Yasuhisa Mizutani is a Japanese saxophonist and flutist active in jazz, improvisation and independent popular music. A longstanding member of Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe, he appeared on the ensemble's debut recording, Kobe Yee!!, and its later collaboration with Australian pianist and composer Alister Spence, Imagine Meeting You Here. Mizutani has also worked outside large-ensemble jazz as a session musician, contributing alto and soprano saxophones and flute to recordings by Japanese singers and songwriters. His work with Fujii places his incisive alto voice within music that moves freely between tightly organized orchestration, open improvisation and explosive collective textures.

Motoki Suino is a Japanese alto saxophonist documented as a member of Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe. On After the Storm, he joins Yasuhisa Mizutani in the alto section of Fujii's 14-piece ensemble, contributing to the layered reed voicings, angular themes and improvised ensemble passages of the four-part composition. Reliable published biographical information about his wider musical activities is presently limited.

Eiichiro Arasaki is a Japanese saxophonist, flutist, composer, arranger and educator active in the Kansai jazz community. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, he has led his own ensembles and trained younger saxophonists while working across small-group jazz, big-band writing and improvised music. Arasaki has been a central reed player in Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe since its early years, appearing on Kobe Yee!! and Imagine Meeting You Here, where his tenor saxophone and shakuhachi helped broaden the orchestra's tonal vocabulary. His forceful but flexible improvising is particularly suited to Fujii's movement between structured thematic writing and volatile collective interaction.

Tsutomu Takei is a Japanese saxophonist, flutist, clarinetist, composer and arranger based in Osaka. Largely self-taught after discovering jazz in high school, he developed a broad musical practice encompassing jazz, free improvisation, rock, ska, reggae, funk, soul, Brazilian music and traditional reeds. After leaving an engineering career in 2001 to become a full-time musician, Takei performed and recorded extensively with groups including E.D.F., Ensemble Shippolly and his own collaborative projects. A longtime member of Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe, he brings an intense and highly responsive tenor sound to the ensemble's composed and improvised passages.

Keizo Nobori is a Japanese saxophonist from Hyogo Prefecture whose work encompasses jazz, free improvisation and large-ensemble performance. Best known as a baritone saxophonist in Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe, he has been part of the ensemble since Kobe Yee!!, supplying both the low foundation of the reed section and a distinct improvising voice. Nobori has also appeared in smaller experimental settings and on recordings outside Fujii's orchestra, performing on tenor as well as baritone saxophone. His weighty tone and ability to move between ensemble support and independent abstraction make him an important component of Orchestra Kobe's orchestral color.

James Barrett is a trumpeter active in Japan's jazz and improvised-music community and a recurring member of Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe. He appeared with the ensemble on Alister Spence's Imagine Meeting You Here and returns for Fujii's After the Storm, contributing to a trumpet section that shifts between strongly voiced themes, dissonant orchestral masses and freely interacting subgroups. Reliable published information about Barrett's background and work outside the orchestra remains limited.

"Japanese trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for a unique musical vocabulary that blends extended techniques with jazz lyricism. This unpredictable virtuoso's seemingly limitless creativity led François Couture in All Music Guide to declare that "... we can officially say there are two Natsuki Tamuras: The one playing angular jazz-rock or ferocious free improv... and the one writing simple melodies of stunning beauty... How the two of them live in the same body and breathe through the same trumpet might remain a mystery."

Born on July 26, 1951, in Otsu, Shiga, Japan, Tamura first picked up the trumpet while performing in his junior high brass band. He began his professional music career after he graduated from high school, playing in numerous bands including the World Sharps Orchestra, Consolation, Skyliners Orchestra, New Herd Orchestra, Music Magic Orchestra, and the Satoko Fujii Ensemble, as well as in his own ensemble. He was the trumpeter for numerous national television shows in Japan from 1973-1982, including The Best Ten, Music Fair, Kirameku Rhythm and many others.

In 1986, he came to the United States to study at Berklee College of Music. He then returned to his native Japan to perform and teach at the Yamaha Popular Music School and at private trumpet studios in Tokyo and Saitama, before coming back to the US to study at New England Conservatory. He made his debut recording as a leader in 1992 on Tobifudo.

In 1997 he released the duo album How Many? with pianist Satoko Fujii, who is also his wife. It marked the beginning of an artistic collaboration that continues up to the present. The duo has made a total of five CDs over the years, including 2012's Muku. "Muku contains some truly stunning, spine-tingling music...its sheer beauty and elegance is what lingers most," wrote Dave Wayne in All About Jazz. "Fujii's orchestral technique, clear chromatic lines and "prepared piano" devices contrast effectively with Tamura's arsenal of extended techniques which he executes with a warm, vocalized tone throughout the trumpet's full range," Ted Panken said in his four-star DownBeat review. Tamura's collaborations with Fujii reveal an intense musical empathy, and have garnered wide popular and critical acclaim. Jim Santella in All About Jazz described their synergy well in his glowing review of the couple's 2006 Not Two disc, In Krakow, In November: "... the creative couple forcefully demonstrates what can happen when you let your musical ideas run free... Similarly, Tamura's mournful trumpet can fly high or low in search of his next surprise. Oftentimes, they both issue plaintive moans that sing like angels on high." Their sixth duet album is due out in 2017.

