Masahiko Satoh

Did You Know?

• He composed music for a choir of 1,000 Buddhist monks in the early 1990s.
• All songs in the 1973 anime film Belladonna of Sadness were performed by his wife, Chinatsu Nakayama.

Later life and career

Masahiko Satoh was part of Georgie Kawaguchi's band by 1959, sharing the stage with alto saxophonist Sadao Watanabe and tenor saxophonist Akira Miyazawa. A graduate of Keio University, he relocated to the United States at twenty-six to attend Berklee College of Music, where he spent two years studying composition and arrangement. To support himself, he worked in a grocery store and played piano at a hotel. In 1968, he composed and conducted a series of dance-integrated pieces performed in New York. After returning to Japan, he released his debut album as a bandleader, Palladium, and contributed to a Helen Merrill record. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, his playing was marked by a free, percussive approach. At the 1971 Berlin Jazz Festival, he performed in a trio and employed a ring modulator, a device rarely used at the time. Around the same period, he recorded with Attila Zoller, Karl Berger, and Albert Mangelsdorff. He created the psychedelic score for the 1973 anime film Belladonna of Sadness. Satoh has provided arrangements for albums led by Merrill, Kimiko Itoh, and Nancy Wilson, and handled string and quartet arrangements on Art Farmer's 1983 record Maiden Voyage. In 1990, he founded Rantooga, a large ensemble blending global folk traditions. During the early 1990s, he wrote music for a choir of one thousand Buddhist monks and noted that arranging and composing occupied seventy percent of his time, with the remainder split between performing and recording.