Miki Hirose (広瀬未来) is a trumpeter, flugelhorn player, composer and arranger from Kobe, born in 1984 in the city's Higashinada Ward. He took up the trumpet in the brass band at Konan Junior High School and began playing jazz while still a student: the Kobe Shimbun reports that he performed at the Kobe Jazz Street festival from his first year of high school and, a year later, sat in with established players at the jazz restaurant Sone. He has said that Kobe, the city where Japanese jazz is traditionally dated from the 1923 Laughing Stars band at the Oriental Hotel, gave him a running start.

In 2003, at 19, he left for New York. A 2012 Kobe Shimbun profile says he turned down a scholarship offer from Berklee College of Music in Boston to go, and that he was working in more than ten bands there; his label biography describes freelance work across jazz, salsa, hip-hop and funk. He was the trumpeter of the New York salsa dura orchestra La Excelencia from 2007 to 2012, and he appears on records by the Marty Ehrlich Large Ensemble (A Trumpet in the Morning, New World Records, 2013), the Pedro Giraudo Big Band (Cuentos, 2015), Billy Fox's Blackbirds & Bullets (Dulces, Clean Feed, 2011) and the Global Jazz Orchestra (Global Warming, 2011). Reference-site biographies add that he played in New York with Benny Golson, Frank Wess and Billy Harper, among others; those names come from biographical write-ups rather than from record credits.

His own first records date from the New York years. A Day in New York (Jazz Lab Records, 2010) is a sextet date with the tenor saxophonist Xavier Perez, the trombonist Rick Parker, the pianist Toru Dodo, the bassist Aidan O'Donnell and the drummer Jerome Jennings, and Scratch (2013), reviewed on All About Jazz, drops the trombone, adds the conga player Mauricio Herrera and leans toward Latin rhythms. His label biography says he also played the FONT festival, a showcase for emerging New York trumpeters, with his own quintet.

He came back to Japan in 2014 and settled again in Kobe. The return brought two lines of work. The first is the Miki Hirose Jazz Orchestra, an 11-piece band he founded after coming home, for which he composes and arranges: DEBUT (2018) is ten pieces from "Night & Day" to "Besame Mucho," Relight Delight (2021) mixes his own "Relight Delight" suite with standards and features the organist Shota Watanabe as a guest, and On Cue (2025) is the third album. The second is a place in the working bands of other leaders. He has been the trumpeter in Junko Onishi's sextet since XII (2018), and he is on Live XI (2020) and the Sextet Plus releases Unity All and The Most Live!, as well as the big-band album Out of the Dawn (2021), for which he is credited as composer of seven of the fourteen tracks, including the five-part "Suite Estaciones." He also plays trumpet on bassist Kunpei Nakabayashi's orchestra album Live at "Cotton Club" (2023) beside Takuya Kuroda, and on the drummer Akira Yamada's Kejime Collective album Counter Attack (2022), where the guitarist Kazumi Watanabe guests on one track.

Recognition followed at home. A label biography lists a Kobe City Cultural Encouragement Award in 2015, and the Japanese Wikipedia list of Naniwa Arts Festival winners names him as the jazz newcomer prize winner at the 54th festival in 2017. In April 2023 he was one of four musicians who recreated the Laughing Stars at the opening ceremony of Kobe's jazz centennial at the Oriental Hotel, and he played the free KOBE JAZZ DAY concert the same afternoon.

The recordings he leads under his own name now run through the label Days of Delight, with Akiomi Hirano as producer. The Golden Mask (DOD-008, 2020) introduced his regular quintet: the tenor and soprano saxophonist Mabumi Yamaguchi, the pianist Mayuko Katakura, the bassist Kunpei Nakabayashi and the drummer Akira Yamada. Its title piece is dedicated to Taro Okamoto's "Tower of the Sun," and the rest of the program mixes his originals with "September in the Rain," "You're My Everything" and "Days of Wine and Roses." Air (DOD-019, November 2021) is a trumpet and piano duet record with Katakura: six standards, from "Embraceable You" and "Body and Soul" to "Invitation," and three of his own pieces, "Sunlight," "Blues for Taro" and "Air." El Valor (DOD-043, April 18, 2024) is the quintet's second album, eight originals recorded at NK Sound in Tokyo on October 17, 2023 and engineered by Neeraj Khajanchi, and the release notes call it thrilling and driving throughout.

His schedule through 2025 and 2026 is busy. Japanese press reported in April 2025 that the Jazz Orchestra had rehearsed with the singer Ryoko Moriyama ahead of her Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai performance, and a Blue Note Japan video shows the band backing her at Blue Note Tokyo in 2026. He teaches at the Osaka College of Music and the Koyo Music Academy; a flyer from the college lists him giving a public lesson and special live set with a fellow lecturer on February 15, 2026. His official blog lists club and hall dates in Kobe, Osaka and Tokyo through April 2026, including the Cotton Club in Tokyo on April 30.

Hirose works in a modern mainstream vein: a trumpet and tenor front line over a piano trio in the quintet records, standards and originals side by side, and a second life as a big-band writer. His own descriptions and his labels' notes point to three strands. The Days of Delight quintet records are all-acoustic, post-bop in outline, with originals such as "Humorless," "Mr. Calm" and "Citrus" on El Valor and covers of "September in the Rain" and "Days of Wine and Roses" on The Golden Mask. The New York records carry the Latin side of his playing: Scratch is introduced as combining his music with Latin flavor, and Bandcamp tags A Day in New York as funk, Latin and contemporary jazz. The Jazz Orchestra gives him room to arrange, from "Night & Day" and "Besame Mucho" on DEBUT to "Manteca" and "Superstition" on On Cue.

He is a jazz musician first and last. His non-jazz credits are session work: the New York salsa band La Excelencia, and a handful of pop, rock and hip-hop guest appearances. His own albums, his sideman work for Junko Onishi, his teaching and his club schedule are all jazz.