Soichi Noriki (野力奏一, Noriki Soichi in Japanese order) is a Kyoto-born pianist, keyboardist and arranger who has worked for fifty years with Tokyo's jazz singers and bandleaders, a pianist who can also write the charts. He was born on October 20, 1957, took classical piano lessons as a child, and, in his own account, turned to jazz after hearing Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

His start was in the family business. In 1974 he joined the full band led by his father, the saxophonist and clarinettist Hisayoshi Noriki, who had led an 18-piece band at the Kyoto club Bellami since 1961; Japanese Wikipedia gives its name as the Bel-Ami All Stars (ベラミ・オールスターズ). The elder Noriki later founded the Noriki Studio in Kyoto, which opened in 1982 and now stands near Kyoto Station. In 1977 the son moved to Tokyo and began sitting in with the drummer George Kawaguchi's band, according to his own biography and Japanese Wikipedia.

By 1980 he was in Toshiyuki Honda's Burning Wave and on the road with Tatsuro Yamashita. His first recording appearance is on the singer Anli Sugano's Show Case (Eastworld, 1981), where Discogs credits him on piano, electric piano and synthesizer. In 1983 he formed his own band, Noriki, and made Noriki for the same label, released on November 21, 1983. He wrote and arranged it, produced it with Yoichiro Kikuchi, and played piano, Fender Rhodes, Hammond B-3, Mini Moog, Prophet-5 and glockenspiel on it, with a small horn section and Yurie Kokubu singing. Dream Cruise followed on September 21, 1984, then Just! (Who Ring, 1987), the laserdisc Vision of the Heart (1987) and the compilation Blue Side (1988). Discogs files the group of records under Jazz, with the styles Fusion, Smooth Jazz and Jazz-Funk.

The same year as his first album he was already a studio fixture. He is keyboardist and co-sound producer, with the guitarist Tsunehide Matsuki, on Yasuko Agawa's Night Line (1983), and he went on to arrange her Le Cinéma (1992) and Beauty and the Beast (1994). His own biography says that from then on he toured in Japan and abroad as a member of the groups of Sadao Watanabe and Terumasa Hino. On February 23, 1988, at the Tokyo Music Joy '88 festival, he played synthesizer with George Russell's Living Time Orchestra, whose Japanese guests included Kohsuke Mine and Kazutoki Umezu; the concert was issued as New York on Electric Bird.

Crescent (Who Ring, September 13, 1989) is the record that put his name beside another, billed Noriki with Fukui. The bassist is Isoo Fukui, the pair share the composing credits, and the quintet is completed by Mamoru Nihonyanagi on drums and percussion, Shigeo Fuchino on saxophone and clarinet and Yoshimasa Shiozaki on acoustic guitar. The same year he began a second career in film. For the director Yoshimitsu Morita he scored Kitchen (1989, with a soundtrack on Epic/Sony), and later おいしい結婚 (1991) and (Haru) (1996, also with a soundtrack release).

The 1990s and 2000s are the years of the working pianist. He played keyboards on Wild Talk (1990) with Motohiko Hino's Urbanightrops, shared the piano chair with Hiromasa Suzuki on Hidefumi Toki's In A Sentimental Mood (Fun House, 1992), and became a regular pianist and arranger for the singer Kimiko Itoh. He was on the stage of the Japan Society in New York for her concert of March 24, 1994 (issued as An Evening with Kimiko Itoh), and on Sophisticated Lady (1995), where Discogs credits him with piano, keyboards, synthesizers, arrangements and conducting and where the guests included Michael Brecker. He also arranged her Standards My Way (1996). In 1998 the violinist Naoko Terai chose him, with Benisuke Sakai on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums, for her first album as a leader, Thinking of You.

By 1999 he was the pianist of Keiko Lee's band, and his own biography describes him as its pianist, arranger and music director; he is on her records from Keiko Lee Live 1999 (2000) and The Wonder of Love (2001) through Who's Screamin' (2004) to the trio albums The Golden Rule (2019) and Live at Jazz Inn Lovely (2020). The bassist Yoshio Suzuki put him in the quartet Bass Talk, which made Moon and Breeze (2004) with Sadao Watanabe as guest, then Love Letter (2007), Dancing Luna (2012) and Beyond the Forest (2019), and he is credited on the East Bounce album Mistral (2002). He also played keyboards and synthesizer on Shunzo Ohno's Sakura (2008). In 2015 he played piano on One Day, Forever, the singer Miki Yamaoka's album with Benny Golson as guest.

At sixty he released Piano Solo (NorikiMusic, April 18, 2018), a programme that runs from the Miles Davis repertoire ("Seven Steps to Heaven", "Blue in Green", "All Blues") to Wayne Shorter's "Fall" and his own "Kitchen / Full Moon." Saudade (2019) is a Brazilian-leaning programme with Sadao Watanabe as special guest. In 2024, fifty years after joining his father's band, he recorded My Songs at Miyazaki Piano Studio in Tokyo on March 4 and 5, 2024, on a New York Steinway Model L180. It includes his film themes "Haru" and "Kazamachi," a "Song For Noto" written after the Noto Peninsula earthquake, and a "Prayers For Peace" written with the war in Ukraine in mind. The same year he made a duo album, Honori (ほ・ん・の・り), with Toshiyuki Honda. In 2025 he played piano on the Akira Okazawa Band's live album P.S. I Love You from Shinjuku Pit Inn, and he remains the pianist in Keiko Lee's group.

Noriki's earliest records are fusion in the 1980s Tokyo sense. Noriki and Dream Cruise are layered with Rhodes, Hammond B-3 and Prophet-5, with a small horn section and a rhythm section built for groove, and the Discogs entries for them carry the styles Smooth Jazz, Jazz-Funk and Fusion. His own biography names Miles Davis and John Coltrane as the music that made him a jazz player, and the later records show the acoustic side of that: Piano Solo is largely repertoire from the Miles Davis circle, played alone on a concert grand.

What he has done more than anything else is accompany and arrange, and he is a singer's pianist by reputation and by credit list. Agawa, Itoh, Sugano and Lee are all vocalists whose records he arranged or played on, and the same instincts show in the string and orchestral charts he wrote for Agawa's Le Cinéma and Itoh's Sophisticated Lady, which he also conducted. In bands he is the keyboardist who can move between acoustic piano, electric piano and synthesizer in the same set, which is why the same discography holds Hino's Urbanightrops, Honda's Burning Waves and Suzuki's Bass Talk.

A large share of his session credits are on pop and city pop records, among them Tatsuro Yamashita, Anri, Malta and Mariya Takeuchi, and he scored films for a mainstream director. The jazz core is nonetheless where his own records, his standing bands and his billing as a bandleader sit. Cataloguing sites file him under jazz and fusion, and the American players his own site names among his collaborators include Michael Brecker, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, Roy Haynes, Ron Carter, Eddie Gomez, Peter Erskine, Randy Brecker and Randy Crawford. That list is his own and undated, so it is not the same as a credit.