Naoko Terai (寺井尚子, Terai Naoko in Japanese order) was born on 1 May 1967 in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, and started the violin at four. She trained as a classical violinist: by the age of six she was appearing on NHK Educational TV's violin lesson programme, and as an elementary-school pupil she entered the All Japan Student Music Competition. At 14 she developed tendinitis and had to stop her lessons for a time. She used the break to listen to other music, and the record that turned her toward jazz was Bill Evans's Waltz for Debby.

She made her professional debut as a jazz violinist in 1988, playing live houses in and around Nagoya, where the violinist and arranger Toshihiro Nakanishi noticed her. The break that took her abroad came in 1995, when the pianist Kenny Barron was in Japan and played with her. He invited her to New York to record on his Verve album Things Unseen, where she is credited on violin beside the trumpeter Eddie Henderson and the guitarist John Scofield. The album came out in 1997, and it is the event that Japanese profiles of her still treat as the moment she became widely known. Between the session and the release she also appears on Lullabye (1996), a trio album by the pianist and singer Mala Waldron.

Her first album as a leader, Thinking of You, followed on 16 December 1998 on the One Voice label, with Soichi Noriki on piano, Benisuke Sakai on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums. Three more One Voice studio albums followed: Pure Moment (1999), Princess T (2000) and All For You (2001). The band on Princess T includes the guitarist Lee Ritenour, the drummer Harvey Mason, the pianist Alan Pasqua and the bassist Robert Hurst. Ritenour then produced the live album Live, recorded on 9 December 2000, with Mason, Pasqua and the bassist Dave Carpenter. On All For You the accordionist Richard Galliano is a guest, the first of several projects together.

In 2003 she moved to the Somethin' Else label, the Toshiba EMI jazz imprint, and her records with the pianist Naoki Kitajima began. Anthem (released 14 February 2003) won Jazz Album of the Year (Japanese) at the 18th Japan Gold Disc Awards, and Swing Journal's Jazz Disc Award gave her its Japan Jazz Award for 2004. Kitajima is the pianist on most of the albums she made over the next decade and a half, from Jazz Waltz (2003) through The Standard II (2018), with Go Nakazawa on drums until the mid-2010s and Ryo Arayama after that. In 2008 she received the 33rd Fumio Nanri Award, named after the trumpeter, and for the 2009 fiscal year the Agency for Cultural Affairs' Art Encouragement Prize for new artists in the popular performing arts category, which was presented on 19 March 2010.

Galliano remained a regular partner. On 30 August 2008 she was the special guest of his "Tangaria" quartet at the Tokyo Jazz Festival, recorded at Kokusai Forum Hall A and issued on DVD in 2009. In February 2010 the two played the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris under the title "JAZZ in JAPAN 2010", her first concert in the city. Tango and classical themes run through her later albums. Adagio (2009) took "Time to Say Goodbye" and the theme from Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Limelight (2011) took Bach's "Chaconne" and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and a live record, Libertango in Tokyo, appeared in December 2011. Hot Jazz... And Libertango 2015 and the Piazzolla programme Piazzollamor (2017) continued the line, while Very Cool (2014), The Standard (2017) and The Standard II (2018) went back to standards and to film and pop songs.

In 2018 she marked the 30th anniversary of her debut and the 20th of her first CD. She released The Standard II and a self-selected best-of on the same day, 9 May 2018, and recorded the 14 tracks of the former over two days in February, mostly in one take. Flourish (2020) reworked pieces by Pat Metheny, film music and the aria "Nessun dorma" from Puccini's Turandot, and she toured it with a quartet of Kitajima, the bassist Mitsuaki Furuno and Arayama. In 2021 her quartet, with Yusuke Nakaishi on bass, played Blue Note Tokyo. She has also lent her violin to pop sessions: Hiroko Moriguchi's three Gundam Song Covers albums (2019 to 2022), Anri's 2003 album R134 Ocean Delights, and the 2021 deluxe edition of Melody Gardot's Sunset in the Blue, where she is one of the violinists credited on "From Paris With Love". Her most recent album is Naoko's (2024). She turned 59 in May 2026.

Terai came to jazz from the classical side, and the Japanese press that profiles her stresses the classical technical foundation under everything she plays. Japanese Wikipedia describes her improvising as grounded in bebop fundamentals, in contrast to the swing-era violin tradition of Stéphane Grappelli and Ray Nance. She has gone on to record Waltz for Debby herself, on C'est la Vie (2013). She plays an Italian-made violin that she has used for more than twenty years, and she has said she takes it out on outdoor stages in full sun.

Her repertoire spreads wide. The straight-ahead core is the standards and bebop heads on Thinking of You, My Song and the two Standard albums ("Donna Lee", "Stolen Moments", "Cantaloupe Island", "Soul Eyes", "Nardis"). Around it sit Latin and tango (Astor Piazzolla's "Libertango" appears on All For You, Libertango in Tokyo, Hot Jazz... And Libertango 2015 and Piazzollamor), classical themes treated as jazz vehicles (Bach, Debussy, Mussorgsky, Puccini) and film and pop material. Her Princess T and Live sessions with Ritenour and Mason lean toward fusion. Discogs lists each of her own albums under Jazz, and the Japanese jazz press and award system treat her as a jazz musician: a Gold Disc in the jazz category, Swing Journal's Jazz Disc Award and the Fumio Nanri Award. The crossover and classical material is a real part of her output, and the reason her Subgenres list includes Crossover Jazz.