Takashi Sasaki (佐々木隆) is a Japanese drummer who played on the first two albums by Casiopea, the group that went on to become one of the best-known names in Japanese fusion. He has no album under his own name, and no interview with him in his own words has been published that this page can draw on. What is known comes from the credits on the records, a short Japanese Wikipedia entry, and a trail of musicians' blogs and venue listings that runs from 1977 to 2021.

Japanese Wikipedia gives his birth year as 1956 and his birthplace as Tokyo, and says his family home is in Nishi-Ogikubo, in Suginami Ward. It lists his schooling as Nihon University's own junior and senior high school, then the university's College of Art. His exact birth date is not reliably published: the Japanese Wikipedia infobox says 27 August, while Wikidata and MusicBrainz say 17 November, and none of the three cites a source. Only the year is given here. The same entry says that while still a student he played jazz and fusion in Tokyo live houses in bands with the saxophonist Takeshi Itoh and the arranger and keyboardist Masanori Sasaji, again without a source.

In 1977 he became the drummer of Casiopea, then still an amateur band, in time for the second Yamaha EastWest amateur band contest it entered. Japanese Wikipedia's Casiopea entry says the drum chair had been unsettled and was only fixed on Sasaki by the time of the final; the English entry says the band held auditions after its 1976 drummer, Tohru "Rika" Suzuki, left, and chose him. At the 1977 contest Casiopea took the best group award and guitarist Issei Noro won best guitarist for the second year running. The line-up that stayed together into the recording studio was Noro, bassist Tetsuo Sakurai, keyboardist Minoru Mukaiya and Sasaki.

The debut, CASIOPEA, came out on Alfa on 25 May 1979 (ALR-6017). The rhythm tracks were cut at Alfa's studio in Shibaura, Tokyo, with the American engineer Al Schmitt, and the horn section was added in New York at the Power Station studio on 10 February 1979: Randy Brecker on trumpet, Michael Brecker on tenor saxophone and David Sanborn on alto saxophone, with Jun Fukamachi arranging and conducting. All eight pieces are by Noro. The obi strip billed the band as thrilling, fast and superbly technical, a tagline that stuck to the group for decades.

SUPER FLIGHT followed on 25 November 1979 (Alfa ALR-6029), finished on 13 October. Discogs credits Sasaki with drums and handclaps, and credits Kanya Kazama as a guest drummer and Penny Itoh on percussion. Japanese Wikipedia describes it as the more melodic, pop-leaning record against the hard-edged debut, and notes that it carries the first recording of "Asayake," later one of the band's signature pieces, and "I Love New York," the single used in Japan Air Lines' New York advertising, which Alfa issued on 15 November 1979 (ALR-1017). The same entry says the second album outsold the first.

Between those two releases and his exit, the four also made a record that does not carry the Casiopea name. Spiral Fusion (Toshiba, TP-60352, 20 December 1979 according to Discogs) is an album by the Electone player Tatsuya Koguma: Koguma on the Yamaha Electone E-70, with Mukaiya on electric piano, Noro on guitar, Sakurai on bass and Sasaki on drums. Six of its seven titles are jazz standards ("Summertime," "Misty," "Caravan," "La Chanson d'Orphee," "Watermelon Man," "Satin Doll"), plus "Space Core."

He did not leave the band at once. A footnote in Casiopea's Japanese Wikipedia entry, citing Mukaiya's 1995 book, says the decision to part over differences in musical direction came after SUPER FLIGHT was finished, but that Sasaki kept playing the live dates already booked, and that the band met his successor, Akira Jimbo, during that stretch. Jimbo's first record with the group, the live album THUNDER LIVE, was released on 21 April 1980. A fan who taped Casiopea's 31 December 1979 show at Roppongi Pit Inn wrote in 2022 that it was probably Sasaki's last with the band, and that the audience had no idea a change was coming; he singles out Sasaki's drum solo in "Sailing Alone" that night. English Wikipedia and a 2008 Jakarta Post profile of Sakurai give 1980 for Jimbo's arrival, while Discogs dates Sasaki's membership 1977 to 1979.

