Stomu Takeishi (武石務, Takeishi Tsutomu in Japanese order) is a bassist who built his career in New York's improvising scene, playing a fretless five-string electric bass and a five-string acoustic bass guitar, often with looping and electronics. He was born in 1964 in Mito, in Ibaraki Prefecture, and started out as a koto player. In 1983 he left for the United States to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, finished there in 1986, and then moved to Manhattan to study at The New School. He has lived in New York ever since.

One of his first prominent credits is the electric bass on Paul Motian and the Electric Bebop Band (Paul Motian on drums, Joshua Redman on tenor saxophone, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Brad Schoeppach on guitars; JMT, 1993), an album of bebop standards played with electric instruments. Through the second half of the 1990s he became one of the busiest bassists in the downtown scene. He is the fretless bass on Henry Threadgill's Where's Your Cup? (Columbia, 1997), recorded by Threadgill's band Make a Move with Bill Laswell co-producing, and on Make a Move's Everybodys Mouth's a Book (Pi Recordings, 2001), the first release on the Pi label, with Dafnis Prieto on drums. The guitarist Brandon Ross, who was in that band, became a lasting partner. When Threadgill's later band Zooid recorded This Brings Us To Volume I (2009), Volume II (2010) and Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp (2012) for Pi, Takeishi was the acoustic bass guitarist, with Christopher Hoffman on cello on the last of the three. He is credited again on Threadgill's 2025 album Listen Ship.

In 1997 he also joined cellist Erik Friedlander's quartet Topaz, with the saxophonist Andy Laster and the percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, his brother. The group made four albums, Topaz (Siam, 1998), Skin (2000), Quake (Cryptogramophone, 2003) and Prowl (2006), and Takeishi played on Friedlander's She Sees in 2023. The quartet also recorded "Kinyan" for The Unknown Masada (Tzadik, 2003), an album of reworkings of tunes by John Zorn.

The pianist Myra Melford has used him in four bands: Crush, whose Dance Beyond the Color (Arabesque, 2000) credits him as a producer alongside Melford; The Tent, with Chris Speed, Cuong Vu and Kenny Wollesen, on Where the Two Worlds Touch (2004); Be Bread, on The Image of Your Body (2006) and The Whole Tree Gone (2010); and Snowy Egret, with Ron Miles, Liberty Ellman and Tyshawn Sorey, on Snowy Egret (Yellowbird, 2015) and The Other Side of Air (Firehouse 12, 2018), which he co-produced. He also played bass for the trumpeter Cuong Vu on Bound (2000), Pure, Come Play with Me (2001), It's Mostly Residual (2005), Vu-Tet (2007) and Leaps of Faith (2011), and in Vu's trio with the drummer Ted Poor on Cuong Vu Trio Meets Pat Metheny (Nonesuch, 2016), where Pat Metheny plays guitar and produced.

A long run of work links him to Japanese musicians in New York. Pianist Satoko Fujii's Orchestra New York recorded Undulation (2006), Summer Suite (2008), Eto (2011), Shiki (2014), Fukushima (2017) and Entity (2019) with him on bass and her husband Natsuki Tamura in the trumpet section, and he appears on the Fujii orchestra album South Wind (1997). In 2006 he and Brandon Ross, with Daisuke Suzuki (鈴木大介), contributed to Quotation of Dream (Intoxicate), a tribute to the film music of Toru Takemitsu.

Takeishi has also co-led a series of records of his own. With the tabla player Badal Roy and the guitarist Kenny Wessel he made Daybreak (Igmod, 1998), with Satoshi Takeishi on most tracks and the saxophonist Tim Ries; with Roy and the flutist and soprano saxophonist Geoff Warren, Kolkata Rose (FMR, 2002), where he plays bass guitar and tambura. Human Rights (Pulque, 1999) is a quartet record led with the guitarist Francisco Mondragon, with Satoshi Takeishi and the drummer Bobby Kapp. The Fell Clutch (Animul, 2007) is a free-improvising quartet with Ned Rothenberg on reeds, Tony Buck on drums and David Tronzo on guitar. His duo with Brandon Ross, For Living Lovers, has made two albums for Sunnyside, Revealing Essence (2014) and Natural Name (2025). With the pianist Mark Aanderud and the drummer Hernán Hecht he leads the trio Molé, which made RGB (RareNoise, 2014), with two of its nine pieces co-written by him, and has toured in Mexico.

He also appears on records by Bruce Arnold (Blue Eleven, 1996), the saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti (Stolen Days, Auand, 2006, as Sax Pistols with the drummer Dan Weiss), Lucia Pulido, Ahmad Mansour, Jessica Jones, Kirk Knuffke, Taylor Ho Bynum and Steph Richards, among others. His own biographical notes name Don Cherry, Butch Morris, Dave Liebman, Randy Brecker and Wynton Marsalis among other musicians he has performed with. In the 2009 DownBeat Critics Poll he was named Rising Star in the Electric Bass category.

Takeishi plays instruments that sit between the usual bass roles: a fretless five-string electric bass and a five-string acoustic bass guitar, which he plays on the Zooid records, the For Living Lovers duo and the Melford albums. He uses extended techniques and electronic effects, including looping, and critics have praised his attention to timbre. He began on the koto.

His discography runs through several worlds that are usually kept apart. In Threadgill's bands and the Fujii orchestra he is a member of a written, rehearsed ensemble that still leaves a great deal of space for improvisation. With Badal Roy and Kenny Wessel on Daybreak, and with Roy and Geoff Warren on Kolkata Rose, he works in a jazz and Indian-music blend that Discogs files under Hindustani, Indian Classical and Fusion. The Fell Clutch is catalogued as free improvisation, and the duo with Brandon Ross is an acoustic music of its own.