Eric Miyashiro (エリック・ミヤシロ, also written エリック宮城 in kanji) is a trumpeter and flugelhorn player born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on 13 July 1963. Japanese Wikipedia describes him as a third-generation Japanese American, and Yamaha's artist biography says he was born and raised in Hawaii to a musical family and studied both classical and pop/jazz music in Honolulu before going to Berklee College of Music. According to Japanese Wikipedia, he played Carnegie Hall with Maynard Ferguson in his final year of high school, as part of the Hawaii delegation to a national high-school all-star band, and he went to Berklee on the Maynard Ferguson Scholarship, working as a studio musician in Boston with his teachers while still a student.

He then went on the road with big bands. Yamaha's biography lists tours with Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Stevie Wonder and Tower of Power, and a Singapore concert review says he made his name with the Buddy Rich Big Band and the Woody Herman Orchestra. The Rich chair is documented on record: he is credited on trumpet and flugelhorn on Mr. Drums: Buddy Rich & His Band Live on King Street, San Francisco, recorded at One Pass King Street Studios on 3 April 1985 and issued by Cafe Records in 1986, and archival Rich releases such as The Lost West Side Story Tapes (Hudson Music, 2002) and The Lost Tapes (2018) credit him as well.

Miyashiro came to Japan in 1989 and has lived and worked there since, which is the reason he sits in a Japanese jazz catalogue even though he was born in the United States. Nearly four decades of Japanese work back that up. Yamaha describes him as a first-call studio, session and solo player in Japan, and Discogs lists close to 300 appearances on Japanese recordings, from 1990s pop and soundtrack sessions to the Mario Kart 8 score (2015) and the Animal Crossing: New Horizons soundtrack. He also teaches there: Japanese Wikipedia lists him as trumpet lecturer in the popular music course at Showa University of Music and as visiting professor at Kunitachi College of Music, Senzoku Gakuen College of Music and Osaka University of Arts.

In 1995 he formed his own big band, the EM Band (also called the EM Big Band), made up of top Tokyo players who lead their own groups. Its first album, Kick Up, came out on Village Records on 19 July 2000, and City of Brass followed in 2003 on the Kick'Up label with a nine-piece reed and flute section, five trombones and a rhythm section that included the keyboardist Jun Abe. Times Square (Live at STB139) captured the band at the Tokyo club STB 139 on 21 and 22 February 2006 and was released as a multichannel hybrid SACD. Pleiades (2008) was a tribute to Maynard Ferguson with liner notes by Bobby Shew and Wilder Ferguson, and Skydance (2010, Geneon Universal) ended on a version of "Smile" that Discogs says is entirely Miyashiro, overdubbed many times. Blue Horizon, issued on vinyl by Orange Lady on 24 September 2025, is his sixth album under his own name. It has Makoto Ozone among its three pianists, Masato Honda on saxophones, the American trumpeter Greg Gisbert in the trumpet section and the trombonist Eijiro Nakagawa, with the vinyl cut by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road.

Two other orchestras fill out his week. He has been a trumpeter in Makoto Ozone's big band No Name Horses since its first album in 2006, on which Discogs credits him as co-producer as well as performer, and he is credited on trumpet on its Verve albums through Day 1 (2024). And since 2013 he has been leader and music director of the Blue Note Tokyo All-Star Jazz Orchestra, which debuted at Jazz Auditoria in May 2013, played the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2014 and the Esplanade in Singapore on 21 October 2023. It is listed to appear under his direction at JAZZ-FUSION SUMMIT 2026 at Kanadevia Hall in Tokyo on 1 November 2026, on a bill with T-Square, Dimension and the Masato Honda Band.

Miyashiro is a lead trumpeter and high-note specialist first. Japanese Wikipedia singles out his command of the extreme upper register, and the Ferguson scholarship, the Carnegie Hall date and the Pleiades tribute all point to the same school of big-band trumpet. His own band is a conventional full-size big band, with a brass and reed section playing his arrangements.

The repertoire runs from jazz standards ("A Night in Tunisia", "Stella by Starlight", "Danny Boy") and his own originals ("Basara", "Ken's Bar", "Kokopelli") to arrangements of pop and film themes: "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and "MacArthur Park" on Skydance, "Gonna Fly Now" and a Tommy medley on Pleiades, the Lupin III theme in concert. Discogs files his leader albums under jazz, with the styles Big Band and Jazz-Rock. A fair caveat is that most of his recorded output is session work for pop, anime, television and game music, and that his own jazz identity rests on a handful of leader albums and the big bands he leads rather than on small-group improvising. That is why the catalogue tags him as Big Band and Jazz Rock only.