She recorded her debut solo album, A Drop of Water (Passport, 1987), with her husband Kazu Matsui.

[1] She produced her album The Road (Shanachie, 2011) and recorded it with Richard Bona, Vinnie Colaiuta, Jackiem Joyner, and Kirk Whalum.

She has a very spiritual view of composing music, feeling out each composition as though it were, in her words, "coming to me from another space, another dimension," and "catching notes from the silence and then simply placing them together".

[2] Matsui sees music as "the great gifts from the human souls from the past, for the children of the future".

She performed at the United Nations Headquarters building in New York City on December 17, 2003, to benefit the program.