Keita Ogawa (小川慶太) was born in 1982 in Sasebo, a port city in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. He took up drum set at fifteen after seeing a jazz drum solo on television, studied for two years at the Koyo School of Music (Koyo Ongaku Gakuin) in Kobe, and spent a further two years working in Tokyo's jazz scene, including a stint as a roadie for percussionist Saori Sendo, before deciding to study in the United States.

Ogawa enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston in the fall of 2005, where he shifted his focus from drum set to hand percussion under Jamey Haddad and Eguie "Manuel" Castrillo, along with Tito De Gracia, David Rosado, and Mark Walker. In 2007 he spent three months in Rio de Janeiro immersing himself in Brazilian percussion traditions, studying with Jorginho do Pandeiro, Celsinho Silva, Kiko Freitas, and Marcio Bahia - training that shaped the pandeiro, surdo, and hand-drum vocabulary that runs through his later session work.

Settling in New York, Ogawa built a career as one of the city's most in-demand percussionists, working across jazz, Brazilian, and global-fusion settings. His earliest confirmed studio credit with Snarky Puppy is the live album groundUP (2012, Art Of Groove/MIG), and he became a regular member of the band's percussion chair through the 2010s. In the same period he joined bassist Or Bareket's working circle, played percussion and sang on three releases by Greek-American composer Magda Giannikou's band Banda Magda (Amour, T'es Là?, 2013; Yerakina, 2014; Tigre: Stories of Courage and Fearlessness, 2017), and became a founding member of Michael League's Creole-fusion project Bokanté, recording Strange Circles (2017) and the Metropole Orkest collaboration What Heat (2018). He also co-founded and performed in J-Squad, a New York-based quintet of Japanese jazz musicians whose music was featured on Japanese national television beginning in April 2016, and recorded and toured with pianist/composer Clarice Assad, documented on the quintet's live release Live at the Deer Head Inn (recorded 2015, released 2016).

Ogawa's connection to Or Bareket runs through Bareket's debut as a leader: he plays percussion across all nine tracks of OB1 (2017, Fresh Sound New Talent), alongside guitarist Shachar Elnatan, pianist Gadi Lehavi, drummer Ziv Ravitz, and accordionist Vitor Gonçalves. He also recorded with vocalist Tessa Souter on Picture in Black and White (2018) and with Camila Meza and the Nectar Orchestra on Ámbar (2019).

Ogawa has been part of three Grammy-winning Snarky Puppy albums, each confirmed with an album-wide percussion credit: Culcha Vulcha (2016, GroundUP Music/Universal Music Classics), which won Best Contemporary Instrumental Album at the 59th Grammy Awards in 2017; Live at the Royal Albert Hall (2020, GroundUP Music), which won the same award in 2021; and Empire Central (2022, GroundUP Music), which won it again in 2023. He also plays on the band's Grammy-nominated Immigrance (2019) and on Bokanté's Grammy-nominated Strange Circles, and appears on tracks 2, 3, 5, 9, and 11 of Cécile McLorin Salvant's Ghost Song (2022, Nonesuch), nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 65th Grammy Awards. His own site credits him as a three-time Grammy winner and five-time nominee overall. Sasebo named him a tourism ambassador in 2017, and he received a Nagasaki Prefectural Award and a Sasebo Citizen Honor Award in 2021.

More recently Ogawa has worked as a co-leader as well as a sideman: he is one-third of the trio behind Preludes (2023, Chelsea Music Festival Records), pianist Adam Birnbaum's set of twelve original jazz preludes modeled on Chopin, with bassist Matt Clohesy, and he plays percussion in vibraphonist Christian Tamburr's trio with pianist Takana Miyamoto on People Talk (2015). He continues to record widely as a sideman, including a guest percussion credit on singer Arooj Aftab's Night Reign (2024, Verve).

Ogawa's playing draws on the two traditions he studied most directly - Brazilian hand percussion (pandeiro, surdo, repinique) learned in Rio de Janeiro, and the frame-drum and hand-percussion vocabulary he absorbed from Jamey Haddad at Berklee - deployed inside jazz-fusion, Afro-Caribbean, and world-music settings rather than a straight-ahead drum chair. His session work favors color and texture over a single instrument: on Snarky Puppy's Culcha Vulcha alone, Discogs's track-level credits show him playing timbales, repinique, kanjira, caixa, congas, talking drum, kalimba, and handclaps across different tunes, and on Bokanté's What Heat his credited instruments include bendir, daf, pandeiro, and a set of instruments simply logged as "Percussion [Mushroom Drum, Ceramic Vase, Talking Drum, The Thing]." He has described his own approach as valuing "your own style, your own personality and tone" over imitation, and he endorses Latin Percussion, Sabian cymbals, Canopus drums, Cooperman frame drums, and Evans drumheads.