Yoshisaburo Toyozumi (豊住芳三郎), who plays and records as Sabu Toyozumi, was born on 11 July 1943 in Tsurumi, a ward of Yokohama. According to a 2017 profile in New Zealand's Elsewhere magazine, he played in a school marching band, formed an amateur pop group in the late 1950s and turned professional at 22. Two years later he joined the Samurais, the pop group Discogs lists as Micky Curtis & The Samurais, and toured Europe with it. Japanese Wikipedia adds that he studied under the drummer Masahiko Togashi in 1963. He has long pointed to seeing Jimi Hendrix play in Sweden in January 1968 as the moment that pushed him from psychedelic rock toward open improvisation. When he got home he left the band and joined the guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi.

The Takayanagi trio, called New Direction, paired the guitarist with Motoharu Yoshizawa on bass and Toyozumi on drums. They recorded Independence: Tread On Sure Ground on 18 September 1969 (Union Records, 1970), and on 11 and 12 March 1970 they played the Station '70 concerts in Shibuya, with the saxophonist Mototeru Takagi joining for part of the sets. Those tapes stayed in the can until P.S.F. Records issued them in 1994 and 1995 as Call In Question and Live Independence, and Black Editions collected them in 2022. The trio also plays "Mass Projection" on the 1970 sampler Guitar Workshop.

In the early 1970s he worked in two very different worlds. In Japan he drummed in sessions for the big band of Toshiyuki Miyama and the New Herd, among them Togashi's Canto of Aries (1971) and Charles Mingus's Charles Mingus with Orchestra (1971), where he is not credited on the sleeve. In April 1971 he recorded live at Yasuda Seimei Hall with Takagi, a set Qbico issued in 2009 as If Ocean Is Broken. The same year, according to Wikipedia and the Elsewhere profile, he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, reportedly its only non-American member, and Japanese Wikipedia says he played there with Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell and Douglas Ewart. In 1972 he moved to France. On 11 March 1972 he was in the percussion section of Anthony Braxton's Creative Music Orchestra at the Festival of Chatellerault, and in France he played in Emergency, a group built around the bassist Bob Reid with the guitarist Boulou Ferré, the pianist Takashi Kako and the saxophonist Glenn Spearman, which recorded Homage to Peace (1973).

On 20 October 1974, back in Japan for a visit, he recorded Message to Chicago at Jazz Corner Mama in Koriyama with the pianist Ryo Hara and the baritone saxophonist Shoji Ukaji. It was his first record as a leader, and its repertoire draws on AACM compositions. He returned to Japan for good in April 1975, and that month he was on Togashi's Spiritual Nature (recorded 9 April, with Masahiko Satoh on piano and Sadao Watanabe among the players). On 2 July 1975 he gave the concert "The Seven Seas" at Nichifutsu Kaikan Hall in Tokyo with the bassist Takashi Tokuhiro and Takagi, issued as Water Weed. He was in Togashi's quintet in September 1975 for Story of Wind Behind Left, in June 1976 on Satoh's big-band work Nayuta Genjo with the New Herd, and in a free-music trio called F.M.T. with the saxophonist Yoshiaki Fujikawa and the cellist Keiki Midorikawa, recorded at Tachikawa on 27 and 28 June 1978. A quartet under his own name, the Toyozumi Unit, recorded there on 17 and 18 April 1979 with Kazutoki Umezu, Hiroaki Katayama and Haruki Sato, and was issued in 1981 as The Masterpiece.

The partnership for which he is best known began in 1978. The alto saxophonist Kaoru Abe named the duo Overhang Party, and the two played Tokyo clubs and cafes from February to August of that year. Abe passed away on 9 September 1978. Sessions from Raoya in Kichijoji (5 August 1978) and Goodman in Ogikubo (13 August 1978) were issued in 1979 on ALM Records as Overhang-Party - A Memorial to Kaoru Abe. Qbico released a different set of 1978 duo recordings as the double LP Senzei in 2004, and NoBusiness issued Mannyoka, taken from Gaya in Hatsudai (13 January 1978) and Minor in Kichijoji (7 July 1978), in 2018. Its two pieces are dedications to the players' mothers. In March 2020 he recorded "Ode to Kaoru Abe" in the Philippines with the alto saxophonist Rick Countryman, issued in 2021 on Misaki Castle Tower.

