Takashi Kako (加古隆) is a pianist and composer whose career divides in two, and the first half is free jazz. From 1973 to 1980 he was an improvising pianist in Paris, recording with Noah Howard, with Steve Lacy's group and with his own trio, TOK. Since the middle of the 1980s he has been better known in Japan as a solo pianist and as a composer for film and television, above all as the author of "Is Paris Burning" (パリは燃えているか), the theme of NHK's documentary series Eizo no Seiki (The 20th Century in Moving Images). He is 79 and still performing.

He was born in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, on 31 January 1947, into a family with no musical background. As a child he fell in love with a Toscanini recording of Beethoven's Fifth at an acquaintance's house, and in junior high he heard Stravinsky's three big ballets; a piano teacher's remark in his last year there set him on the road to composition. Jazz came later, in his first year at Toyonaka High School, when a senior took him to see Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at Osaka's Festival Hall. He entered the composition course at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1965 and spent roughly his first year there playing jazz more than writing. Then, after studying with the composer Akira Miyoshi, he made a deliberate choice for composition: he stopped playing jazz, stopped listening to it, and set out to become a contemporary-music composer. In 1970, while in the graduate programme, he took second prize in the orchestral section of the Mainichi Music Competition, and in 1971 his orchestral piece Kosei (構成, Composition) was premiered by the Tokyo Philharmonic under Hiroshi Wakasugi.

In July 1971 he went to Paris as a French government scholarship student and studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire, graduating in 1976 with its composition prize. Messiaen told him that being Japanese was an enormous asset, advice he later credited with turning a young man who wrote mostly Western-sounding scores back toward his own country's sound. About a year after arriving, at a classmate's apartment, he heard free-jazz records for the first time and saw something in common with contemporary composition. In 1973, still enrolled, he made his professional debut as an improvising pianist. His European debut record is Homage to Peace (America Records, credited to the group Emergency), cut with bassist Bob Reid, drummer Sabu Toyozumi, guitarist Boulou Ferré and saxophonist Glenn Spearman, and it includes a piece titled "Kako Tune". A jazz magazine, according to his Japanese biographers, called him the best pianist one could hear in France.

The Paris years were crowded. On 2 March 1974 he played piano and electric piano on drummer Ron Pittner's live Out From the Edge (Angelus), with Mototeru Takagi on tenor and soprano saxophone and Kent Carter on bass and cello. The same four musicians played as the Takagi et Kako Quartet at the Maison du Japon in Paris on 26 April 1974, issued in Japan by Nadja as Jazz à Maison de Japon, Paris. His solo set Night Music was recorded at Studio Clarens in Paris on 21 November 1974 and came out on Sun Records in 1977. He joined American altoist Noah Howard's groups, with Carter and drummer Oliver Johnson, for Live in Europe, Vol. 1 and for Berlin Concert (FMP), taped at the Quartier Latin in Berlin on 30 and 31 January 1975.

Trio Records in Tokyo documented him in a run of albums in 1976 and 1977. Passage, a piano and percussion duo with Toyozumi, was recorded at AOI Studio in Tokyo on 14 and 16 January 1976. Paris Days, recorded in Paris on 7 and 8 June 1976, put him with trumpeter Itaru Oki, altoist Claude Bernard, Carter and Johnson. Micro Worlds, recorded in Paris on 31 August and 1 September 1976, brought in the violinist and singer Irene Aebi, Steve Lacy's wife, alongside Carter and Johnson. Legend of the Sea - Myself is a concert recorded at ABC Hall in Tokyo on 10 January 1977, with Masahiko Togashi on percussion. Togashi became a regular partner. Kako played piano and percussion on the Togashi Quartet's Sketch (Denon, 1977) and Voice From Yonder (Denon, 1978), and on Richard Teitelbaum's synthesizer record Hiuchi-Ishi, recorded at Nippon Columbia's studio in Tokyo in September 1977 with Togashi on percussion.

In 1978 the trio with Carter and Johnson took the name TOK, from the initials of Takashi, Oliver and Kent. It recorded TOK in Tokyo on 7 June 1978 and played a live set at Toho Seimei Hall two days earlier. That August and September he recorded El Al (Union, 1979), for which he composed and arranged the music and played piano and celesta with Toshiyuki Miyama and the New Herd, with Akira Sakata on alto saxophone and alto clarinet and Togashi on drums and percussion. In June 1979 TOK recorded Paradox at the Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, produced by Steve Lake and issued in 1980 on Japo (JAPO 60029), a label associated with ECM. Japanese sources count it as an ECM release and call him the first Japanese artist the label put out worldwide. That summer he also took the piano chair on Togashi's Session in Paris, Vol. 2 (recorded 17 and 18 July 1979, with trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and bassist Jean-Francois Jenny-Clark), and he played keyboards on Steve Lacy's band record The Owl (Saravah, 1979), in the company of Steve Potts, Irene Aebi, Butch Morris, Carter, Johnson and Jean-Jacques Avenel.

