Toshinori Kondo (近藤等則) was born on December 15, 1948 in Imabari, on the island of Shikoku. He entered Kyoto University in 1967, where he met the percussionist Toshiyuki Tsuchitori, and left in 1972. Rather than finish the degree he joined pianist Yosuke Yamashita's group, at that point one of the most uncompromising bands in Japanese free jazz.

His first recorded credit is not a jazz record at all. In 1976 he appeared on an album by the singer Maki Asakawa, the beginning of a working relationship that would outlast every band he joined; nine of her releases carry his name, more than any other artist in his catalog.

In 1978 Kondo moved to New York and became part of the downtown improvised-music scene at the moment it was forming. Within two years he had recorded with John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, Tom Cora, Polly Bradfield, Andrea Centazzo and Henry Kaiser. His first album under his own name, Fuigo From A Different Dimension, appeared on Bellows in 1979, crediting him with trumpet, alto horn, mutes, the compositions, the production and the sleeve design.

He then repeated the exercise in Europe. Between 1980 and 1983 he recorded with John Russell and Roger Turner, with Tristan Honsinger, Steve Beresford and David Toop on Imitation Of Life for Y Records, in duo with the drummer Paul Lovens, with Peter Kowald and Sabu Toyozumi, and alongside Derek Bailey and Evan Parker across both volumes of the Metalanguage Festival recordings. Few Japanese musicians of his generation moved through both the American and European free scenes as completely.

1984 was his pivot year. He returned to Japan and founded IMA, an electric band that ran the trumpet through effects units over funk and electronics and found a genuine commercial audience, producing Taihen (1985), Cerezo Rosa (1986) and 337 (1987). In the same year he played trumpet on three tracks of Herbie Hancock's Sound-System, released on Columbia on August 20, 1984, in a guest cast that included Wayne Shorter, Henry Kaiser and the kora player Foday Musa Suso. The album won Hancock the Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance, his second consecutive award after Future Shock. Its producer was Bill Laswell, who would become one of Kondo's most frequent collaborators fifteen years later. Kondo also recorded with Ryuichi Sakamoto on Ongaku Zukan and worked with Kazumi Watanabe during this period.

The amplified trumpet stayed with him permanently, and not only in commercial settings. In 1994 he joined Peter Brötzmann, William Parker and Hamid Drake in the Die Like a Dog Quartet, a group built around the music and memory of Albert Ayler, and remained with it until 2011. In 1996 he made Ki-Oku (記憶) with DJ Krush, released on August 8 by Sony Music Entertainment Japan, setting trumpet against turntables and sampler. From 1999 he recorded repeatedly with Laswell and Eraldo Bernocchi on the Charged and Re-charged records, and in 2001 released Life Space Death with Laswell, featuring the Dalai Lama.

The final phase of his career took the horn outdoors. Under the title Blow the Earth, Kondo performed solo on amplified trumpet in landscapes: the Negev Desert, Machu Picchu, the Himalayas, Alaska, India, and sites across Japan including the Kurushima Strait beside the town where he was born. The performances date from the 1990s, and the recordings were issued as a series of albums from 2008 onward. In 2002 he organised an International Peace Festival in Hiroshima after speaking with the Dalai Lama, and in 2011 he played the Concert for Fukushima at Wels alongside Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet, Otomo Yoshihide, Michiyo Yagi and Akira Sakata.

He worked without pause to the end. During 2020 he recorded and released six volumes of solo material under the heading Beyond Corona, along with Born of the Blue Planet, Back to Space, Aozora and Santouka, all on his own imprint. He passed away on the night of Saturday, October 17, 2020, at home in Kawasaki, aged 71. No cause was made public. His sons reported that he had been looking forward to a live-painting collaboration with the artist Seitaro Kuroda in Osaka, scheduled for that same day.

Archival and collaborative releases have continued to appear since, including Complete Link with Brötzmann and Sabu Toyozumi on NoBusiness Records in 2024. Discogs credits him on 386 releases, 122 of them as leader.

Kondo's defining decision was to treat the trumpet as an instrument with no settled role. He came up through the most demanding end of Japanese free jazz, established himself in two separate international improvised-music scenes on their own terms, and then, at the point where that reputation was secure, plugged the horn into effects units and started making funk records. Purists read the move as a defection. It is better understood as continuous with everything else he did: each time a context started to define him, he left it.

The amplified trumpet is his signature sound. Once he adopted it in the mid-1980s, he carried it through every setting, from IMA's dance floors to Brötzmann's free jazz to solo performances on mountainsides, which is what makes the catalog cohere despite its apparent scattering.

The late Blow the Earth work reframes the whole career. Playing alone into a desert or out over a strait removes the two things improvised music normally depends on, other musicians and a room, and leaves only the sound of the horn against open space. For a player who spent thirty years responding to other people, choosing to spend his last two decades responding to landscape is a deliberate and legible artistic statement.