Takeshi Inomata (猪俣猛) heard the record that decided his life at fourteen: Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert, and on it Gene Krupa playing "Sing Sing Sing." He wanted to be a professional drummer, and he wanted, one day, to stand on the Carnegie Hall stage himself. He was born in Takarazuka, in Hyogo Prefecture, where his father played oboe in the orchestra of the Takarazuka Revue and his elder brother was a trumpeter, so music was already the family trade. His father bought him his first drum set at a music shop in Kobe, a snare drum from an Osaka maker that, as it happened, sold its drums under the name Krupa. By day he sat in the Takarazuka theatre's orchestra pit and listened to the revues and musicals; at night he worked at a civilian club in Kobe where his father played, learning the groove on the job. It was the years of the postwar occupation, so his first audiences were American servicemen, and much of the early work was at US military camps. Discogs dates his professional debut to the age of sixteen.

He moved to Tokyo in 1956. His own account of the first years, written for his official website, runs through a chain of bands: Akira Watanabe's Embers Five, which had the pianist Keitaro Miho, whom he admired, in it; then the bassist Shin Watanabe's Six Joes; then the West Liners, the band of the tenor saxophonist Konosuke Saijo that held the house job at the Tamuracho nightclub Manuela. He was called into the West Liners in a hurry, standing in for the original drummer, who had been hospitalised with tuberculosis, and he stayed. The pianist in that band was Norio Maeda, two years his senior, whom Inomata had first met at a Kansai jam session when he was sixteen and Maeda eighteen and just out of high school. The two would work together for the rest of Inomata's life. In 1957, at twenty-one, he won a newcomer award.

The nightclub job was dance music, and Inomata and Maeda wanted more. When a jazz coffee house opened in Ginza, its owner asked Inomata to play there; the whole West Liners would not fit in the room, so the rhythm section went alone, Inomata, Maeda and the bassist Tatsuro Takimoto. That was the first WE3. Inomata named it himself, a trio of three equals with no leader's name on the marquee, each member meaning "me." They made records, appeared on the radio, and played every Friday on Nippon Television's late-night show 11PM; later the bass chair passed to Jun Suzuki and then to Yasuo Arakawa, who stayed. The trio's first album, Alpha Ray, was recorded on October 3, 1968 for Columbia and released in 1969 as the Norio Maeda Trio. Inomata's own summary of the arrangement was that Maeda was the director of music, he was the director of sales, and Arakawa was the director of personnel.

Alongside the trio he became one of the drummers Tokyo's jazz records called for. On August 15 and 16, 1961 he played on three tracks of Sadao Watanabe's debut LP for King Records, sharing the drum chair with Akihiro Hasegawa. In March 1961 he was on two tracks of Toshiko Akiyoshi's Toshiko Meets Her Old Pals, on which Masahiko Togashi played the other drum chair. In May 1962 he was one of the two drummers on Akira Miyazawa's first record as a leader, Yamame, with Masahiko Satoh on piano. On February 12 and 13, 1963 his West Liners, with Jiro Inagaki on tenor saxophone and flute, backed the American singer Helen Merrill on Helen Merrill in Tokyo, with Maeda arranging. That year he was also the drummer on Miwaku no Jazz (Fascinating Jazz), the Victor album by Akiyoshi with Charlie Mariano on alto saxophone. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz entry on him adds that he lived in the United States for a time in the early 1960s and studied with the Boston drummer Alan Dawson.

By 1966 he was a Yamaha drum endorser, and the West Liners were making albums under his name for King, Columbia and the Takt label, with Maeda arranging and, on Liner Note (1967), Masaru Imada at the piano. The Takt Jazz Series also issued Drum Shot, billed to Inomata on drums and Maeda on arrangements and piano, with Konosuke Saijo on tenor saxophone, a four-trombone section that included Hiroshi Suzuki, Sadanori Nakamure on guitar and Takimoto on bass. Side one was recorded at Teichiku Kaikan Studio on December 14, 1967.

The turn into the 1970s made him a fusion bandleader. On February 7 and 12, 1970 he and Arakawa were the rhythm section on Mal Waldron's Tokyo Bound, a trio record for Victor. Weeks later, from March 25 to 27, he recorded Sounds of Sound L.T.D. with the new band he called Sound Limited, a horn-heavy jazz-rock group formed in the wake of the brass-rock bands then crossing over in America. The Columbia album credits him as drummer and music director, with Ryo Kawasaki on electric guitar, Shunzo Ohno on trumpet, Takao Uematsu on tenor saxophone, Toshiaki Yokota on flute and Jun Suzuki on electric bass. A second album recorded that April, Sound Ltd., played Chicago's "South California Purples," Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Sometimes in Winter," the Doors' "Tell All the People" and the standard "God Bless the Child." The same year he put his name on Jazz Rock in Stravinsky, Maeda's arrangements of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring for twenty-six credited musicians, one ballet to each side of the LP. Sound Limited played the Sensational Jazz '70 concerts on a bill with Jiro Inagaki's Soul Media and Akira Ishikawa's Count Buffalos, and Inagaki's own biography dates his Soul Media horn-rock idea to a 1969 United States tour made with Inomata.

