Takao Naoi (直居隆雄) is a Tokyo guitarist and arranger who has led his own jazz dates in 1970, 1977, 1982 and 2008 and, in between, spent decades in the city's recording studios, where by his own account he played on thousands of songs. He was born on 14 January 1947; his website gives the Tokyo ward of Setagaya as his home, and MusicBrainz records Setagaya as his birth area. The site also says his father was the film screenwriter Kinya Naoi (直居欽哉). He studied science and engineering at Aoyama Gakuin University, left in 1968 to become a professional musician, and worked his first job at the Five Spot in Jiyugaoka.

His early years were spent in other people's bands. He lists the groups of Isao Suzuki (鈴木勲), Yasuro Osawa, Shinya Kimura and Nobuo Hara's Sharps & Flats among them, and he and two fellow guitarists from his student days, Yoshiaki Masuo and Ryo Kawasaki, were teasingly dubbed the "three crows" of young jazz guitar (the Japanese idiom for a trio of rising stars). The Sharps & Flats years are the best documented. He remembers joining at nineteen, barely able to read the charts, and leaving after about a year for America; the Discogs credits put him on three of the big band's 1969 releases, including Little Giant, recorded in December 1969, where he takes the guitar solo on "Dark Horse." He also played on the band's records with the American arranger Oliver Nelson, whom Hara had invited to write for the band: 3-2-1-0, which he dates to 19 and 20 September 1969, and Oliver Nelson In Tokyo. He says he barely spoke to Nelson then, since he had no English, but a few months later a new chart arrived from Nelson in the mail, an arrangement Nelson had written for Wes Montgomery, which he now reads as Nelson having sensed how much he admired Wes.

In 1970, when he was 23, he recorded his first album as a leader, What's Happening? for Union Records (ULP-2001), arranged with Masahiko Satoh. With Akira Ishikawa on drums, Kunimitsu Inaba on electric bass, Hiromasa Suzuki on electric piano and Takao Uematsu on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, it mixed Beatles and Hair songs with two originals, and Discogs tags it Jazz-Funk and Avant-garde Jazz. He remembers the music as a mix of rock and jazz that had no name yet (people called it "jazz rock"), and says it sold poorly because it was serious. A second album for the label, Oh Happy Day (ULP-2003), arranged by Hiromasa Suzuki, followed the commercial example of the orchestral pops albums then successful in America. He prefers the playing on the second, which he finds more relaxed.

He then went to New York to study. His own pages date the stay variously, from 1970 to 1972, and describe the school differently (the Japanese-American Institute in one place, the Manhattan School of Music in his English biography); they agree that he came home at the end of 1972. Soon after arriving he went to Manny's in Midtown with the bassist Teruo Nakamura and bought the Gibson L-5 CES that has been his main jazz guitar since, an instrument he dates to 1968 or 1969 from its serial number. George Benson, a friend, has played it and signed the back.

Back in Tokyo he became a studio guitarist almost at once. He explains that studio work was shifting from salaried house orchestras to freelance players because of the demand for eight-beat pop, and says he cannot remember ever having to canvass for it. Akira Ishikawa, the drummer who led Count Buffaloes, drew him into that band; the group gave regular concerts in 1974 and 1975 at the Fuji Film hall in Kasumicho and recorded widely, and Naoi appears on Drums Concerto, Get Up!, Emergency, Okinawa and others, arranging and conducting Take Me To Disco (1975). His site lists a Best Studio Musician award from 1974 and, as an arranger, Hit Prize and Golden Disc Prize awards for records by the singers Kumiko Ohba and Kumiko Aimoto, and the session credits bear out the range: Seiko Matsuda and Momoe Yamaguchi albums, the Space Battleship Yamato scores, Lupin III, and the 1987 Dragon Quest II soundtrack. Alongside the pop work he played straight jazz at Pit Inn and Taro, and he says he performed in the groups of Sadao Watanabe, Terumasa Hino, Yuji Ohno, Shigeharu Mukai, Hidefumi Toki and Mikio Masuda; several of those leaders are documented elsewhere in his credits, others rest on his own account.

The late 1970s and early 1980s are when his jazz identity and his studio identity overlap most. In The Mood (Toshiba TP-60181), released on 5 February 1977, is his own guitar album: eight standards, arranged by him, with a rhythm section of Kenji Takamizu on bass and three pianists across the tracks, and Discogs files it under Fusion. The same year two of its tracks, "Moon River" and "Dream," reappeared on a quadraphonic Toshiba compilation of arrangements by five hands, New Interior Music. With saxophonist Takeru Muraoka and trumpeter Susumu Kazuhara he led a rehearsal band at the Roppongi club Mingos that made Soft Landing (King, 1977 by his dating, 1978 on Discogs), whose tunes, he says, had every member write out his improvised solo so that the band could play them in unison; he adds that the Brecker Brothers once sat in when they were visiting Tokyo. From 1978 he also wrote and played for the stage, and his site lists the Shiki theatre company and the Tokyo Disneyland show stage among his theatre and show credits. He was a regular in Chikara Ueda's Power Station, on Bos & Boz (with the harmonica player Toots Thielemans) and Flying Easy, where Harvey Mason was the guest drummer; he says Mason told him he was a monster who could play anything. He is also listed as a member of Yuji Ohno's You & The Explosion Band, which made the 1979 Lupin The 3rd soundtrack, and he played on Ohno's score for Inugamike no Ichizoku (1976) and, in 1979, on the Masa Matsuda and Ohno album Silent Dialogue. He also recorded with Tatsuya Takahashi's Tokyo Union orchestra; his compositions and arrangements "Route 246" and "Flying Subway" appear on a 1989 compilation titled for the band's 1978 Montreux, 1979 Tokyo and 1980 San Francisco appearances, with Naoi taking the guitar solo on the second.

