Tadayuki Harada (原田忠幸) is a baritone saxophonist from Kyoto whose career follows the whole arc of postwar Japanese big-band jazz: the dance halls and American-base clubs of the early 1950s, the Swing Journal poll era, a few years as a studio and show musician in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and then forty years of Tokyo sessions, recordings and club dates. Columbia Japan's reissue notes call him the country's foremost baritone saxophonist, and a 2010 magazine interview places him at the top of that field in Japan.

He was born on July 30, 1936, in Kyoto, into a musical family. His father was the drummer Jimmy Harada (ジミー原田, real name Joji Harada, 1911 to 1995), who ran a popular band in the Kansai region before the war and later led Jimmy Harada and the Old Boys. His older brother Isamu Harada is also a jazz drummer, and Isamu's son Shuntaro Harada was an original drummer of The Square, the group now known as T-Square. Tadayuki says he dreamed of professional baseball as a boy, and that the family's move to Tokyo after the war ended that plan. Band members lived in the family house in Kyoto, so music came as a matter of course.

His first instrument was the clarinet, which his father bought him when he left middle school. His teacher was Raymond Conde, the Filipino clarinetist whose Gay Septet was one of the most popular groups of the early postwar jazz boom. Harada worked as the band boy for about two years, learning from the older players, then played alto saxophone at Yokohama's Cliffside Club. In 1955, at 19, he ran into the bandleader Nobuo Hara on a train and was invited to join Nobuo Hara and the Sharps and Flats as a baritone saxophonist. By his own account the band had never carried a baritone before, he did not own one, and Hara borrowed a horn for him; he taught himself the instrument with no model to follow. He stayed under two years and often backed the singer Chiemi Eri.

In 1957 he joined the West Liners, then led by the tenor saxophonist Konosuke Saijo (西條孝之介), a group built on the West Coast sound of Stan Getz and Lee Konitz. Norio Maeda wrote the arrangements, and the band was soon renamed for its drummer, Takeshi Inomata. On May 10, 1961, at TBS Hall in Tokyo, a group of young modern players recorded Modern Jazz Show Case as the Modern Jazz Playboys: Sadao Watanabe on alto saxophone, Akira Miyazawa on tenor, Harada on baritone, Hideto Kanai on bass and Inomata on drums, playing "Moanin'," "A Night in Tunisia," "The Preacher" and other hard bop repertoire that Japanese listeners had loved since the 1950s.

His most visible session of the decade came in July 1964. On the 16th and 17th, in a TBS studio in Tokyo, Toshiko Akiyoshi, working at the time as Toshiko Mariano, led an all-star Japanese big band with the bassist Paul Chambers and the drummer Jimmy Cobb as guests and Charlie Mariano arranging most of the book. Harada was the baritone saxophonist, in a reed section with Sleepy Matsumoto (Hidehiko Matsumoto), Miyazawa, Hiroshi Okazaki and Shigeo Suzuki, and a brass section that included Terumasa Hino and Hiroshi Suzuki. It came out in the United States on Vee-Jay as Jazz in Japan, and in Japan as Toshiko & Modern Jazz.

In August 1966 he left the West Liners together with Maeda, and the next month he went to the United States. He has said he wanted to test himself abroad, and that his partner, the singer Izumi Yukimura, wanted to sing there. In Los Angeles he found work slowly, mostly in studios, shows and film scoring, with help from the actress Shirley MacLaine. In January 1967 he and Yukimura were married in Reno, Nevada, where she was the vocalist and he was in the band for a Donald O'Connor show. After about a year and a half he moved to Las Vegas for show work, and he later called the exposure to big-name singers and bands the most valuable thing he took home. He meant to settle there, but calls from Yukimura's management brought him back to Japan, and the work offers waiting for him in Tokyo kept him. The marriage later ended in divorce.

On a return to Tokyo in 1968 he recorded Playboy's Theme for the Takt Jazz label on May 1 and 2, with Maeda writing string arrangements around a band that included Masaru Imada and Maeda on piano, Sadanori Nakamure on guitar, Inomata on drums, and a horn section of Shigeo Suzuki, Hiroshi Okazaki, Ichiro Mimori, Yoichi Kanai, Tetsuo Fushimi, Keiri Okubo and Hiroshi Nemoto. The program mixes the hits of the day ("Sunny," "A Whiter Shade of Pale," "The Look of Love") with "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" and the title tune. Columbia Japan issued it on CD for the first time in July 2009 and describes it as popular with club DJs.

By 1971 he was settled in Japan again and formed his own big band in 1971, The Hearts, with an unusual front line of four trumpets and two saxophones. The same year he joined Inomata's jazz-rock band The Third, recording Hare Krishna / The Third First Album on April 6 and 10, 1971, with Maeda conducting. In June 1975 he was one of the seven players on Inomata and Maeda's Alone Together, cut in a single day at Iino Hall. From 1979 he was a member of Maeda's Wind-Breakers, which he described in 2010 as still his main regular job. He also made leader records of Japanese pop and television themes, including Love Sounds from T.V. Drama Themes (Columbia, 1976), and in 1979 Discogs credits him as producer of Maria Asahina's disco-soul album Maria, an Alfa record with arrangements by Harvey Mason, Kouichi Sugiyama and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Asahina is Yukimura's daughter.

By his own account he led the band for Frank Sinatra's five Japan tours, in 1974, 1985, 1989, 1991 and 1992, and he lists Marlene Dietrich, Anita O'Day, Helen Merrill, Natalie Cole, Sammy Davis Jr. and Quincy Jones among the visitors he played behind. In 1994 he toured New York with Inomata's All Stars, playing Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Theater. He calls Gerry Mulligan, whom he first met at TBS Hall in the 1950s, a teacher for life, and says he received his guidance in the 1990s.

Midnight Sun (Sax Record, 2002) is a quintet album of standards under his own name, recorded on April 24, 2002, at the Kanagawa Prefectural Public Hall, with Toshihiko Ogawa on piano, Sadanori Nakamure on guitar, Kunimitsu Inaba on bass and Shinnosuke Takahashi on drums. He turned 90 on July 30, 2026, and Japanese Wikipedia lists him as living. In 2010, reflecting on 55 years as a professional, he said that jazz was something he had lived alongside his whole life and that his happiest moments were playing favorite tunes with close friends.

Harada plays a Selmer New York baritone saxophone made in Elkhart, with a Meyer mouthpiece, and his sound is the thick, rounded one that a big-band baritone needs. He says the instrument changes the whole band: when a baritone joins a full band, the sound gains body and thickness. That is the role he filled for Hara, for Saijo and Inomata, for Maeda's Wind-Breakers, and for the visiting Americans who hired him.

His model for the instrument was the West Coast school. The West Liners were formed around the sound of Stan Getz and Lee Konitz, and he names Gerry Mulligan as the baritone player who taught him most. Alongside the section work he has a ballad and standards voice of his own, which Midnight Sun puts in the open: "Angel Eyes," "Here's That Rainy Day," "These Foolish Things," "I Loves You, Porgy" and an unaccompanied reading near the end of the program.

His recorded range is wide. The same musician is on a 1956 Swing Journal all-star disc, a 1964 Toshiko Akiyoshi big-band session, 1970s jazz-rock sessions with Inomata, television themes and Japanese pop covers under his own name, and albums by singers from Helen Merrill's 1963 Tokyo recording to Yuming's 1975 Cobalt Hour. Japanese-language sources record that he finished in the top five of the Swing Journal reader poll every year, in the "other instruments" category. Asked what he learned in America, he said that technical skill is assumed there and that individuality is what gets a player noticed.