Takao Uematsu (植松孝夫) is a Tokyo-born tenor saxophonist whose name sits on a run of Japanese jazz records from the early 1970s that collectors have kept in print, and whose career then ran through four more decades of sideman work. He was born on April 16, 1947, turned professional in 1966 at the age of 19, and played in the Count Buffaloes and in the guitarist Kiyoshi Sugimoto's quartet before joining the drummer George Otsuka's quartet in 1969.

His earliest recordings are from 1970 and come from two directions at once. In the spring he was a tenor saxophonist in Takeshi Inomata's big band Sound Limited, which recorded Sounds of Sound L.T.D. for Columbia on March 25 to 27 and Sound Ltd. for Express in April, with Shunzo Ohno on trumpet, Ryo Kawasaki on electric guitar and Toshiaki Yokota on flute. He is credited on soprano as well as tenor on the band's next record, New Rock in Europe, cut on June 22, 1970. On November 19 he led his own session, Debut, for Three Blind Mice, the Tokyo label founded that same year. The date was billed as a quartet and quintet: Uematsu on tenor, Takashi Imai on trombone, Sadayasu Fujii on Fender piano, Yoshio Suzuki on bass and Otsuka on drums, playing "Inside Parts," "Stella by Starlight," "T.I." and "Sleep, My Love." It has stayed in print in one form or another ever since, most recently as a 2025 remaster on vinyl and on hybrid SACD.

The leader's chair was not where he spent most of the decade. In late 1970 he recorded A Part, a Terumasa Hino date with the American bassist Reggie Workman, on tenor and bass clarinet, and in 1971 he joined Hino's quintet. On November 6, 1971 that band, with Hino, Uematsu, Kiyoshi Sugimoto, Yoshio Ikeda on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums, played the Berlin Jazz Festival, released in Japan as Hino at Berlin Jazz Festival '71. He is on the sextet record Fuji, cut at Victor Studio on March 8, 1972 with Mikio Masuda on electric piano, and on Reminicent Suite, which Hino recorded with the pianist Mal Waldron, Isao Suzuki on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums at Victor Studio on August 14, 1972. He returned for Hino's 1974 CBS/Sony records Into Eternity and Journey Into My Mind.

Elsewhere in that stretch he was on George Otsuka's Sea Breeze (Union, recorded February 8, 1971), playing tenor and soprano beside Ohno, the pianist Hideo Ichikawa and the bassist Takashi Mizuhashi, and on Kazumi Watanabe's first record, Infinite (Express, recorded in May 1971), with Yoshio Suzuki, Motohiko Hino and Ichikawa. Also in 1971 he shared a sleeve with the tenor saxophonist Takeru Muraoka on Ride and Tie (Express), four tracks running from ten to thirteen minutes, with Yoshio Suzuki, Motohiko Hino and Hiromasa Suzuki on electric piano.

The Sugimoto connection produced Babylonia Wind (Columbia, 1972), a live set from the Roppongi club Mingos Musico (Kiva, October 25, 1973) and Our Time (Columbia, recorded between December 1974 and January 1975). For Three Blind Mice he was on guitarist Sunao Wada's Blues World (March 25, 1974), on side B of Now's the Time (March 26, 1974, Toshi Center Hall, a shared date that also gathered Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's trio and Otsuka's quintet), and on three Tee & Company albums recorded in 1977, Sonnet, Dragon Garden and Spanish Flower, where he plays tenor and bass clarinet alongside Masaru Imada, Masayuki Takayanagi and Nobuyoshi Ino. He also played on Mikio Masuda's Trace (East Wind, June 1974) and on Shigeharu Mukai's Hip Cruiser (Better Days, October 1978).

