Yudo Matsuo (松尾由堂, read Matsuo Yudo) is a Tokyo jazz guitarist, composer and painter who came to jazz by a roundabout route. According to the profile on his own website, he was born in Fukuoka in 1977 and later lived in Saga and Kumamoto. In junior high school he became devoted to Bob Dylan, and at fifteen he started playing guitar. He moved to Tokyo to enter the University of Tokyo, and there, hearing the tenor saxophonist 森田修史 play was a shock that made him start listening to jazz. He started working as a professional around 2003, after graduating. No birth month or day is published.

Between roughly 2007 and 2012, by his own account, he took part in recordings and live shows for Lamp, a Tokyo trio (Taiyo Someya, Yusuke Nagai and Kaori Sakakibara) that formed in the winter of 2000 and that his website calls a city pop unit. He lists five tracks on Lamp's 東京ユウトピア通信 (2011) and three on ゆめ (2014). Discogs confirms the ゆめ credit at track level: electric guitar on "A都市の秋," "渚アラモード" and "二人のいた風景." It also credits him with electric guitar on the first two tracks of Lamp's mini-album 八月の詩情 (originally issued in 2010; the credit appears on the 2020 vinyl edition), and the 2025 vinyl reissue of Minuano's 蝶になる夢を見た lists him as electric guitar and soloist on "終わりのない季節." Discogs files all of these under pop. They are guest sessions that sit beside a jazz career, not part of it.

The jazz career is documented from 2012. Bonanza, released in July 2012 on the Coume Music label (DQC-919), was his first record as a leader, and he wrote everything on it except one Beatles song, "Blackbird." The band was a quartet of guitar, trumpet and flugelhorn (Keisuke Nakamura), fretless electric bass (Ryoji Orihara) and drums (Yasushi Fukumori), with Takeru Yamazaki guesting on keyboards on three tracks. The CD runs to ten tracks, including a second, alternate take of the eleven-minute "Wicked Wind." When Brian McCrory reviewed it for the Jazz of Japan newsletter in February 2020, he heard a fusion-leaning record that also takes in smooth jazz, jazz waltzes and pop, with one track, "Loplop," that comes closest to straight bop guitar in the line of Tal Farlow and Pat Martino. A live performance of "Loplop" by the band is on YouTube, posted by the channel Music Air.

Six years passed before the next leader album. A 2015 video shows his quartet at Ikebukuro Apple Jump with Yuichi Narita on piano, Yoshimasa Otsuka on bass and Sota Kira on drums, and from November 2016 his posted schedule lists quartet dates with the pianist Junichiro Ohkuchi (大口純一郎). That group made Songs in Motion at Studio Dede on 26 and 27 March 2017 (the recording dates are in the Discogs release notes), and it came out in early 2018 on the Song X label as SONG X 055, credited to the Yudo Matsuo Quartet: Matsuo on electric and acoustic guitar, Ohkuchi on piano and Fender Rhodes, Otsuka on bass and Kira on drums. All ten tracks are his compositions and the album runs to over an hour. Jazz of Japan, reviewing it in July 2026, described music that moves between displays of fun virtuosity and quieter, more atmospheric pieces, with two tracks of overdubbed solo guitar. The reviewer also noted that the online listing tags it acoustic, country and folk as well as jazz, but that the jazz attitude and improvising carry it from start to finish.

Atlantic Stories followed in November 2018, a solo album of nine tracks on which he plays acoustic and electric guitar, whistle and asalato. Four tracks are pure solo performances that he had first supplied as bonus audio for an issue of the Japanese magazine Audio Accessory, and five are built from self-overdubbing; the only piece he did not write is Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy." It was recorded at Studio Dede, mixed by Shinya Matsushita and mastered by Akihito Yoshikawa, and it is available on Spotify, Apple Music and about thirty other services. His fourth leader album, From the Lowland, came out on 2 September 2020: seven tracks of solo and overdubbed guitar, all recorded at home, including new songs written during the Covid-19 stay-at-home period. His website describes it as the closest he has come to his own roots.

By 2019 he was playing duo dates with the pianist Sumire Kuribayashi (栗林すみれ), and their duo, Zclocca Quokka (ツクロッカクオッカ), has made three albums: Morning Bird (sold at gigs from December 2019, then on Bandcamp from 20 March 2020), Time Passes (4 June 2020, seven tracks and about 25 minutes, recorded by Tadashi Ozawa) and Quiet Traces (29 August 2024), a set of seven pieces and roughly 42 minutes, three written by Matsuo and four by Kuribayashi. The duo describes its music as jazz-based but mixing in classical, Brazilian, Spanish and Japanese folk material, from fast, bright tunes to gentle melodies and playful improvisation. A release event for Quiet Traces was held on 1 December 2024 at the venue um, with a one-day exhibition of his paintings. Matsuo also plays guitar on track 7, "United 93," of I Will Touch You (Doppio Sugo Records, 2021), the album Kuribayashi made with the Italian bassist Giuseppe Bassi. "United 93" is his own tune; he had already recorded it on Songs in Motion and with Kuribayashi on Time Passes. Apple Music also lists a Yudo Matsuo among the featured artists on Gianluca Porro's 2020 single "Angel," a credit that names Bassi among the others.

