Tsutomu Okada (岡田勉, Okada Tsutomu) was a Japanese jazz bassist who spent more than four decades inside the rhythm sections of the country's best-known jazz bandleaders and, late in life, finally put his own name on a record. Friends called him "Ben-san," and the domain of his official website, ben-okada.com, comes from that nickname. He was born on December 23, 1948, in the Minamiuwa District of Ehime Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku, according to Japanese Wikipedia and Wikidata, and he passed away on October 2, 2013, at the age of 64.

He studied at Sophia University in Tokyo and left without graduating. His official biography says that during his student years he switched from rock to jazz and from guitar to bass, that he met the saxophonist Akira Omori and the pianist Fumio Itabashi in that period, and that he started his career in Omori's group. Wikidata dates the start of his working life to 1968. The same biography lists the groups he went on to work in, among them those of the altoist Yoshio Otomo, the trombonist Shigeharu Mukai, the pianist Mikio Masuda, the drummer Motohiko Hino and the trumpeter Terumasa Hino.

The recorded trail begins in the second half of 1973. On August 22, 1973, he was the bassist on trombonist Hiroshi Fukumura's Morning Flight at Aoi Studio in Tokyo, and five days later, on August 27, he played the same band's concert at Toshi Center Hall, issued as Live: First Flight. In December 1973 he is on two tracks of Terumasa Hino's Journey Into My Mind, recorded at Iino Hall. In 1974 he recorded Hino's double album Into Eternity at CBS/Sony's No. 1 Studio in Roppongi between May 28 and June 1, and two of the first seven releases on the new East Wind label: Kohsuke Mine's Out of Chaos (July 1974, with Masabumi Kikuchi on piano and Motohiko Hino on drums) and Masuda's Trace (June 1974, with Hino on flugelhorn). In January 1975 he was on Hino's Speak to Loneliness, with Itabashi on piano and Motohiko Hino on drums, and in April 1975 at Tokyo's Yubin Chokin Hall and the Nemuro civic hall in Hokkaido he was the bassist for the Hino concerts that became Live in Concert and the two Wheel Stone albums.

His official biography says that when Terumasa Hino moved to the United States in 1975, Okada went to New York with Itabashi and stayed several months, and that he met Teruo Nakamura, Masabumi Kikuchi, Yoshiaki Masuo, Mine, Hiroshi Murakami and Keiji Kishida there; it adds that for a period he spent several months in New York every year. That account comes from his own site and is not corroborated elsewhere. On his return he joined Sadao Watanabe's group, and the credits bear it out: Watanabe's Recital, recorded live at Yubin Chokin Hall on October 19, 1976, with Mine, Fukumura, Kazumi Watanabe and Takehiro Honda beside him; the Denen Colosseum festival of July 24, 1977, issued as Jazz of Japan: Live Under the Sky '77; and a concert at the Nemuro civic hall on October 8, 1977. That last night was recorded by people connected with the Nemuro Hot Jazz Club, who kept the tape; according to his official site it was broadcast on Watanabe's radio programme Nightly Yours on January 3, 2016, and JVC released it in May 2016 as Live in Nemuro 1977, thirty-eight years after the concert and more than two years after Okada's death.

The longest partnership in his discography was with the pianist Tsuyoshi Yamamoto. Okada is the bassist on Yamamoto trio records from the vocalist Minami Yasuda's Sunny (September 1975) and Daahoud (recorded November 1975) through Blues to East (1977), Midnight Sun (Three Blind Mice, June 1978), the trio album Speak Low (1999) and the live recording at the Tokyo club Body & Soul on June 16 and 17, 1995, which came out as Live at Body & Soul in 1996 and again as Night at Body & Soul in 2015. On July 4, 1979, at Shinjuku Pit Inn, he and Yamamoto, with the drummer Fumio Watanabe as the trio Big Bird, played a night with the harmonica player Toots Thielemans that was released as First Live and, under Thielemans's name, as Toots Thielemans in Tokyo. His official biography says he toured Hong Kong with Yamamoto in 2000.

Other leaders called on him again and again. He recorded the Kohsuke Mine Quintet's Major to Minor (1993), In a Maze (1995) and Balancez (1997) with the guitarist Kazumasa Akiyama, the pianist Junichiro Ohkuchi and the drummer Ryojiro Furusawa; he wrote "Sophia 15" for the last of them. In 1990 he and the guitarist Yoshiaki Masuo made a guitar-and-bass duo album, Acoustic Duo: Lush Life, Billy, Tokyo (Pony Canyon), cut in New York in October 1989 and in Tokyo in April 1990, with three of its eight tracks his own compositions, and toured Japan with it. He wrote "Bird in the Yard" for a 1992 Takehiro Honda session issued in 1993 as Earthian All Star Ensemble (his official site lists it as Ease). He appears on two albums with the altoist Lee Konitz, Lee Konitz Meets Don Friedman (Nova Hall, Tsukuba, October 23, 1992) and Body and Soul, dedicated to the memory of Warne Marsh (Body & Soul, Tokyo, November 7 and 8, 1995, with Gary Foster as second altoist), and his official biography says he also took part in a Japan tour with Lew Tabackin. He played on the first two albums of the singer Chie Ayado, For All We Know and Your Songs (both 1998), and on the debut album of the singer Sumiko Yoseyama, Introducing (Union Jazz, 1983).

