Jun Miyake (三宅純) is a trumpeter, flugelhorn player and pianist who started out as a jazz musician and is now known mainly as a composer for film, dance theatre and advertising. That second identity is the louder one. He has written music for more than 3,000 television commercials, three of his pieces appear on the soundtrack of Wim Wenders's documentary Pina, and he worked for years with Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. The jazz thread is real but it is the root of his work rather than the label on most of it, and this profile treats him as a borderline jazz figure for that reason: a Berklee-trained trumpeter whose catalogue includes a 1984 New York session with some of the best-known names in the genre, and whose later records are hybrids of jazz, bossa nova, chanson, film music and electronics.

He was born in Kyoto on January 7, 1958, and grew up in Kamakura, south of Tokyo. According to Japanese Wikipedia he was already playing professionally at clubs such as Shinjuku Pit Inn while still in high school. His official biography says the trumpeter Terumasa Hino discovered him and that he began his career as a jazz trumpeter; Japanese Wikipedia adds that Hino recommended he go to Berklee College of Music in Boston. He studied there from 1976 to 1981, led his own group in Boston and New York, and in 1981 won a Massachusetts Artist Foundation prize for composition. He then returned to Tokyo and worked as a jazz and studio musician and as a composer for commercials, films, documentaries and contemporary dance.

His first album, June Night Love (TDK Records, 1983), was recorded in Tokyo between April and August 1983. The credits list Miyake on flugelhorn and as composer and arranger, with Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami and Motohiko Hino on drums, Yasuaki Shimizu on tenor saxophone, Soichi Noriki on keyboards and Tim Horner on percussion and chorus. Two of its tracks were used in a TDK television commercial starring Andy Warhol, which started the steady flow of commercial work that earned him a reputation as Japan's "CM king."

The follow-up, Especially Sexy (TDK, 1984), is the most conventionally jazz record he has made. Its track-level credits read like a New York session list: Michael Brecker on tenor saxophone on "Twist to Open" and "JFK Express," David Sanborn on alto saxophone on "June Night Love," and on the closing "Becoming to You" a quartet of Miyake on flugelhorn with Roland Hanna on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Al Foster on drums. Mike Stern plays guitar on "Pungent," and Bobby Broom, Victor Bailey and Charles "Poogie" Bell make up much of the rhythm section elsewhere on the record.

The albums that followed moved further from the straight-ahead frame. Tokoshie no Tenohira (永遠乃掌, Switch, 1988) has him on trumpet, flugelhorn, keyboards and programming, with Bobby Broom and Victor Bailey among the guests. Entropathy (星ノ玉ノ緒, Sony, 1993) was produced by Hal Willner and brings in the guitarists Marc Ribot and Arto Lindsay, the percussionist Don Alias and the violinist Asuka Kaneko. In 1993 he appeared as a soloist at the Montreux Jazz Festival with the Seigen Ono Ensemble, a set released as Montreux 93/94 (Saidera, 1994) with Miyake credited on flugelhorn and piano. His official biography says he performed with his own band in clubs and halls in Tokyo, Boston, New York and Paris between 1988 and 2004. In the same decade he released two volumes of CM Tracks (1996), each collecting 80 of his commercial pieces, with Konosuke Saijo credited as one of the musicians on the first, and he scored "Stink Bomb," the second segment of the 1995 anthology film Memories.

By the late 1990s the records had become stranger and more playful. Latinism Reversible (1997) is a four-track mini-album that Discogs files as avant-garde jazz, and Glam Exotica, Mondo Erotica! and Innocent Bossa in the Mirror (all released between 2000 and 2001) mix exotica, bossa nova, strings and sampling. He also kept working as an arranger and producer for other artists, among them Akina Nakamori, Origa, Vie Vie and Aline De Lima.

In 2005 he moved his base to Paris. There he wrote for the choreographers Philippe Decouflé and Pina Bausch, and his music was used in Bausch productions at Tanztheater Wuppertal including Rough Cut, Vollmond and Sweet Mambo. The album that carries his name best outside Japan is Stolen From Strangers (2007), with Arto Lindsay, Vinicius Cantuária, Dhafer Youssef, Arthur H, Lisa Papineau, the Bulgarian vocal ensemble Cosmic Voices and the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra, with cover art by Jean-Paul Goude. It won him the German record critics' prize, the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik; his official biography and English Wikipedia credit the same prize to the later Lost Memory Theatre albums as well.

Pina (2011), Wenders's film about Bausch, put his music in front of a wide audience. Its soundtrack album includes three Miyake pieces, "Lilies of the Valley," "The Here and After" and "All Names." The film won the European Film Award for Best Documentary and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; the nomination was the film's, not Miyake's. Between 2013 and 2017 he released the three-part Lost Memory Theatre on Yellowbird and P-Vine, with liner notes by Wenders for the first act and guests including Nina Hagen, David Byrne (credited on the recording), Melvin Gibbs, Dhafer Youssef and the cellist Vincent Segal. In 2016 he arranged "Kimigayo" and wrote "Anthem Outro" for the Rio Olympics closing ceremony, the segment that handed the Games over to Tokyo.

On May 7, 2017 he and Ryuichi Sakamoto played the opening of Japan House São Paulo with the cellist Jaques Morelenbaum, according to his official biography; a set of photographs from that evening is the source of the portrait above. Recent scores include Norman (2016), The Translators (Les Traducteurs, 2019), No Longer Human (2019) and Snow Country (2022), and Whispered Garden (Yellowbird, 2021) is the latest of his solo albums. He spent about three years back in Japan during the pandemic and moved his base to New York in 2024. He continues to work, and his official biography counts 17 solo albums.

Miyake's language starts in jazz: a trumpet and flugelhorn sound formed at Berklee and an early habit of recording with working jazz players. From there he has pushed outward in almost every direction. The records mix bossa nova and Brazilian song (Arto Lindsay, Vinicius Cantuária and Bruno Capinan all appear), French chanson, Bulgarian choral writing, orchestral strings and heavy use of sampling and programming. Discogs lists his leader albums under styles that range from fusion and jazz-funk through avant-garde jazz and Latin jazz to exotica, trip hop and soundtrack.

That breadth is also why he sits at the edge of a jazz library. Most of the music the public knows him for is film, dance and commercial work, and a good share of his discography is soundtrack and advertising material rather than jazz records. The Subgenres above name the jazz currents his albums most clearly touch; the rest of his output, including the Pina and anime scores, is better described by the film and dance context it was written for.