Site Map｜Contact
TARO KOYAMA Biography
Taro Koyama is a Japanese jazz drummer. Besides leading his own group, the Taro Koyama Quartet, he has performed with many renowned artists including Kenichi Tunoda Big Band (Tb), Junko Moriya (p) and Shigeharu Mukai (Tb). A master of tone and rhythm is contributing to the music scenes by using his well-cultivated skills and dynamic but delicate articulations, and performing in a wide variety of ensemble and big band work.
Taro Koyama was born in 1965, Sano City in Tochigi. He spent most of his childhood listening thousands of jazz records collected by his jazz fan father. At the age of ten Taro started playing drums, and started studying under Takeshi Inomata while in junior high school. By his teen years he had already begun playing professionally. Taro moved to Tokyo in 1984 to go on to play as sideman with the Naoki Nishi (p) trio and the Osamu Kawakami (b) trio. He was also performed with a variety of musicians, most importantly with the Sadao Watanabe Big Band, the Shigeharu Mukai (Tb) quintet, the Hiroko Kokubu (p) band, the Seiichi Nakamura (sax) quartet and the Mabumi Yamaguchi (sax) quartet before forming his own trio with Hiroshi Tanaka (p) and Yosuke Inoue (b) in 1999. In the same year he released his first album entitled "Light & Shade” with them and embarking on a Japan-wide tour from 2000 to 2001. The tour was extremely well received. Taro moved to New York in 1999 to broaden his view of music and playing with a variety of musicians, most importantly with Shunzo Ohno (Tp), Kenny Wissel (g), Dave Pietro (as), Scott Wenhold (Tp), Jonathan Kreisberg (g), Eric Lewes (p), George Colligan (p), Ed Howard (b) and Gary Wofsy (Tp). He returned to Tokyo in 2004 and released his second album entitled “Drumgenic” with his own quartet (his own trio plus a newly participating saxophonist, Kazuhiko Kondo.) Taro is now playing with a variety of musicians including the Kenichi Tunoda Big Band (Tb), Junko Moriya (p) and Shigeharu Mukai (Tb). He has attained first place for popularity votes held on the Jazz Page Web site both in 2000 and 2005 and been always placed high in the Swing Journal magazine’s popularity votes. In recent years Taro has been a judge at Yokohama Jazz Promenade Competition, the most well-known jazz festival in Japan. He is also instructing jazz course at Showa Academia Musicae.
www.taro-koyama.com
Copyright 2000 - 2015 Taro Koyama