In March 1982 he was in the studio for Full Sail (Philips, 28PL-31), the second album by guitarist Hiroki Miyano, billed on the label as Hiroki Miyano and Bird On The Wind. Discogs credits Sasaki as a band member on drums alongside Makoto Saito on bass, Mitsuhiro Sonoyama on flute and saxophones and Masashi Hirashita on keyboards, with Toshiyuki Honda on soprano saxophone, Shigeharu Mukai on trombone, Sybil Thomas on vocals and others as guests. The album had no CD edition until 12 November 2025, when STEPS Records issued a remastered UHQCD (STPR-54). The same year Toshiba issued a five-LP Electone box set, Electone Popular Collection: New Love Sounds, whose first record, led by Koguma, credits Sasaki with drums on all twelve of its tracks, with Makoto Saito on bass, Masaru Komatsu on guitar and Andy Hiyama on percussion.

The trail then thins. On 22 January 2011 the drummer Funky Sueyoshi wrote on his blog that Sasaki had dropped by his bar one day and now played there every month with his own trio, Throw, and that he had watched him play for the first time the night before and been astonished by his technique. Sueyoshi added that he had heard Sasaki had spent periods away from active playing. Japanese Wikipedia lists three other projects: Narusasa, with Casiopea's bassist Yoshihiro Naruse; his own band Dazzle, with bassist 小山卓 and guitarist 中山隆司; and a duo called Ratio with the bassist 武士守廣, all based at the Hachioji live house X.Y.Z.→A. Naruse himself told HMV in November 2014 that, during Casiopea's break from 2006, fans who ran a Casiopea cover band asked him to appear at events with the group's first drummer, Sasaki, and that the experience helped push him to propose the group's restart, which came in 2013 as CASIOPEA 3rd.

From November 2015 the documentation turns dense, thanks to the bassist Katsuyuki Kariya's blog. Sasaki became the drummer of the Okazaki Trio, led by the guitarist Takeshi Okazaki, with Kariya on bass, first billed as the trio's "Sasaki version" at X.Y.Z.→A on 25 November 2015 in place of its regular drummer, Kunihiko Miura. Kariya wrote the next day that it was his third time playing with Sasaki and that he sometimes divided one bar into nine or eleven beats in ways Kariya could not follow. From June 2017 the trio's monthly dates moved to the Hachioji live bar Gurumama, and Kariya's blog lists Sasaki on drums at monthly dates there through to 25 March 2021, the latest dated listing found; the 21 January 2021 date was cancelled. Around the monthly dates came special billings: on 17 January 2018, "Funky Sueyoshi vs Takashi Sasaki," a twin-drum night with the trio at the club Ongakushitsu DX in Shinjuku Ward; Okazaki Trio dates at Bar aLive in Shinjuku, including 18 January and 30 March 2019, billed as all original compositions by Okazaki; on 21 May 2019, "Kariopeya," Kariya's Casiopea-covers unit with the keyboardist HEYSKE, at Ongakushitsu DX; and from August 2019 Kariokasahei (仮岡佐兵), a four-piece of Kariya, Okazaki, Sasaki and HEYSKE at the same venue. The trio opened a YouTube channel in November 2020.

Two things remain unknown: why he stepped back for long stretches of the decades between 1982 and 2011, and what, if anything, he recorded in them. No source gives his own account of leaving Casiopea.

Sasaki's reputation rests on two Alfa albums recorded when he was in his early twenties, in the period when Japanese fusion was still partly called crossover. Discogs files the albums under jazz with the styles Jazz-Funk and Fusion, and files Spiral Fusion under Fusion, Jazz-Funk and Prog Rock and Full Sail under Fusion, Jazz-Funk and Latin Jazz.

No source records what he listened to or who he studied with, so influences are not stated here. What exists are descriptions of how he played, all from other people. Writing in 2022 about the 1979 shows, the music marketer Hiro Kashimi said Sasaki's playing was built on four independent limbs and fine finger technique, with phrases in the manner of Steve Gadd and fast tom fills reminiscent of Billy Cobham, and that among Japanese drummers of the time he was the closest to Gadd; Kashimi also found his rhythm more dynamic than that of other Japanese fusion groups such as Prism, Space Circus and The Square, a judgement he ties to the 16-beat feel of the period. Funky Sueyoshi, seeing him in 2011, described polyrhythms built from five-beat and seven-beat phrases and cymbal legato backed by solid technique. Kariya's 2015 remark about nine- and eleven-beat bars points the same way. These are listeners' and colleagues' impressions rather than statements by Sasaki himself.

His records show range within fusion more than a single style: the hard-edged, fast debut, the melodic SUPER FLIGHT, a standards-and-groove Electone session, and the Latin-flavoured Full Sail. In the 2010s he turned to a guitar trio playing the guitarist's own originals.