other pole of his work. Guitar Samba (1967), the Sadao Watanabe sessions of 1966 and 1967 and the 1977 Guitar Bossa tie him to the bossa nova wave that Kyodo says Watanabe's group set off, and the same guitarist is credited on koto, big-band and studio-orchestra dates throughout the 1970s, which shows how wide a range of settings he worked in.