Takuya Kuroda (黒田卓也) is a trumpeter and composer from the Kobe-Osaka corridor who made his career in Brooklyn. Wikipedia and Wikidata give his birthplace as Ashiya in Hyogo Prefecture, the residential city between Kobe and Osaka, while Blue Note's biography calls him a Kobe native; he grew up in that area and learned his trade in Kobe's jazz clubs. He followed his older brother, a trombonist, into the junior high school big band and began on trumpet as a child. By 1996 he was already playing clubs in Kobe and Osaka, and he studied economics at Konan University while staying in a college big band. He has said the big band itself taught him little about improvising, and that he learned jazz properly in small groups on the local scene, where older musicians took him in.

A five-week course at Berklee College of Music at about age twenty was his first formal jazz study, and it was hard going because every class was in English. In 2003 he moved to New York for the jazz and contemporary music programme at The New School, graduated in 2006, and studied privately with the trumpeter and teacher Laurie Frink. He settled in Brooklyn, where in 2005 he co-founded Chicken Gravy, a soul, jazz and funk band of Japanese musicians that made two albums, It's Better With Chicken Gravy (2007) and Joyride (2008). He also played for years in the Brooklyn Afrobeat band Akoya Afrobeat, and by 2007 he was working in around ten bands across gospel, funk, hip-hop and Latin styles.

The decisive friendship of those years was with the singer José James, whom he met at The New School. James brought him onto Blackmagic (Brownswood, 2010), took him on tour in 2011, and hired him for the sessions of No Beginning No End (Blue Note, 2013), for which Kuroda also wrote the horn arrangements. Kuroda had meanwhile begun releasing his own records: Bitter and High (2010) and Edge (2011), both self-released, and Six Aces (2012), a sextet date with Corey King on trombone, Jamaal Sawyer on tenor saxophone, Takeshi Ohbayashi on piano and Rhodes, Rashaan Carter on bass and Adam Jackson on drums, issued in Japan by P-Vine with a bonus track.

When James heard Kuroda's newer material on tour, he offered to produce the next record, and told him to put something in the music that made people nod their heads. The result was Rising Son, Kuroda's Blue Note debut, released on February 18, 2014, with Kris Bowers on keyboards, Solomon Dorsey on electric bass, Nate Smith on drums and Corey King on trombone. Lionel Loueke added a guitar solo on "Afro Blues," and the programme included two compositions by Roy Ayers, "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" (with James singing) and "Green and Gold." It was recorded at The Motherbrain in Brooklyn and Sear Sound in Manhattan. He named Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown and Miles Davis as the trumpeters he came up on, and critics heard Morgan in his tone on "Afro Blues."

He moved to Concord for Zigzagger (October 7, 2016), which he produced himself. It reunited the core of his working band, Carter, Jackson, Ohbayashi and King, added Keita Ogawa on percussion, and closed with a cover of Donald Byrd's "Think Twice" played with a Brooklyn Afrobeat horn section. The same year he joined J-Squad, a New York-based quintet of Japanese jazz musicians whose first album came out on Universal Music Japan in 2016 and whose theme for the TV Asahi news programme Hodo Station made them a familiar sound in Japan. In 2015 he had joined DJ Premier's Badder Band; the group toured the United States in 2017, the year he also played the Fuji Rock Festival and was the only Japanese performer at International Jazz Day in Cuba.

In 2019 he returned to Tokyo to record Blue Note Voyage, a label 80th anniversary project in which eight Japanese musicians, among them drummer Shun Ishiwaka, played Blue Note standards at Onkio Haus on July 18 and 21, 2019, for a disc mastered through an analog vinyl-cutting chain to recreate the sound of the label's 1950s and 1960s sessions. The next year came Fly Moon Die Soon (First Word Records, 2020), a beat-heavy record that covers Herbie Hancock's "Tell Me a Bedtime Story" and reworks "Sweet Sticky Things," a song credited to members of the Ohio Players. The six-track Midnight Crisp (First Word, October 21, 2022) was a shorter and calmer record with Corey King, saxophonist Craig Hill and keyboardist Takahiro Izumikawa in the band. His eighth studio album, Everyday, arrived on February 28, 2025, made partly from a wish to play for audiences again after the pandemic years; drummer David Frazier anchors it, and the credits include guitarist Akira Ishiguro, pianist Takahiro Izumikawa and tenor saxophonist Akihiro Nishiguchi.

He remains an active sideman in New York. He plays trumpet on keyboardist Chris McCarthy's Still Time to Quit (2020) and Add a Zero (2025), appears on the New York band Ajoyo's War Chant (2020), and in 2020 guested on the Italian saxophonist Vittorio De Angelis's Believe Not Belong, on which Roberto Giaquinto is one of three drummers. At 46 he still tours widely, with 2026 dates that included Milwaukee in April and the Berklee venue at 939 Boylston Street in Boston later that month.

Kuroda sits where post-bop trumpet playing meets soul, hip-hop and Afrobeat. Blue Note describes his music as post-bop blended with soul-jazz, and the track listings bear that out: Roy Ayers and Herbie Hancock tunes sit alongside originals built on a groove first and a solo second. His stated models are Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown and Miles Davis, and his tone has a rounded, singing warmth that reviewers have tied to Morgan, but his rhythm sections work from Afrobeat, J Dilla-derived beats and neo-soul rather than the swing feel of those trumpeters' own records.

His production approach shifted over time. Rising Son was made in the studio with a working band and a producer, José James, whose brief was to give the music a head-nodding pulse. By Zigzagger he was producing himself, and for Everyday he has described building tracks at home first, then bringing them to the studio to add players and polish. He also doubles on flugelhorn, Rhodes and synthesizer on his own sessions, and the electronic layer has grown with each release, up to the remixed 12-inch of Midnight Crisp by Waajeed and Kaidi Tatham in 2024.