From the early 1980s he became one of the Japanese improvisers European musicians most often sought out. In May 1982 he recorded a duo with the German tenor saxophonist Peter Brötzmann in Tokyo, and on 24 and 25 May 1983 he, Toshinori Kondo, the cellist Tristan Honsinger and the bassist Peter Kowald made What Are You Talking About? at Chestnut Studio on Suzuka Mountain, with Kondo producing. He is one of the partners on Kowald's Japanese duo series Duos Japan (sessions between 1984 and 1986), played on the Eastasia Orchestra's Shoyoh Jurin (recorded 14 March 1983), and in autumn 1987 toured with Brötzmann and the English guitarist Derek Bailey. That tour is documented in a duo with Bailey in Fukuoka (2 November), a Bailey and Brötzmann trio in Okayama (16 November) and a duo with Brötzmann at OHM in Tokyo (4 December). The guitarist Fred Frith and John Zorn are credited alongside the saxophonist Onnyk (Yoshiaki Konno) on Ars Longa Dens Brevis, recorded at a gallery in Morioka in February 1985 and December 1987.

The 1990s and 2000s filled out the catalog with duos and trios recorded almost entirely live. With the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith he recorded Cosmos Has Spirit at Hair Salon Fuji on 13 April 1992 and, in Yamaguchi on 22 March 1994, the concert later issued as Burning Meditation. He made a trio record with the bassist Barre Phillips and the guitarist Keiji Haino on 20 December 1991 and played in Japan with the saxophonist Arthur Doyle and the Les Rallizes Denudes guitarist Takashi Mizutani in 1997. The producer Takeo Suetomi recorded concerts in Yamaguchi that caught him with the drummer Han Bennink (1 October 1995), Satoh (26 March 1997) and the pianist Yuji Takahashi (16 March 1998), and he recorded a long duo with the pianist Misha Mengelberg in Shizuoka on 21 October 2000. He recorded with the trombonist Paul Rutherford in 1998 and 1999, with Sunny Murray in Sapporo on 4 April 1999, and with the saxophonist Eiichi Hayashi and Otomo Yoshihide at Gumbo Studio in Yokohama in January 2003 (The Crushed Pellet). The guitarist John Russell brought him to London, where a two-day event was dedicated to him in 2005 and where he played the Fete Quaqua festival in 2009.

By 2009 he had added the erhu, the two-string Chinese fiddle, to his drums, and he uses it on Crimson Lip (recorded in Yokohama on 29 August 2009 with the bassist Alan Silva, the vocalist Keiko Higuchi and the guitarist Takuo Tanikawa) and on the double CD Kosai Yujyo (2012). In March 2017 he toured New Zealand. Since 2017 a long run of trio and quartet records has come from the Philippines, with Countryman and the bassist Simon Tan, and later with the bassist Richard Allan Bates, issued by Chap Chap Records, Sol Disk and FMR. NoBusiness, the Lithuanian label, has meanwhile issued his archival and new duos: The Conscience with Rutherford (2017), Burning Meditation (2018), The Aiki with Satoh (2019), Hokusai with the Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (recorded at Jazz Spot Candy in Chiba on 11 and 12 June 2018), Complete Link with Brötzmann and Kondo (2024), Breath Awareness with Bailey (2024), The Analects of Confucius with Mengelberg (2025) and Sun's Blessings with Murray (2026). Toyozumi turned 83 in July 2026, and his catalog is still growing.

Toyozumi plays a conventional drum kit, but on record he is more often a third voice than a timekeeper. On Cosmos Has Spirit he is credited with percussion tuned to a non-tempered scale, he painted or designed the covers of many of his own releases, and on records such as The Aiki and Hokusai the music is credited to the players jointly as composers even though it is improvised. The Elsewhere profile says the drummers he admired early on were Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, Tony Williams and Max Roach, and his first record as a leader drew on AACM repertoire.

Much of his music is made in duo, and many of his best-known recordings are meetings with a single partner: Abe, Brötzmann, Bailey, Wadada Leo Smith, Mengelberg, Bennink, Satoh. These are live sets, often one or two long pieces. The erhu joins the drums on many of the records from 2009 onward.

The Elsewhere profile calls him a devotee of the Zen flute master Watazumi Doso (Watazumido), whom he met in 1997, and his track and album titles lean on the natural world (Water Weed, Chasing the Sun, Turtle Bird, Musashi As The Water). Five Rings Secret (2022) includes "Gaia Tornade," a piece dedicated to the late Watazumi Doso.