Takeo Moriyama

Takeo Moriyama is a Japanese jazz drummer, born in 1945 and raised in Katsunuma, Yamanashi Prefecture. He came to wide attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the drummer in pianist Yosuke Yamashita's group, a band known for intense free jazz, and later led his own groups from Nagoya. Takeo Moriyama played piano as a child, took up drums in his late teens and studied percussion at the Tokyo University of the Arts. He joined Yamashita in 1967 and toured abroad with him until 1975. That year he recorded Distant Thunder for Enja with Manfred Schoof, Akira Sakata and Yamashita.