Keyboards, Composition | b. 1934

Shūkō Mizuno was born in Tokushima in 1934, raised in Chiba, studied at Chiba University’s Faculty of Letters and Sciences, and entered Tokyo University of the Arts in 1957 to study music theory, completing the specialist course in 1963. His composition teachers included Yoshio Hasegawa and Michio Shibata; he studied ethnomusicology under Fumio Koizumi and jazz theory under Sadao Watanabe. He then studied electronic music at Mills College in Oakland, California, before joining the faculty at Chiba University as a professor of education, eventually becoming emeritus professor. His collaborative work with Toshiyuki Miyama and the New Herd on Three Blind Mice, “Jazz Orchestra ‘73” (TBM-55, 1973) and “Jazz Orchestra ‘75” (TBM-65, 1975), placed in the top three of Swing Journal’s Jazz Disc Award on both occasions. “The World of Shūkō Mizuno” (TBM-70, 1976), was recorded live at the fourth night of the “5 Days in Jazz 1976” festival at Yamaha Hall in Ginza on May 26, 1976, with his Combo and the New Herd and featuring Kazumi Watanabe on guitar. His parallel classical output includes five symphonies, the most recent published in 2022; he received the Chiba Prefecture Cultural Merit Award in 1991 and the Geijutsusai Yushu Prize in 1997 for his Symphony No. 3.