Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Isao Suzuki was born on January 3, 1933 in Tokyo, Japan. It wasn’t until college that he asked his mother to buy him a double bass after being moved to tears by the playing of Milt Hinton in concert. His ability to read music allowed him to quickly become proficient enough to land his first job in a strip joint, where it was common practice to hire jazz musicians in the Fifties.

He would join guitarist Tony Tekiseira group a G.I. stationed in Tokyo and over four years he gained confidence learning from the American musicians. By 1960 Isao was playing with George Kwaguchi and Big Four, with special guest Sadao Watanabe, with clarinetist Tony Scott’s band that evolve into the Hidehiko Matsumoto Quartet. The group would play the first world jazz festival in 1964 and Isao would meet Miles Davis, Wynton Kelly but most importantly bassist Paul Chambers.

1966 saw him working with the Sadao Watanabe quartet, then he became a band leader of a house band at Five Spot backing or playing with musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Horace Silver, Winton Kelly and Art Blakey. in 1970 he went to New York and officially joined his Jazz Messengers. Over the next year Suzuki worked and recorded with Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Wynton Kelly, Bobby Timmons, Jim Hall, Ron Carter, Sun Ra and others.

Returning to Japan, he performed and recorded with guitarist Baden Powell, continued playing and recording and became a grand master of jazz. Isao Suzuki is more than a bassist but a multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, producer and bandleader. He continues to contribute to the development of many young musicians enlisting them as members of his band Oma Sound, a practice that has kept his sound on the cutting-edge of progressive jazz to this day.

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