His second leader album, Straight Ahead, was recorded on October 12, 1977 at Onkio Haus in Tokyo and released by Trio Records as PAP-9100. It is a fusion date in the sense the decade used the word: Masuda on piano, electric piano and synthesizer, Motohiko Hamase on electric and acoustic bass, Arihide Kurata on drums, Tatsuji Yokoyama on percussion and Hitoshi Okano on trumpet, with Takeshi Shibuya directing the session. Uematsu wrote three of the six tracks, "White Fire," "Mysterious Jump" and "Samba to Kiki"; Masuda contributed "Fancy Free," and the programme is completed by "Afro Blue" and "Invitation." The record was reissued in 2010, 2017 (Solid Records), 2018 (Octave Lab), 2020 and 2026. "White Fire" has outlived it: it opens the BBE compilation J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan 1969-1984 (2018), and in August 2016 he recorded it again, on tenor, for pianist Hajime Yoshizawa's Double Moon.

Japanese profiles of him describe a break of several years in the 1980s. He appears in 1983 on Kazuo Yashiro's Funks and in 1984 on the rock band the Fools' Weed War, and from 1986 he became a regular in the horn section behind the singer Maki Asakawa, on Amerika no Yoru (アメリカの夜, 1986, with Toshiyuki Honda), Koboreru Ogon no Suna (こぼれる黄金の砂, 1987), Underground (1987, on baritone saxophone), Nothing At All To Lose (1988), the live Yoru no Carnival (夜のカーニバル, 1989), Kuroi Kukan (黒い空間, 1994, recorded live at Bungeiza Le Pilier on December 31, 1992), Konna Fu ni Sugite Yuku no Nara (こんな風に過ぎて行くのなら, 1996) and a 2022 live-selection box set. Asakawa also produced his third album as a leader, Come From With (Eastworld, August 26, 1992), a seven-track quartet record with Takeshi Shibuya on piano and organ, a bassist credited as Bobby Watson and Hiro Tsunoda on drums, built from standards such as "Cry Me a River," "Sonny Is Blue" and "A Song for You." It reached vinyl for the first time in 2024 on C.A.E. Record.

Other late sideman work includes a saxophone feature on Motohiko Hino and Urbanightrops' Wild Talk (1990), the vocal date Getting To Know You (Insights, released in 1994 from a Roppongi session of May 22, 1985), on which he is billed alongside the singer Takako Ueno and Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's trio, and the blues musician George Yanagi's Storage (1994). In 2018 he led a quartet at Shinjuku Pit Inn in Tokyo with Kanoko Kitajima on piano, Riku Takahashi on bass, Shogo Hamada on drums and the flutist Maoyo Sakai as guest. The Japanese listing for that appearance also names him in two-tenor settings with Kohsuke Mine and in work with pianist Takehiro Honda; fan accounts place him in Honda's 1990s sextet EASE, though no release credit documents either pairing.

Uematsu is a tenor player of weight and warmth whose playing on Debut is routinely placed in the line of Joe Henderson: a dark, singing tone, long-lined phrasing, and a technical command that kept him busy in studios and bands of very different temperament. Reissue copy for Debut makes that comparison directly, and reviewers of the album describe it as post-bop.

The range of the discography is wider than that single label. Debut is acoustic post-bop with a Fender piano. Ride and Tie is soul-jazz and jazz-funk built on twelve-minute grooves, with Hiromasa Suzuki on electric piano. Straight Ahead sits in fusion, with synthesizer and percussion, a samba in "Samba to Kiki" and a reading of "Afro Blue." The Tee & Company records and Babylonia Wind belong to the modal, spiritual end of the period, and both Tee & Company's "Spanish Flower" and Sugimoto's "Babylonia Wind" were later chosen by the compilers of Spiritual Jazz 8: Japan, Part Two (Jazzman, 2018). Come From With is the other pole: a late-night ballad record.

He doubled on soprano saxophone (Sea Breeze, New Rock in Europe), bass clarinet (A Part, Spanish Flower, Dragon Garden) and, once, baritone saxophone (Maki Asakawa's Underground), and he wrote the material that has lasted on his own records: "White Fire," "Mysterious Jump" and "Samba to Kiki."