Mari Watanabe began piano lessons in Tokyo at age four with her grandmother, a piano teacher. As a freshman at Waseda University she joined the school's New Orleans Jazz Club, founded in 1957 after clarinetist George Lewis toured Japan. She traveled to New Orleans for the first time during Mardi Gras 1985, and by that December she had made the city her permanent home.
Her first professional gig in New Orleans was at the Gazebo Cafe on Decatur Street with trumpeters Chris Burke and Wendell Brunious. Danny Barker heard her, told her to learn the tension chords, and put her on his gigs at Dutch Alley — mentoring her until his death in 1994. By 1987 she was filling in for Sadie Goodson with Gregg Stafford's band, recorded with Willie Humphrey, and played in Jackson Square with Tuba Fats.
Watanabe now leads her own Chosen Few Jazz Band, teaches as a member of the Preservation Hall Musical Collective, and remains a regular on the piano at 726 Saint Peter Street. She has played with Danny Barker, Dr. Michael White, Ernie K-Doe, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Harold Dejan's Olympia Brass Band, and Kermit Ruffins. In 2024 Preservation Hall named her a Legacy Award winner — the first Japanese musician so honored in the homeland of traditional jazz.
