Naosuke Miyamoto (宮本直介) is a double bassist from the Kansai region of western Japan. He was born in 1936 in Hyogo Prefecture, and a 2018 profile on Jazz Town Kobe places his birth in Nishinomiya. Discogs gives the date as November 13; the year and prefecture are also in Wikidata and in a 2016 festival biography. He studied commerce at Kwansei Gakuin University, in Nishinomiya, and graduated in 1961. The university years are where the written record starts: Nishinomiya's city page says he was already known as the number one young bassist while still a student.

That reputation took him to Tokyo. George Kawaguchi, whom the city page describes as sitting at the summit of Japanese jazz at the time, picked him for his Big Four Plus One. The 2016 festival biography dates the call to 1960, while the city page places it after his 1961 graduation, so the exact year is not settled. The city page says he stayed about three years in Tokyo. The festival biography lists the musicians he played with there as Sadao Watanabe, Akira Miyazawa, Masayuki Takayanagi and Masahiko Satoh. Jazz Town Kobe adds that he went home to Kansai for family business and kept playing there.

Back in the Kansai area he built a second career as a teacher and organiser alongside the playing. In 1965 he won the grand prize at the first Yamaha Light Music Contest, and the prize was a trip around the world. In 1966 he became an instructor at the Yamaha music schools in Shinsaibashi (Osaka) and Motomachi (Kobe) and opened what the city page calls Kansai's first jazz classes. The festival biography says that on the Japan tours of Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton, Curtis Fuller and Freddie Hubbard he sat in on sessions with them, and that the bassists who shaped him most are Reggie Workman and Ron Carter, with whom he has stayed friends.

His first record as a leader came in 1973. Step! was recorded on August 25 and 26 at Aoi Studio and issued as Three Blind Mice TBM-20 under the name Naosuke Miyamoto Sextet. The front line was Kunji Shigi on trumpet and flugelhorn, Takashi Furuya on alto saxophone and Takeshi Goto on tenor and soprano saxophones, with Masayoshi Yoneda on piano and Shoji Nakayama on drums. Takeshi Fujii produced. Two of the five pieces are by the tenor saxophonist Harold Land ("Step Right Up to the Bottom" and "A New Shade of Blue"), "One For Trane" is Goto's, "Where Do They Go?" is Yoneda's and the closing "Blues" is Miyamoto's. The obi strip on the original LP calls him Japan's top veteran bassist and the record an ambitious work full of thrill and speed. It has been reissued many times: on CD in 2001, as a hybrid SACD in 2006, as a Blu-spec CD in 2013, on vinyl by the French label Le Très Jazz Club in 2019 (the label's seventh release and, by its own account, the album's first reissue of that kind), on CD in 2020, and in June 2025 as an LP and a hybrid SACD in Sony's Three Blind Mice premium reissue series.

A year later he was back at Aoi Studio for Three Blind Mice as a sideman. George Otsuka's New George Otsuka Trio recorded You Are My Sunshine at Aoi Studio, Tokyo, on October 31, 1974, with Hideo Ichikawa on piano and Miyamoto on bass.

Two private-press LPs followed in 1981 on the Bonny Panera label, both recorded live at the Bonny Panera jazz club. The first, catalogued BPL-101, carries no title and credits Miyamoto, the pianist Yoku Tamura (田村翼) and the drummer Mike Reznikoff; it was recorded on October 8 and 17 and released without a sleeve. The second, Poisonous Apple (BPL-102), was recorded on December 28 by the Naosuke Miyamoto Trio with Sadayasu Fujii on piano and Rikiya Higashihara on drums. It opens with the 13-minute title piece, co-written by Miyamoto and Shinpei Nakayama, and also includes his "Crowdy Street".