In 1998, Tamura began recording his unaccompanied solo performances. The stunning solo trumpet debut release, A Song for Jyaki earned a Writers Choice 1998 in Coda magazine, and Andy Bartlett wrote in Coda, "A fabulous set of hiccuping leaps, drones and post-bop trumpet hi-jinx. Tamura goes from growling lows to fluid, free solo runs and echoes not only Don Cherry's slurring anti-virtuosic chops but also Kenny Wheeler's piercing highwire fullness." He followed it up in 2003 with KoKoKoKe, which Jon Davis described in Exposé as "Buddhist chants from an alien planet." Grego Applegate Edwards explains that on Tamura's most recent solo album, 2013's Dragon Nat, "he pares down to focus on simple unwinding melodic material, the sound of his trumpet as a sensuous thing, a periodicity. Taken as a whole it is a kind of environmental tone poem for the moment Natsuki is in now."

2003 was a breakout year for Tamura as a bandleader, with the release of Hada Hada, featuring his free jazz-avant rock quartet with Fujii on synthesizer. Peter Marsh of the BBC had this to say about the high voltage CD: "Imagine Don Cherry woke up one morning, found he'd joined an avant goth-rock band and was booked to score an Italian horror movie. It might be an unlikely scenario, but it goes some way to describing this magnificent sprawl of a record." The quartet's 2004 Quartet release Exit was deemed "...a brilliantly executed set with a neon glow," by Dan McClenaghan in All About Jazz.

In 2005, Tamura made a 180-degree turn in his music with the debut of his all acoustic Gato Libre quartet. Focusing on the intersection of European folk music and sound abstraction, the quartet featured Fujii on accordion, Kazuhiko Tsumura on guitar, and Norikatsu Koreyasu on bass. The quartet's poetic, quietly surreal performances have been praised for their "surprisingly soft and lyrical beauty that at times borders on flat-out impressionism," by Rick Anderson in CD Hotlist. Dan McClenaghan in All About Jazz described their fourth CD, Shiro, as "intimate, something true to the simple beauty of the folk tradition...Tamura's career has largely been about dissolving musical boundaries. With Gato Libre and Shiro, the trumpeter extends his reach even deeper into the prettiest, most accessible of his endeavors." After the unexpected passing of Norikatsu in 2012, Tamura added trombonist Yasuko Kaneko to the group. The new configuration has toured Europe and Japan and released its debut recording, DuDu, in 2014. "DuDu follows the winning formula of its predecessors but, as with the other discs, eschews the formulaic. The result is another sublimely satisfying, elegant record that brims with raw excitement and a reflective nostalgia," writes Hrayr Attarian in All About Jazz. With the tragic death of guitarist Kazuhiko Tsumura, Gato Libre is now a trio. They will release a CD and LP in 2017.

In 2010, Tamura debuted a new electric quartet, First Meeting, featuring Fujii, drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto and electric guitarist Kelly Churko. Their first release, Cut the Rope, is "is a noisy, free, impatient album, and ranks among Fujii and Tamura's most accomplished," according to Steve Greenlee in the Boston Globe.

While fronting groups and recording as a leader, Tamura has also played an integral role in nearly all of Satoko Fujii's many projects. He is featured on all of the CDs by Satoko Fujii's various orchestras (NY, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Berlin) and has contributed original compositions and arrangements to each of their 19 critically celebrated albums. In addition, he was a featured soloist in the Satoko Fujii Quartet, her avant-rock free jazz group that also included Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins. Of his work on the quartet's 2003 release Minerva, Mark Keresman wrote in JazzReview.com, "Natsuki Tamura's trumpet has some of the stark, melancholy lyricism of Miles, the bristling rage of late 60s Freddie Hubbard and a dollop of the extended techniques of Wadada Leo Smith and Lester Bowie."

Tamura is a vital member of Fujii's Min-Yo Ensemble as well. "Tamura tempers his avant-garde antics with an innate lyricism," wrote Steve Smith of Time Out New York in his review of Fujin Raijin, the intimate acoustic quartet's debut CD. He's also been singled out for his contributions to Fujii's ma do ensemble. "With Tamura's brash and glowing lines, the band incorporates mesmeric ostinatos and thrusting opuses into the grand schema," Glenn Astarita wrote in Ejazznews about their first CD, Desert Ship.

Collaborative groups also play an important role in Tamura's career. Most recently, Tamura joined Fujii and two French musicians, trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins, to form Kaze, which made their recording debut in 2011. In 2015, they released their third album, Uminari, which Jazz Magazine (France) called, "a compelling example of free jazz today. Compositions are perfectly scripted, with a well-oiled interaction and playing of beautiful power..." The collaborative trio Junk Box, which he co-founded in 2006 along with pianist Fujii and drummer John Hollenbeck, plays Fujii's "composed improvisations," graphic scores that take "ensemble dynamics to great creative heights," says Kevin Le Gendre in Jazzwise. Their music "is full of bluster and agitation that nonetheless retains moments of great melodic beauty, usually by way of concise, pertly pretty motifs that trumpeter Tamura plays in between bursts of withering roars that often dissolve into austere overtones." Their premiere CD, Fragment, appeared in 2006. As Daniel Spicer wrote of Fragment in JazzWise, "Tamura spits out gloriously rude Lester-Bowie-like snorts, lows like a herd of robotic cattle or makes like a wheezy howler monkey... Cool and clever." Glenn Astarita of All About Jazz declared it "Required listening."

