Senri Kawaguchi
Senri Kawaguchi is a Japanese drummer known for jazz fusion. In Japan she is sometimes called Tekazuhime, meaning “Princess of Many Strokes.” She wears a gecko image on her 20-inch bass drum and on her Zildjian drumsticks.
She was born in Nagoya on January 8, 1997, and grew up in nearby cities. Her father, a doctor who loves operating and building things, gave her an electronic drum kit when she was five, and she began lessons at six. When she was eight, she started studying with the renowned drummer Kozo Suganuma. Soon she was playing with professional musicians.
In 2009 she released a DVD called Horoscope with Suganuma and members of the fusion band Fragile, and she began playing in small venues with Senri’s Super Session and later the BeeHive Session in Osaka, where she worked with many top Japanese musicians. She posted videos on YouTube, including performances to music from the anime K-On, which helped her reach a wider audience. At 13, she became one of the youngest drummers recognized on Drummerworld’s top 500 list.
Her first overseas trip came in 2011 when Yamaha invited her to showcase new drums at NAMM in California, and she also played in China that year at a drum festival.
In 2013 she released her first solo album, A la Mode, on her 16th birthday. She performed at festivals like Hua Hin Jazz Festival and formed the fusion duo Kiyo*Sen with keyboardist Kiyomi Otaka, releasing Chocolate Booster in 2014. She also recorded in Los Angeles, where she met Philippe Saisse and began a long collaboration. She has served as a judge for the Hit Like a Girl drum competition since 2014.
That year she joined idol group E-Girls on tour, gaining experience playing at large venues, including Tokyo’s Budokan, and she appeared at the Tokyo Jazz Festival. In 2015 she moved to Tokyo to study social science at Waseda University while continuing her music career. Kiyo*Sen released the album Duology in 2015, and Kawaguchi performed at festivals in France and Japan, including a Super Mario 30th Anniversary Concert in Tokyo. She also performed with Guthrie Govan on tour in Japan.
In 2016 she released three albums: KKK Core (with Kozo Suganuma and Kaori Hirohara), Trick or Treat (with Kiyo*Sen), and Cider Hard and Sweet (with Philippe Saisse and Armand Sabal-Lecco). In 2017 she took part in Yamaha’s 50th anniversary celebrations, worked with Bootsy Collins on his World Wide Funk project, and performed with Saisse and Sabal-Lecco at the Tokyo Jazz Festival. Their show at Motion Blue Tokyo was released as a DVD/Blu-ray, winning the Nissan Jazz Japan Award for Best Live Performance. She also joined Eric Miyashiro’s Blue Note Tokyo All-Star Jazz Orchestra and participated in events like Octaves in Bengaluru.
In 2019 Kawaguchi graduated from Waseda University. She then joined Jun Abe in a project that blends traditional Japanese instruments with modern ones, later named ZAON (announced in 2021). In 2020 she played as a guest on the album Ritual iDance by Anders Helmerson. In 2021 she helped close One Young World Munich with a rooftop performance, which inspired a film called Senri’s Seven. The Jazz Avengers, the group she performs with, gave live shows in Japan, including Billboard Live venues, and released their first album in 2023. They announced a hiatus starting May 2, 2025.
Since 2022 she has played with bassist Masatoshi Mizuno and guitarist Shoya Kitagawa in the jazz fusion group Nankai Trio, releasing their first album Antarctica in April 2025.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:06 (CET).