Not all of it was jazz. Discogs credits him on bass on most of the tracks of the rock singer Sion's 1990 album Yoru Shika Oyogenai, alongside the drummer Hiroshi Murakami, and the official discography lists him on Sion's live album True Live / 1989-1992. His official biography lists him in the stage show of the actress Kaori Momoi in 2002 and, from 2006, in the stage shows of the actor Issey Ogata.

In 2002 he formed the trio Okada-gumi with the Nagoya pianist Koji Goto and the drummer Atsushi Kuroda, a group that played Nagoya clubs such as jazz inn LOVELY and Jazz Spot Swing and took in vocalists and horn players as guests. In 2005 he, Goto and the drummer Yoshihito Eto began a second trio, The EROS, named, the official site says, by the manager of the club where it started; its album Quiet Thrill came out in 2010 on the Kuku Label.

His own quartet, nicknamed the Hiko-no-ri Ben Band, brought together Mine on tenor saxophone, the pianist Souichi Noriki and Murakami on drums. Their first album, Happiness, was recorded live at Jay-J's Cafe in Meguro, Tokyo, on October 10, 2007, and released on December 23, 2007, his fifty-ninth birthday, as the first release on the label TOAST (TBCJ-07121). The official site calls it his first album as leader and says every one of its six tracks was written by him. The second, Zan Zaux (TBCJ-10041), was recorded live at jazz inn LOVELY in Nagoya on December 12, 2009, released on April 28, 2010, and produced by Okada. The 1990 duo with Masuo was co-billed, so Happiness is his first album under his name alone. The official site announced regional tours by the quartet in northern Japan (2007, 2008 and 2009), Hokkaido (2008) and the Chubu and western Japan regions (2009).

He fell seriously ill in 2012. His staff and friends organised benefits: a "Cheering Up Okada" evening on January 30, 2013, at Live Music JIROKICHI in Koenji, Tokyo; "Get Well BEN" on May 6, 2013, at the Nagoya Arts Creation Center, organised by jazz inn LOVELY, with Terumasa Hino and Keiko Lee as guests; and the Laughing Heart project started by Masuo, a recording of Okada's composition by Mine, Noriki, Murakami, Masuo and Yoshio Suzuki in March 2013 with a cover by the New York artist Yuichiro Shibata. The proceeds went to his family. According to a notice from his support staff, posted on his official site on October 5, 2013, he died on the morning of October 2, 2013, after an illness that had begun the previous year; no cause is given. Memorial concerts followed at Shinjuku Pit Inn on November 4 and at Kichijoji Sometime on November 21, a photo exhibition ran at the Cafesta jazz cafe in Nagoya from January 6 to 29, 2014, and on the first anniversary the Caballero Club in Nagoya held an evening in his memory. Koji Goto released a solo piano album of Okada's pieces, Ontology, in May 2014. Both his trios continued, Okada-gumi with the bassist Hiroki Okitsu and The EROS with Masashi Kato.

Japanese Wikipedia says he played more than 200 live sessions a year, and the German Wikipedia, citing Tom Lord's discography, counts 49 jazz sessions between 1973 and 2012. His Discogs entry lists 63 items, of which 59 are recording credits for this bassist, three of them under his own name.

There is no interview or review in which Okada describes his playing, so what follows comes from where he was used. For the first half of the 1970s he was the bassist of choice for the Terumasa Hino and Kohsuke Mine sessions that the East Wind label issued, which Discogs tags as Post Bop, Free Jazz and Fusion; on Live in Concert (1975), with Watanabe added to Hino's horn line and Itabashi on electric piano, the credits put him in an electric fusion band, and on the 1978 session Burning Super Session he is credited on both acoustic and electric bass. From the middle of the decade the pattern shifts toward the piano trio: Yamamoto's trio records, Itabashi's Toh (a live trio set at Daichi Seimei Hall on March 1, 1976, with Takuji Kusumoto on drums), the Takeda guitar trio and the EROS trio, plus accompaniment for singers from Minami Yasuda in 1975 to Takako Ueno and Chie Ayado.

As a composer he left a modest but traceable body of work: "Bird in the Yard" on Honda's session, "Sophia 15" and a track on Mine's Major to Minor (Discogs credits him as composer of "Changa"), all six pieces of Happiness, three of the six tracks of Zan Zaux ("Zan Zaux," "First Show" and "Words and Mood"), and three of the eight on the Masuo duo album. Several of them lived on after him: Goto's Ontology includes "Now I Smile," "First Show," "Sophia 15" and "Solitaire," titles that appear elsewhere on this page as his, and the singer Itsuka Yamamura wrote lyrics to "Now I Smile" for a 2018 mini album.

A staff report of the Nagoya memorial evening of October 2, 2014 recalls the "growl" he made while playing the bass, which the writer felt could still be heard that night; it is the only description of his playing sound in the sources found.