In 1988 he took a trio to New York. City Breeze, released by Break Time (Crown) as the Naosuke Miyamoto Trio, was recorded and mixed at A&R Studios with Lewis Nash on drums and Shingo Take on piano, and Discogs also credits vocals to Vanessa Rebin (German Wikipedia gives the name as Vanessa Rubin). The LP, BRP-1007, has seven tracks; the CD, BRJ-4069, issued on November 21, 1988, adds an eighth, "East of the Sun". Jim Anderson recorded and mixed it. The same A&R Studios, with Nash on drums and Anderson engineering, hosted the session for Nash's own Rhythm Is My Business on October 5, 1989, a record Discogs credits to Miyamoto as co-producer with Nash. It was issued on Evidence in 1993, and the festival biography says he produced Nash's first album in 1993. The same biography credits him with realising the Japanese franchise of the Blue Note club in 1989, and Jazz Town Kobe says he helped bring Blue Note to Osaka and arranged Dizzy Gillespie's Japan concerts. Those are statements in the biographies cited here; the arrangements themselves are not documented in the sources consulted.

Since 2004 he has been general producer of Nishinomiya Jazz 3 Days, a three-day spring festival of Kansai musicians whose third day, "Young at Heart", is devoted to young players. From 1999, for four years, he coached junior high school big bands in Nishinomiya on a Kansai TV programme with Sadao Watanabe, and from 2004 to 2009 he judged the Music Contest Koshien. He helped found the Kansai Jazz Association with fellow musicians (the city page dates this to 1999) and has been its vice-president since 2000; the pianist Zenshow Otsuka has been the association's president since 2003. In 2014 he received the Nishinomiya Citizens' Culture Award.

In 2008 he joined two older Kansai players in a new group. On September 18 of that year the Golden Senior Trio was formed, with the vibraphonist Naoteru Nabeshima (鍋島直昶), the pianist Zenshow Otsuka (大塚善章) and Miyamoto on bass: a drumless trio of long-serving Kansai players. They made their first recording in 2011 and in 2014 released Jubilee Cookin', a CD and DVD marking Otsuka's 60th anniversary as a pianist; Discogs notes that the three men's ages added up to 245 at the time of recording. In July 2015 Guinness World Records certified the group as the oldest band in any genre. Nabeshima was 89, Otsuka 81 and Miyamoto 78, and their average age was 83 years and 19 days on July 5, 2015. The previous holder, the Peace Old Jazz Band of China, had averaged 76 in 2007. The record requires at least one album on sale and more than 20 concerts of 45 minutes or longer in the previous five years. On September 22, 2016 they gave their first Tokyo concert as a trio, at the Sound Live Tokyo festival. They disbanded after a final concert at Elcelahn Hall in Osaka on October 27, 2019, with the three men aged 93, 85 and 82. Nabeshima passed away on January 6, 2021, at 94.

Miyamoto kept working with his own groups. The jazz database Jazz Shiryokan lists his club dates from September 2018 to July 2022: a quartet led under his own name, a trio billed with the singer Hiromi Toda, a long run of monthly dates with the vocalist Lorna Cifra and the pianist Toshio Takahashi (高橋俊男), evenings with the trumpeter Mirai Hirose (広瀬未来), a "Bass on Top" series at the club JAZZ ON TOP between 2019 and 2021, and several dates with Zenshow Otsuka at COMTE ROSE. The most recent dated appearance on record is a concert planned for January 13, 2025: the 22nd Kwansei Gakuin alumni jazz concert, held in memory of the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, where he was scheduled to play with the KG All Stars. The 2016 festival biography also names two further recordings, Gotta Get Ready (Vols. 1 and 2, 2000) and Hip Bop Plays Love Standards (2005); neither appears in Discogs or the other catalogues checked, so no label, catalogue number or personnel can be given for them.

Step! is the clearest picture of his playing as a leader. Le Très Jazz Club describes it as a modal jazz LP with a spiritual-jazz high point in "One For Trane", while the notes on the 2025 Sony reissue call it a straight-ahead album by Kansai-based players; two of its five pieces are Harold Land compositions. Discogs files his 1981 trio records under Post Bop and Modal and City Breeze (1988) under Contemporary Jazz and Bop. He also wrote: "Blues" on Step!, and "Crowdy Street" and the title piece (with Shinpei Nakayama) on Poisonous Apple. The festival biography names Reggie Workman and Ron Carter as his main influences among bassists. The Golden Senior Trio had no drummer, a format that the same program says requires tight control among the three players.