Tib Kamayatsu (ティーブ釜萢, real name 釜萢正, Kamayatsu Tadashi) was born on May 7, 1911, in Los Angeles, a second-generation Japanese American whose parents ran a clothing shop. He took up guitar and banjo, and in his twenties joined a Japanese American band called the Show Tokians. The Depression had left Japanese Americans short of work in California, and in 1937 the group put together a band and sailed for Japan. His bandmates went home soon afterwards. He did not.

That decision is the whole reason he belongs in the story of Japanese jazz, and the record for it is long. From 1937 until his death in 1980 he lived and worked in Japan, a stretch of 43 years. He played in the bands on the passenger ships that ran between Japan and the United States, then settled in Tokyo as a jazz singer, and the Nichigai Associates biographical dictionary of entertainers records him performing at the Florida dance hall in Tameike, Akasaka. His son Hiroshi, later known as Monsieur Kamayatsu, was born in Tokyo in January 1939. In 1944, still holding American citizenship and speaking almost no Japanese, he was called up by the Japanese army and sent to the China front, where his ability to drive got him posted to a transport unit; the same dictionary records that he gave up his American nationality and took Japanese nationality that year. He is buried at Kensoji temple in Moto-Azabu, Tokyo.

After the war he was among the musicians who brought American-style jazz to Japanese audiences. He joined the New Pacific Band, with Yoshiko Ishii as vocalist and his brother-in-law Hisashi Moriyama among the players, and worked the officers' clubs and camps of the Allied occupation forces, mostly in the Tokyo area. Nichigai Associates adds that he became a popular vocalist with Hiroshi Watanabe and the Star Dusters, the band based at the Daiichi Hotel in Shimbashi, before going out on his own, and Japanese Wikipedia also names a group billed as Tib Kamayatsu and the Blue Ribbon. The Nichigai entry singles out his guitar playing and his English pronunciation and phrasing.

In 1950 he opened the Japan Jazz School (日本ジャズ学校) and served as its principal. Japanese Wikipedia, citing a book review by Haruomi Hosono, names three pupils who went on to lead postwar Japanese pop: Mickey Curtis, Masaaki Hirao and Peggy Hayama. Curtis's own Japanese Wikipedia biography independently says that he attended the school around 1955, while still in high school, and Japanese Wikipedia cites entries for the school in a 1955 directory of recognised vocational schools in Tokyo and in a 1962 guide to Tokyo schools. The claim that it was Japan's first jazz school, made by the Nichigai dictionary, is contested: a Tokyo Shimbun article of October 2023 gives that distinction to the Iida Jazz School, founded in 1955 in Suginami.

One film appearance is documented: the 1953 Shintoho film Seishun Jazz Musume, in which he appears as a guest judge in the opening scene, a university jazz contest. On October 20, 1957, he sang "My Blue Heaven" in a set of recordings made for NHK broadcast, with the trumpeter Fumio Nanri conducting that session; Polydor's 2009 CD Dynamic Jazz collects the set, and on it Toshio Oida sings "Dark Eyes" and Hisashi Moriyama sings "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby". A 1975 two-LP Victor compilation, Nihon no Jazz Kashu-tachi (Japan's jazz singers), put his "Sioux City Sue" alongside tracks by Oida, Eiji Kitamura and other singers and players of the early postwar scene.

His own records are few. Father & Mad Son (Philips, 1971) is a joint album with his son, filed on Discogs under rock, folk rock and contemporary jazz, on which both men sing and play guitar; its programme includes "Walking My Baby Back Home", which he also recorded for his own album five years later. In 1976 he made the only album released under his name alone, Sing A Simple Melody (Bellwood), a set of eleven standards with Eiji Kitamura on clarinet and tenor saxophone. Two years later he sang the lead on "Japanese Rhumba" on Haruomi Hosono's Paraiso (Alfa, 1978), an album of tropical pop recorded in Tokyo over the winter of 1977 and 1978, on which his son sang backing vocals on the same track.

Tib Kamayatsu passed away on March 10, 1980, aged 68. He was the father of Hiroshi "Monsieur" Kamayatsu of the group The Spiders, a separate person with his own, mostly rock and pop, career, and Japanese Wikipedia credits him with naming that band. Through his wife's family he was also related to the singer Ryoko Moriyama, who is his wife's niece and the daughter of Hisashi Moriyama.

He was an American-raised jazz and pop singer working in English. The Nichigai dictionary credits him with strong guitar technique and a stylish, easy way of singing, with the English of someone who grew up speaking it. The repertoire on his own album is the American standard songbook of the swing era and earlier: "On the Sunny Side of the Street", "Alexander's Ragtime Band", "After You've Gone", "Route 66", "Lover Come Back to Me", "'S Wonderful".

His importance is larger than his discography. He ran a jazz school in Tokyo from 1950, and the singers who passed through it included some of the best-known popular vocalists of the 1950s. He also moved easily out of strict jazz: Father & Mad Son is a rock and folk album led by his son, and the 1978 Paraiso session was a Hosono pop record, so the jazz label fits his career as a singer, bandleader and teacher more than it fits every record he appears on.