Hopeful Days (2022) is a different kind of project: ten new pieces written on commission for Vase Music Publishing, meant to be used as background music for video. He says it let him use pop sounds that he seldom has room for in his own gigs and records. He plays guitar, keyboards and other instruments on it. A digital single, "Calling Whale," appeared on Apple Music in November 2021.

On stage he works the Tokyo club circuit in many formats, and his posted schedule is the best record of it. His own projects include AmberTheater 5, a quintet with the trumpeter 市原ひかり; 溪 (Kei), a nylon-string guitar duo with the bassist 落合康介; Trio Bosco, with 落合康介 on bass and 大村亘 on drums or percussion; the Cross Point Duo, a guitar duo with 鈴木直人; and Linha Azul, a trio with 成田祐一 on piano and 清水昭好 on bass. He also accompanies many singers, plays solo shows in cafes and small venues, and returns to rooms such as Nakano Sweet Rain, Ekoda Salt Peanuts, Takadanobaba Gate One and Ikebukuro Apple Jump; Shinjuku Pit Inn appears in his 2017 and 2019 listings. In 2026 the schedule also includes a recurring series at "The Throne," inside the Villa Fontaine hotel at Haneda Airport Terminal 3. He made two solo trips to Kyushu in 2026: a three-day run starting in Miyazaki and Kumamoto in January, and a four-day run through Saga, Fukuoka and Kumamoto in July, the part of the country where he grew up. The schedule runs through December 2026, including a trio night at Nakano Sweet Rain on 21 October with the drummer 鈴木梨花子, marked there as a first-time combination.

Other documented moments include a guest appearance on episode 60 of the YouTube series Tanka Channel (譚歌チャンネル, 27 June 2021), recorded at Sweet Rain with the hosts Hideaki Kanazawa on bass and Akira Ishii on piano, where he played "Humming Bird"; and a guest workshop for guitar students at the SHOW! music school, posted online in May 2016. In early 2021 he also ran a four-part conversation-and-duo series on his own YouTube channel, Yudo's Playroom, with the guitarists 鈴木直人 and 馬場孝喜, the guitarist Sadanori Nakamure (episode 2, 25 January 2021) and 原田上総 as guests. His schedule also lists duo dates with Nakamure in July and August 2020, including one at Ogikubo Northside on 28 August that was streamed online.

Since 2020 he has painted in acrylic and pastel, and by 2026 he was showing work once or twice a year. He calls the daily drawing habit a gift of the Covid shock: performing work disappeared one booking after another, and painting filled the time and gave him encouragement when audiences responded. His first exhibition was in early 2022, and the sixth, built around a series of bird paintings, ran from 23 to 25 January 2026 at Gallery Yamagoya in Ebisu. He has issued a hand-painted calendar every year since the 2021 edition (insects at first, then other animals, marine life in pastel for 2025 and birds for 2026), and he says that things he discovers in painting have influenced his playing and the reverse.

Almost everything on his own records is original music: the Beatles song on Bonanza and the Gershwin standard on Atlantic Stories are the exceptions, and the tune "United 93" travels from the quartet record to the duo with Kuribayashi to the Italian session. Jazz of Japan's two reviews are the main outside evidence of how he sounds. It described Bonanza as built on electric jazz fusion with pop songwriting, smooth jazz and a swinging bop moment in the same set, and heard "Wicked Wind" as an eleven-minute jam in the spirit of the electric Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock periods. It found Songs in Motion lyrical and quartet-driven, with the overdubbed solo tracks showing his melodic writing.

He plays acoustic, electric and nylon-string guitar, and he sometimes sings at solo shows. The duo with Kuribayashi leans toward interplay and improvisation, and the solo albums toward folk-tinged melody. His YouTube channel includes solo readings of "But Beautiful" and "Stella by Starlight" and a guitar version of Thelonious Monk's "Pannonica," so the standards repertoire is part of his working picture. By his own account his first passion was Bob Dylan, and the road into jazz began with a saxophone solo, not a guitar one.

The Lamp, Minuano and library-music credits show a second side: a Tokyo session guitarist who takes pop, Brazilian-leaning and background-music work. His own releases, his club schedule, the jazz tag on all four albums on his own Bandcamp page, and Discogs's description of him as a jazz guitarist all point to jazz as the center of his work.