Yasuaki Shimizu (清水靖晃) was born on August 9, 1954 in Shimada, a town in Shizuoka Prefecture, and spent the 1970s working as a saxophonist in Tokyo. His own first album, Get You, came out on Yupiteru Records in 1978. The same year he appeared on records by the Yosuke Yamashita Trio and the trombonist Shigeharu Mukai, which set the pattern for a career in which his session work would eventually outnumber his own releases by more than six to one.

His second album moved fast and far. Far East Express was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York across nine days in July 1979, with Tony Levin on electric bass, Andy Newmark on drums, Clifford Carter on keyboards and the trumpeter Shunzo Ohno conducting. Shimizu was 24.

From 1979 he led Mariah, the band that occupies the strangest and most celebrated corner of his catalogue. Six albums appeared between 1979 and 1983, beginning near progressive rock and drifting steadily away from it. The last of them, Utakata no Hibi (1983), set traditional Japanese festival rhythms against rock tempos and electronic production, and it is the record that carried the band to listeners outside Japan once the New York label Palto Flats reissued it in 2015.

Between the last two Mariah albums came the solo record that now defines him for most listeners. Kakashi was released on Better Days in 1982, recorded and mixed at Nippon Columbia's Tokyo studios, with Shimizu credited on saxophone, clarinet, flute and voice, and on the cover artwork. It is a record of long, patient saxophone lines laid over dub space, marimba and cello. It stayed a Japan-only pressing for thirty-five years until Palto Flats and WRWTFWW issued it internationally on November 15, 2017.

In 1983 he launched The Saxophonettes, initially a studio concept rather than a band, with L'Automne à Pékin on Better Days. Ryuichi Sakamoto plays piano and bass guitar on it, a credit confirmed in the release personnel rather than inferred from the two men moving in the same Tokyo circles. The following year Shimizu recorded New Yorker Short Stories with The Great Jazz Trio, putting himself in a studio with Hank Jones, Eddie Gomez and Jimmy Cobb.

He also finished another album in 1984, a follow-up to both Kakashi and Utakata no Hibi, built on samplers, drum programming and turntables alongside the saxophone. It was never released. The master tapes stayed in storage until Palto Flats transferred them and issued the record as Kiren on February 25, 2022, thirty-eight years after the sessions.

From 1985 to 1991 Shimizu lived between Paris and London. Subliminal (1987) was recorded and mixed at ADS-Colour studio in Paris with the French producer Martin Meissonnier; Dementos (1988) and Aduna (1989) followed from London, the latter made with the Senegalese musician Wasis Diop, whose own albums No Sant (1995) and African Dream (1996) Shimizu went on to produce. Music for Commercials, a collection of short pieces written for Japanese television advertising, came out on the Belgian label Crammed Discs in 1987 as volume 12 of its Made To Measure series, and was reissued by the same label in 2017.

Back in Tokyo he co-produced the Tokyo Mura Mura Festival with Haruomi Hosono from 1991 to 1994, programming Michael Nyman, John Zorn, The Orb and Julee Cruise.

The work that has occupied him longest began by accident. Practising the Prelude from Bach's first Cello Suite, he ran his tenor saxophone through a reverb unit, and the sound convinced him to record all six suites on saxophone, each in a different acoustic environment, using the space itself in place of an accompanist. The second suite was recorded underground in the Oya stone quarry at Utsunomiya. Cello Suites 1•2•3 appeared on Invitation in 1996 and Cello Suites 4・5・6 on Victor in 1999, gathered as a two-disc set in 2007. Bach Box (1997) won the Best Production prize at the 39th Japan Record Awards. He returned to the same territory in 2015 with the Goldberg Variations arranged for five saxophones and four contrabasses, recorded at Salamanca Hall in Gifu.

In 2006 The Saxophonettes became a working quintet, and Pentatonica (2007) paired Shimizu's own compositions with arrangements of Ethiopian traditional songs built on the pentatonic scale.

Shimizu has scored for film and television throughout, including Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996), the anime feature X (1996), and the Oscar-nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer (2013). In 2012 he received an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica for Voices of Aliveness, made with the artist Masaki Fujihata.

He remains active at 72. Bill Laswell has been releasing tapes of Shimizu's Tokyo club dates with drummer Hideo Yamaki: Shinjuku Pit Inn, recorded at the club in April 2002, appeared in 2020, and the Tokyo Rotation sets, taped in 2009 and 2010, have been issued since 2022, two of them with Akira Sakata on alto saxophone and clarinet. In March and April 2025 Shimizu played seven North American dates, his first there since the 1980s, running from Brooklyn to Seattle by way of Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The tour sold out, drawing on material from Kakashi, Utakata no Hibi and Pentatonica, with Ray Kunimoto, his touring collaborator since 2018, processing the saxophone in real time.

Shimizu is a tenor player first, though he moves across alto, soprano, clarinet, bass clarinet and flute, and produces and arranges as readily as he performs. What connects records as far apart as Kakashi and the Bach cycle is an interest in the saxophone as a sound to be placed rather than simply played. On the 1982 record that means long tones suspended in dub reverb and echo; on the Cello Suites it means choosing a stone quarry as the reverb chamber and letting the room supply the counterpoint a solo cellist would otherwise imply.

His jazz grounding is in the Tokyo fusion and studio scene of the late 1970s, which is where his Kazumi Band and Yosuke Yamashita credits come from, but he moved away from straightforward fusion quickly. The Mariah records absorbed new wave, and by Utakata no Hibi they had turned toward Japanese festival rhythm and folk melody. The European years pushed him further toward African and electronic music, and the 1990s took him into a sustained engagement with Baroque repertoire. Discogs files his own catalogue under jazz, electronic, classical, ambient, new wave and stage and screen, which is a fair description of the range.

The Bach project is the throughline he has spent the most years on, and it is best understood not as a classical detour but as the same instinct that produced Kakashi: take a line, find the right space for it, and let the space finish the music.