Masato Honda

Biography

Masato Honda is a Japanese saxophonist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. He was born in what was then Nakamura City in Kochi Prefecture, now part of Shimanto City, and is a graduate of Kunitachi College of Music. He is best known as a member of the band T-Square and for his work on the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack with The Seatbelts.

Honda first picked up the saxophone in third grade, encouraged by his father, after trying the flute and clarinet. In high school, he played guitar and sang in a pop band. He studied classical saxophone at Kunitachi College of Music until winning the 14th Yamano Big Band Jazz Contest in 1983, after which he shifted his focus to jazz and fusion. He graduated at the top of his class in 1985 and joined Nobuo Hara's Sharps and Flats. He then worked as a session musician with artists like Toshiki Kadomatsu, Hiroshi Sato, and the Katsumi Horii Project, and co-founded the group WITNESS with Masaharu Ishikawa and Jun Kajiwara.

Honda first worked with T-Square as a session musician during their 1990 live performance featuring the F1 Grand Prix Theme. Soon after, saxophonist Takeshi Itoh left the group for a solo career. Honda became an official member at the 1991 live show Farewell & Welcome, which also served as Itoh's send-off. Earlier that year, he had begun recording his first studio album with T-Square, New-S, which included his composition Megalith as the opening track and was released on March 21, 1991. Later that year, the group released Refreshest, the first album under the name T-Square and Friends, featuring rearrangements of older songs including a version of It's Magic. After the death of racing driver Ayrton Senna in 1994, the group released SOLITUDE, also as T-Square and Friends. For the 1995 album Miss you in New York, overseas musicians David Liebman, Michael Brecker, and Mike Stern joined the project. Following the album Blue in Red, Honda left T-Square for unknown reasons to pursue a solo career. He performed at the Farewell & Welcome Live 1998, recorded on April 28, 1998 and released on VHS that July, and later appeared at the Yaon de Asobu – 20th Anniversary Special. Takahiro Miyazaki, a Berklee graduate, replaced him starting with the album Gravity, though Honda still contributed to that album, playing on the track Japanese Soul Brothers.

Instruments

Honda has experience on a variety of instruments. Aside from the four main soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones he has been observed playing the clarinet, flute, EWI, guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone, and recorder. He also has ability as a jazz scat singer. He even played all instruments from his second solo album, Carry Out. On the alto saxophone he uses a refaced 7 Yanagisawa mouthpiece, as well as a model made specifically for him by the brand Saxz, and a Meyer 5M. He used a Selmer Mark VII saxophone for most of his career, but switched to the more renowned Mark VI at some point in the 2010s and currently uses a Yamaha YAS-875EX. For his time in T-Square during the 90s, he primarily used a synthetic Fibracell reed, but now uses Vandoren's Green Java reeds. On the EWI he started using an Akai EWI during his run with T-Square, and switched to a Berglund NuRAD after three decades of usage.