The turn came that winter in Caen. Called on the day to replace a pianist who could not get across from London, he played his first solo concert. He returned to Japan in 1980 and began to concentrate on the solo piano. Valencia, a duo with Togashi recorded at Onkio Haus in Tokyo on 22 and 23 January 1980, was the first record of his return, and L'Aube (Baybridge), a solo album recorded at Victor Aoyama Studio in Tokyo in December 1983, followed. In 1984 he was one of four pianists, with Masahiko Satoh, Aki Takase and Ichiko Hashimoto, on Twilight Monologues, recorded live at Yamaha Hall in Hiroshima that June and July. In February 1985 he gave three consecutive solo nights at the Seibu Theatre in Tokyo (now the Parco Theatre). The critic Hisamitsu Noguchi had suggested he try, just once, a melody everybody knows. The result was "Poesie", built on "Greensleeves", which he hesitated over until the morning of the concert because it sounded nothing like his earlier music. It became a hit when Nikka Whisky used it in a commercial, and Japanese accounts treat it as the moment he began to put composition, and the simple melody, at the centre of his music. Those concerts were released as Solo Concert (Insights, 1985), and Poesie (CBS/Sony) followed in 1986 with Klee, twelve piano pieces after the paintings of Paul Klee.

Jazz did not disappear. Scrawl (CBS/Sony, 1987), recorded in April 1987 on a Bosendorfer, is a quintet record with Toshihiko Inoue on tenor and soprano saxophones, Tetsuji Yoshida on trumpet, Hiroshi Yoshino on bass and Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami on drums. His Japanese Wikipedia entry lists it as the winner of Swing Journal's Japan Jazz Award for 1988. Long Journey (1990), recorded in December 1989 with bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and percussionists Nene and Cheikh Tidiane Fall, closes with Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman".

From the 1990s the weight moved to concert-hall and screen music. He wrote the piano tone poem Spring for the 1990 Expo in Osaka, with the Tokyo Philharmonic under Naoto Otomo, and Apocalypse, premiered in 1989 under the direction of Ushio Amagatsu of the butoh company Sankai Juku, began a run of scores for the company. In 1995 NHK used "Is Paris Burning" to open Eizo no Seiki, and after the broadcasts the network received a flood of inquiries about the music. He scored the Belgian film The Quarry (1998), which brought him the Best Artistic Contribution prize at the Montreal World Film Festival; Japanese films including Amida-do Dayori (2002, Japan Academy Prize for Outstanding Music and the Mainichi Film Award for music), The Professor's Beloved Equation (2006, Mainichi Film Award) and Semi no Ki (2014, Japan Academy Prize); and the Fuji TV drama Shiroi Kyoto (The Great White Tower, 2003-04). The NHK Broadcasting Culture Award followed in 2017. In 2010 he formed the Takashi Kako Quartet, a piano quartet with violinist Mariko Aikawa, violist Kaori Minami and cellist Akio Ueki, which has recorded Quartet (2010), Quartet II (2013) and Quartet III (2021).

The old work has stayed in print. In 2012 the small Kaitai label issued New Sea (CD) and Blue Sea (LP) from a live trio recording made in 1976 with Takagi and Toyozumi, the label having since corrected the sleeve's venue and date to Osaka's Teijin Hall, 24 January 1976. His 2013 Anthology opens with four tracks from the Paris years ("Jazz", "Paradox", "Night Music" and "Dodec"). In 2023 he marked the fiftieth anniversary of his debut, and his official site lists concerts into 2026.

Kako is easier to place by what he drew together than by a single label. His training is in contemporary composition, and Messiaen is the teacher he names. His first idea of what a piano could do came from Stravinsky and from Beethoven on record, and his first jazz was Art Blakey's. The Paris-era records are free improvisation in the European manner of the 1970s, made in the same circle as Steve Lacy's band, with Carter and Johnson as the rhythm section he kept for years. Much of the material is his own writing ("Kako Tune", the pieces on Paradox, the whole of El Al), which is the composer showing through the improviser.

From 1985 the music simplified. The turn toward melody, set off by "Poesie", did not mean a move to pop: Klee, Spring and the quartet records are through-composed piano pieces for concert halls, and the Japanese press has called him a poet and a painter of the piano. He performs from memory and wears a hat on stage, a habit he began in the 1980s.

His standing as a jazz artist is real but partial. The free-jazz catalogue of 1973 to 1984 is substantial and well documented, he appears in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and Discogs files the majority of his releases through the early 1990s under Jazz. But his most widely heard music is the film and television scoring, which sits in the classical and screen categories, and much of the post-1985 catalogue is solo or quartet piano music that makes little use of improvisation. The profile covers both sides, with the jazz work set out in full.