A Surgeon Who Never Played a Gig, a Recording Studio Inside His Okazaki Hospital, and a Saxophonist's Thank-You Tune Called "Doctor U"

On October 5, 1929, Osamu Uchida was born in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture. He never played professionally and never wrote criticism; he became a surgeon instead, and from 1961 ran his family's hospital in Okazaki, where he fitted out a private studio with instruments, mixers and tape machines. Musicians passing through Aichi came by to play, and he taped them, among them the young Masayuki Takayanagi, Masabumi Kikuchi, Terumasa Hino and Yosuke Yamashita. In 1963 he helped found the Yamaha Jazz Club, which he chaired for decades. When saxophonist Akira Miyazawa had surgery at Uchida's hospital in 1981 and stayed two months, Miyazawa's comeback album My Piccolo came with a thank-you tune titled "Doctor U." In January 1993 Uchida gave Okazaki 12,308 records and 847 reel-to-reel tapes, which the city now displays in a room at its central library, where visitors can listen for free. He died in December 2016, aged 87.