Through the early 1970s Sound Limited, the West Liners and a big band called The Third, which Discogs credits Inomata with leading and Maeda with arranging and conducting, were all running at once. Innocent Canon (King, recorded February 21, 1971) is the most unusual of the Sound Limited albums, with a narrator and a piece called "Janis's Death." Inomata Meets Rock was recorded in Hawaii on April 25, 1971, with Imada on piano on half the tracks. Rock Joy in Drums and the first Third album, Hare Krishna, both date from the same year. Then there were the drum albums, a Japanese specialty of the period, in which several drummers shared a record: Four Jazz Drums (1971) with George Kawaguchi, Isamu Harada and Motohiko Hino, Driving Drums (1971) with Ishikawa and a drummer billed as T. Tabata, Rocking Drum Battle by Big 4 (1972) with Ishikawa, Sadakazu Tabata and Kiyoshi Tanaka, and The Exciting Drum (1980), a five-drummer LP shared with Kawaguchi, Tabata, Ishikawa and George Otsuka. Drum Method (Columbia, 1972) was a teaching record with Sound Limited as the backing band and Maeda arranging, which included covers of Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" and Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and two pieces of his own called "Drum Concert." In 1976 he founded the Rhythm Clinic Center, a school for jazz and drum education.

The mid-1970s brought a run of records on his own terms. Drummer Man (Columbia, recorded in January 1975) was a big band record in the spirit of Gene Krupa, with Maeda, Arakawa and the vocalist Terry Mizushima. Alone Together (Audio Lab, June 6, 1975) was a septet date at Iino Hall with Maeda, Arakawa, Saijo, the baritone saxophonist Tadayuki Harada, the alto saxophonist Akitoshi Igarashi and the trumpeter Tetsuo Fushimi. On February 16, 1976 he played with Maeda and Arakawa behind the tenor saxophonists Konosuke Saijo and Hidehiko Matsumoto at Birdland in Roppongi, recorded live as K. Saijo vs. H. Matsumoto for Teichiku. The Dialogue (November 28 and 29, 1977, Iino Hall) was a record of duets, the drums against one instrument per track: Arakawa's bass, Ichiro Masuda's vibraphone, Toshiaki Yokota's flute, Shoji Yokouchi's guitar, Saijo's tenor saxophone, Shigeharu Mukai's trombone and Makoto Aruga's percussion. On March 6, 1978 he recorded the duo album Blue Heaven in Tokyo with Akira Sakata on alto saxophone and alto clarinet, issued at 45 RPM.

He also kept working outside the jazz label. In 1977 he made Morning After, a quadraphonic album of percussion-ensemble music with his group Separation. In the 1980s he issued a live quartet record on his own label (Stop' Over, 1980), recorded Dear My Friend Harold on September 8, 1981 with the tenor saxophonist Harold Land as guest, and, for Columbia from 1983 to 1985, made instrumental albums of music from the television anime Urusei Yatsura. In 1991 he made If I Were a Bell with the pianist Naoki Nishi, and in July 1992 took a trio into the studio for Fever, with Arakawa and Mizushima. Then came the stage he had pictured since he was fourteen: on October 6, 1994 he led his own band at Carnegie Hall in New York. In 2000 he marked fifty years as a professional with an anniversary concert, and in 2002 he took part in the Asuka world cruise. A late release under his own name is Cover Jazz Legend Standards (2017).

Takeshi Inomata passed away on October 4, 2024, at 2:27 in the afternoon, of old age, in a hospital in Saitama Prefecture. He was 88. The Sankei Shimbun's obituary said his work with the pianist Norio Maeda made his name, and noted that he founded the Rhythm Clinic Center in 1976.

Inomata's first model, by his own account, was Gene Krupa, and the debt shows in the records he chose to make: Drummer Man (1975) is a Krupa-style big band album that includes "Sing Sing Sing," and "Drummer Man" turns up again as a track on The Exciting Drum (1980) and West Liners with Terry Mizushima (1977). The sound that carried through most of his career, though, was the mainstream of the West Liners and the Maeda trio: piano trio jazz with Norio Maeda writing the arrangements and Inomata in the drum chair. WE3 took its name from the principle of three equals, and Inomata described the trio's policy as taking on good music of any kind rather than only jazz standards.

The 1970s added rock. Sound Limited and The Third played arrangements of American rock and brass-rock material on jazz instruments, with electric bass, electric guitar and a Hammond organ under a big horn section, and Jazz Rock in Stravinsky gave two Stravinsky ballets the same treatment. At the same time he was a pop session drummer and a bandleader in the Japanese pops market: records for Teichiku, Columbia and Victor billed his group playing hit songs and film themes, albums with the cabaret singer Eiko Shuri, and a run of Crown Records pops albums issued under the pseudonym Arita Shintaro. The jazz side of his identity, which includes the West Liners, WE3, the American visitors (Helen Merrill, Mal Waldron, Harold Land) and the 1970s Audio Lab series, is the longer and better documented thread, and the main reason he is remembered as a jazz drummer rather than a pops one.

The later records show a drummer teaching as much as playing. Drum Method, This Is Rhythm (Columbia, 1975, a two-LP guide to pop rhythm history), the Rhythm Clinic Center and The Dialogue all work variations on the same idea, that a drum kit can talk to any instrument and that rhythm can be taught.