Along the way, there have been one-off cooperative groups and sideman appearances for Tamura as well. In the Tank, an ad hoc quartet with Fujii and electric guitarists Takayuki Kato and Elliott Sharp, is a "triumphant electro-acoustic adventure" according to Daniel Spicer of Jazzwise. "Think AMM meets blues guitar meets 1970s Miles Davis and you get some idea of the disc's flavor: a slow-moving panorama for the ears, where sounds are systematically added, repeated, refined, and replaced in turn," wrote Nate Dorward in Cadence. Tamura and Fujii were one of two piano/trumpet duos featured on the Double Duo Crossword Puzzle CD, a live recording with Dutch trumpeter Angelo Verploegen and pianist Misha Mengelberg. Tamura has also toured and recorded with saxophonist Larry Ochs' Sax and Drumming Core, and appeared on albums by drummer Jimmy Weinstein, saxophonist Raymond McDonald, and CDs by Japanese free-jazz pioneers trumpeter Itaru Oki and pianist Masahiko Sato. In 2014 he released Nax, a duet album with bassist Alexander Frangenheim. Tamua has toured throughout Japan, North America, and Europe, appearing at major jazz festivals, concert halls, and clubs."

"Yasuko Kaneko is a Japanese trombonist and composer. She was born in 1965 in Chiba, Japan. She began with the french horn in her school days, but felt that the trombone was a better instrument for her self-expression. Consequently she studied classical trombone under Yuri Iguchi, and jazz trombone under Shigeharu Mukai.

In 1992 Kaneko began playing in big-bands, and by 1998 she was playing in small jazz combos and formed her own band. In 2012 Kaneko joined Gato Libre, the acoustic band from Japanese trumpeter Natsuki Tamura.

Kaneko has also performed in Satoko Fujii's orchestra (Kobe). She has played with Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker, Japanese vocalist Koichi Makigami and more. Now she performs improvised music, jazz, contemporary music, and beyond. Kaneko also runs improvisation workshops."

Yuichiro Tamagaki is a Japanese jazz trombonist, arranger and educator active in the Kansai region. He has led trombone ensembles, written arrangements of jazz standards and performed in a variety of jazz and commercial recording settings. Tamagaki studied at Berklee College of Music, where he presented an ensemble built around four trombones, and he continues to teach and perform professionally in Japan. On After the Storm, his broad, songful solo in the opening movement provides one of the composition's central lyrical statements before the orchestra expands into more turbulent collective music.

Takumi Seino is a Japanese guitarist, composer and improviser whose work moves freely across jazz, progressive rock, chamber music and experimental improvisation. He graduated summa cum laude from Berklee College of Music in 1996, where he received an IAJE citation for outstanding musicianship, and has subsequently appeared on more than 80 recordings issued in Japan, Europe and the United States. Seino performs both solo and with numerous collaborative groups, developing a colorful, highly individual approach that can range from delicate, pictorial textures to heavily amplified abstraction. His longstanding work with Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe gives the ensemble a volatile electric voice capable of reinforcing orchestral structures or tearing radically away from them.

Keishiro Saito is a Japanese bassist active in the Kansai jazz scene, performing in small groups, vocal collaborations and improvised ensembles. His playing combines a firm rhythmic foundation with an expressive, melodic approach that allows the bass to function as both support and an independent voice. In Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe, Saito occupies an especially flexible role, grounding densely layered ensemble passages while also participating in exposed subgroups and solo transitions. His unaccompanied introduction to After the Storm establishes the stately melodic character from which the large ensemble gradually emerges.

Yoshikazu Isaki is a Japanese drummer active in jazz, rock and improvised music. He has been associated with Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe since its early recordings, appearing on Kobe Yee!! and Imagine Meeting You Here as well as the later After the Storm. Isaki's playing combines propulsive ensemble drumming with the flexibility required for Fujii's open forms, abrupt dynamic changes and spontaneous small-group passages. He has also contributed to recordings outside the jazz orchestra, including work connected with Japan's alternative and roots-rock scenes.

Hiromasa Sadaoka is a Japanese drummer, percussionist and improviser based in Kobe. His work spans jazz, free improvisation, Latin-influenced music, noise and experimental performance, both as a sideman and through projects issued under his own name. Sadaoka has recorded with the Radical Jazz Standard Quartet and the collaborative ensemble SEMODAI, using drums and voice in music that balances rhythmic drive with open-ended interaction. As one of two drummers on After the Storm, he helps generate the orchestra's large rhythmic surges while also contributing an extended solo that fuses pulse, orchestral harmony and evolving texture.