Lost a Rock-Paper-Scissors Game and Got the Alto Sax, Found Charlie Parker Through a Bassist, and Debuted on Savoy at Sixteen

Saori Yano (矢野沙織) was born on October 27, 1986, in Ota Ward, Tokyo. Nobody in her family played music. In her elementary-school brass band the instruments were assigned by rock-paper-scissors, she wanted a flute or clarinet, and she lost, which is how an alto saxophonist was made. Her route to bebop was oblique: Jaco Pastorius's bass version of "Donna Lee" led her back to Charlie Parker, whose intonation she then worked on obsessively. At fourteen she canvassed Tokyo jazz clubs for a place to play; by her own account more than a hundred said no before the owner of Cafe Clair relented. Her self-titled debut came out on September 25, 2003, when she was sixteen, on Savoy, reportedly the second Japanese artist the label had recorded. In 2005 she cut a live album in New York with drummer Jimmy Cobb. Sources differ slightly on the age at which she took up the horn, so that detail is left loose here.