Takeo Moriyama came to jazz sideways. He played piano as a child, moved to drums in his late teens, and then took a degree in percussion at the Tokyo University of the Arts, the most formal conservatory training in the country. What he did with it was join the loudest band in Japanese music.

In 1969 the pianist Yosuke Yamashita assembled a trio with no bass player: piano, one saxophone, and drums. Nothing anchored the low end except Moriyama. Seiichi Nakamura held the tenor chair first, and Akira Sakata took it over in 1972. The group became the defining unit of Japanese free jazz, and the drum seat was its engine rather than its accompaniment.

Word travelled. The German trumpeter Manfred Schoof recommended the trio to Horst Weber, the producer behind Enja Records, and Weber brought them to Europe in 1974. On June 2 they played the New Jazz Festival at Moers. German critics reached for the phrase kamikaze jazz, and the tour turned the group from a Tokyo phenomenon into an international one. Schoof went on to record with them: Distant Thunder, taped live at the Liederhalle in Stuttgart on June 12, 1975, carries all four names on the sleeve and came out on Enja.

There is a stranger piece of evidence for how highly the scene rated him. In 1971 the Yamashita trio, expanded by a twelve-piece brass section, released an album on Toshiba's Express label called Introducing Takeo Moriyama. The leader put his drummer's name on the jacket four years before that drummer released anything of his own.

Moriyama left the trio in 1975. His first record away from it, Full Load, was credited to the Moriyama Takeo Percussion Ensemble and cut over three days that September with nothing on it but percussion. Two years later he built the band that would define him: Fumio Itabashi on piano, Hideaki Mochizuki on bass, Tomoki Takahashi on tenor and soprano. They recorded Flush Up live at Shinjuku Pit Inn on March 1 and 2, 1977, and it remains his debut statement as a bandleader.

The run that followed is the body of work the modern reissue market has drawn on most heavily. Hush-A-Bye (1978) added Shigeharu Mukai's trombone. Smile (1981) brought in Koichi Matsukaze as a guest and put Itabashi's tune "Watarase" on the first side. My Dear (1982) and East Plants (1983) followed, the latter produced by Genji Sawai and later chosen by BBE as a J Jazz Masterclass reissue in September 2018. Green River, recorded live at the East-West Jazz Festival in Nuremberg in July 1984, closed the sequence.

Then he stopped. In 1985 Moriyama moved to Kani City in Gifu Prefecture and almost entirely withdrew from performing. The break lasted until 1989.

His return produced the album a great many collectors now own. On December 28 and 29, 1990 the quartet played Jazz inn LOVELY in Nagoya, and the tapes became Live At Lovely on DIW the following year. BBE gave it a double-vinyl reissue in 2023, its first since the Japan-only CD. The record exists only because he came back, and he still plays the room.

The decades since have been prolific and unusually varied. Two duo albums with Mal Waldron, Dual (1996) and Bit (1998), both drawn from a single session at Tokyo's Studio F on August 20, 1995. Mana and Over The Rainbow, released the same day in September 1994. A second piano-and-drums duo with Takeshi Shibuya on See-Saw (2002). Yatagarasu with Peter Brötzmann and Masahiko Satoh, recorded in Krakow in November 2011. Succession with the Kyoto Jazz Sextet on Blue Note Japan in 2022. Live At Café Oto with Satoh on BBE in 2024, and Tokuzo with the trio Arashi, a two-drummer date alongside Paal Nilssen-Love. Trost also reached into the archive and issued Mitochondria in 2022, a duo with Sakata taped in a Chiba church in May 1986 on a domestic cassette recorder and left unreleased for thirty-six years.

Recognition arrived formally in 2002, when he received the 27th Nanri Fumio Prize, the 35th Jazz Disk Award, and an Excellence Award in the recording division of the 56th Agency for Cultural Affairs Arts Festival. He holds a guest professorship at Nagoya University of the Arts.

At 81 he leads a full national touring schedule. His 2026 dates opened with three nights at Shinjuku Pit Inn on January 2, 3 and 4, weeks after that club marked its sixtieth anniversary, and run through November, taking in Billboard Live Tokyo, Blue Note Tokyo, the Hida Takayama Jazz Festival, the arts centre in his adopted Kani, and Jazz Inn Lovely. He is the only member of Yamashita's 1969 trio still running a working band on that scale.

Moriyama plays in the lineage of Elvin Jones, and reviewers of the reissues reach for that comparison almost immediately: the same rolling, polyrhythmic pressure, the same willingness to push a band rather than support it. The bass-less Yamashita trio forced the approach into its most extreme form, since with no double bass in the room the drums carry both the pulse and the bottom of the harmony, and he never fully let go of that responsibility even after he started hiring bassists of his own.

His conservatory percussion training shows in the tuning and the precision of the kit rather than in any classical formality. Full Load, the 1975 all-percussion record, is the clearest evidence of a player thinking about drums as pitched instruments rather than as timekeeping.

As a bandleader he writes for the long form. The Coltrane influence is explicit in the material his quartets chose, and the modal, spiritually-inclined side of his catalog is what drew the crate-digging audience of the 2010s to East Plants and Live At Lovely in particular. Fumio Itabashi's compositions, "Watarase" above all, are woven through the book, and the piano chair in his bands has consistently been given real compositional weight rather than a comping role.