A different collaboration began in 1980, when a Toshiba EMI producer named him arranger for a record by the American-born shakuhachi player John Kaizan Neptune. He says that album, Shogun (1981), entered the American jazz charts, and the two went on recording together from then until at least 2007. Two In Flight (Eastworld, 1982), co-billed to both men, was recorded between 28 June and 9 July 1982 with a Tokyo horn section, a vocal on one track and four of its eight tunes written or co-written by Naoi; he describes it as arranged with a pop sensibility. They went on to Jazzen (Denon, 1987), Sky Spirit (1991), Kite (1992, recorded in Germany with a string quartet), the quiet standards album Shakuhachi Mellow Jazz (1999, recorded in a concert hall in Kimitsu, Chiba, over two days in May with bassist Toru Kase and drummer Mark DeRose), Steps In Time (recorded in Chennai, India, in 2005), and Bamboo Magic (2007). Together they toured in the United States, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India and Germany, and played a Caribbean cruise ship, and made tours of California in 2000 and again in the early 2000s, the later one including the Idyllwild Jazz Festival.

He did not stay only a player. From 1974 he arranged professionally, and from about 1985 arranging and producing took up more of his time; from 1990 he wrote arrangements for theme parks across Japan, among them Shima Spain Village. In 1993 he formed a rehearsal band of studio colleagues, Pig Nose, and between 1994 and 1997 he performed in and was music director of a Sony Building concert series in Ginza called Nishi-Ginza Jazz Club, with the vocal group Time Five among the guests. In 1995 he became secretary general of the Japan Composers and Arrangers Association (JCAA), the start of a long run of work defending musicians' rights, and he later joined the boards of the Japan Council of Performers' Organizations (2001), the council of music creators' organizations (FCA, 2006) and the performers' rights licensing body MPN. On 18 January 2002 he produced the JCAA Jazz Guitar Summit 2002, with Sadanori Nakamure, Kiyoshi Sugimoto and Yoshiaki Okayasu, bassist Ikuo Sakurai, drummer Hideo Sekine and the singer Marlene, and in 2004 he produced a Special Big Band for Norio Maeda at Sweet Basil. Between those, in 1998 he made Vibration Pulsar for King Records, a five-track album of ambient guitar and guitar synthesizer produced by the composer Shigeaki Saegusa; it is the one leader record that is not jazz, and Discogs files it as New Age. He has also been a lecturer at the Toho Gakuen short college and a jazz guitar teacher at the An Music School in Tokyo.

The most recent chapter is the clubs. In 2008 he released HEARTMADE with the guitarist Kiyoshi Hagiya as L-5 Brothers (the name comes from the Gibson L-5 both men play), a twelve-track duo set recorded in about two and a half days at a studio attached to a pension in Sugadaira, Nagano, as a tribute to Wes Montgomery. The pair were interviewed in the August 2008 issue of Jazz Life and in Shinko Music's Jazz Guitar Book (Vol. 18), and he was later the subject of a feature in Vol. 26. The Jazz Shiryokan live database lists 96 appearances for him between January 2018 and January 2025: in Kamakura at Jazz Club Daphne, in Ikebukuro at P's Bar and Montgomery Land, at Organ Jazz Club in a trio with organist Daisuke Kawai and drummer Yasushi Ichihara, in Yokohama at the Noge club Junk and at Airegin (where on 22 March 2024 he shared a bill with Sadanori Nakamure and the guitarist 井上智), and in guitar duos with Masuo, Hagiya and his student Yoshitaka Nakane (中根賢隆). Singers on those bills include Mari Nakamoto, 清水秀子 and 石川真奈美. The last listing is dated 13 January 2025. In August 2022 he was the guest on a Tokyo web series of music and talk hosted by the bassist Hideaki Kanazawa and the pianist Akira Ishii.

He is living as far as the sources show; the most recent listing found is from January 2025, and he turned 79 in January 2026.

He describes himself as a jazz guitarist who spent most of his working life as a studio craftsman. He first heard Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Wes Montgomery as a junior high school student and decided to become a jazz musician, and Montgomery stays the foundation of his playing: HEARTMADE is dedicated to him, "Summertime" borrows the chord changes of Montgomery's "4 on 6," and Naoi plays it in octaves, with the intro in two. On his own telling, Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and George Benson shaped him early, and in later years he has tried to move past them toward a contemporary voice of his own; he says his tone on Shakuhachi Mellow Jazz resembles Burrell's. His heroes among Tokyo guitarists were the elder session players, and he calls Kiyoshi Sugimoto the one he chased as a high-school student.

The records show a player who moves between registers. The 1970 What's Happening? sits in the jazz-rock and avant-garde end of the Discogs tags; In The Mood is a guitar-and-rhythm album of well-known songs; the Power Station and Count Buffaloes dates are fusion and jazz-funk; the Neptune records lean on his arranging for horns and strings; HEARTMADE is a two-guitar standards date with one blues original by Hagiya. He has also said that he grew up loving soul and that Eric Gale, Phil Upchurch, John Tropea and David T. Walker were among the guitarists he copied, which he thinks helped his studio work. His principal instruments are the Gibson L-5 CES for jazz, a Telecaster-shaped Combat solid-body guitar and an Ibanez semi-hollow instrument given to him by the singer Goro Noguchi, in whose backing band he played, for studio work.

He regards the jazz and pop sides as one career. In his own words he is a jazz musician, but the studio taught him to make music that an audience can enjoy, and he likes to depart from the agreed form of a standard because repeating it bores him.