Satoshi Inoue(井上智, born November 12, 1956 in Kobe, Japan) is a jazz guitarist. Jim Hall calls his former protégé, "an excellent jazz guitarist with a keen musical imagination." [1]
Jazz guitarists are guitarists who play jazz using an approach to chords, melodies, and improvised solo lines which is called jazz guitar playing. The guitar has fulfilled the roles of accompanist and soloist in small and large ensembles and also as an unaccompanied solo instrument.
James Stanley Hall was an American jazz guitarist, composer and arranger. Premier Guitar magazine stated that "It could be argued that the jazz guitar tree is rooted in four names: Django [Reinhardt], Charlie [Christian], Wes [Montgomery], and Jim [Hall]".
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Born in Kobe Japan, Inoue studied at Kyoto's Fuji School of Music from 1979-81. Between 1981-1988, he led his own groups in Japan. [2] He moved to New York City in 1989 to study at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music where he met Hall. He has been on the faculty of the university since his senior year. The two performed together on a guitar duet that was featured on Hall's widely used instructional video collection called Jazz Guitar Master Class Volumes 1&2. In 2005, Hall and Inoue appeared in Village Vanguard 70th anniversary together. [3]
Kobe is the sixth-largest city in Japan and the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture. It is located on the southern side of the main island of Honshū, on the north shore of Osaka Bay and about 30 km (19 mi) west of Osaka. With a population around 1.5 million, the city is part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kyoto.
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asian continent and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea in the south.
The City of New York, often called New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is a center for international diplomacy.
Over the years, Inoue has toured with jazz greats such as James Moody; James Williams; Cecil Bridgewater; Frank Foster; Slide Hampton; Barry Harris; Jimmy Heath; Arnie Lawrence; Jack McDuff; Junior Mance; Jon Faddis; Akira Tana; The Clayton Brothers and Toshiko Akiyoshi.
James Moody was an American jazz saxophone and flute player and very occasional vocalist, playing predominantly in the bebop and hard bop styles.
James Williams was an American jazz pianist.
Frank Benjamin Foster III was an American tenor and soprano saxophonist, flautist, arranger, and composer. Foster collaborated frequently with Count Basie and worked as a bandleader from the early 1950s.
His own band has gigged at New York's top jazz venues - past and present - including The Blue Note, Sweet Basil, Birdland, Smoke, the Village Gate and Zinc Bar.
Blue Note Jazz Club is a jazz club and restaurant located at 131 West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. The club was opened on September 30, 1981, by owner and founder Danny Bensusan, with the Nat Adderley Quintet being the featured performers for the night. The club’s performance schedule features shows every evening at 8:00 pm and 10:30 pm and a Sunday jazz brunch with performances at 12:30 pm and 2:30 pm. The venue has also started a bi-weekly Late Night Groove Series giving New York's up-and-coming jazz, soul, hip-hop, R&B and funk artists an opportunity to showcase their talents on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 12:30 am. The club currently maintains locations in Japan, Italy (Milan), United States, China (Beijing), and Slovakia.
For twelve years, Inoue has brought American musicians to Japan to conduct fall tours for concerts and workshops, including the "Big Apple in Nonoichi" festival.
Jazz critics and musicians have known about Satoshi Inoue for quite some time. A jazz historian Ira Gitler describes hearing Satoshi live in the early 1990s at Sazerac House, a restaurant on New York's Hudson Street: "I was taken with the unforced flow of his ideas and the mellow sound with which he transmitted them".
Ira Gitler is an American jazz historian and journalist. The co-author of The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz with Leonard Feather—the most recent edition appeared in 1999—he has written hundreds of liner notes for jazz recordings since the early 1950s and is the author of dozens of books about jazz and ice hockey, two of his passions.
Hudson Street is a north-south oriented street in the New York City borough of Manhattan running from Tribeca to the south, through Hudson Square and Greenwich Village, to the Meatpacking District.
His lectures on jazz standards appear monthly in a Japanese jazz magazine called Jazz Life.
