On 20 July 1982 Nobuo Hara (原信夫) took his 17-piece big band, Sharps & Flats, onto the stage of the Montreux Jazz Festival and drew the biggest ovation of that day's bill of big bands from around the world. He carried the master tape of the set home to Japan and spent decades looking for it after it went missing. It turned up in perfect condition in 2022, the year after he passed away, and Nippon Columbia released it in October 2024 as Sharps & Flats in Montreux 1982.

He was born Nobuo Tsukahara on 19 November 1926 in Karafuto, the Japanese-ruled southern half of Sakhalin, where his father worked as a cook. Many reference works give Toyama as his birthplace, because the family moved there soon afterwards. His mother died shortly after the move and he was adopted by the Tsukaharas, who ran a fishing business at Higashi-Iwase on the Toyama coast. He took up the cornet at elementary school on a music teacher's advice, and found the tenor saxophone in the brass band of a machine-industry youth school in Toyama. In 1943 he joined the Imperial Japanese Navy band and served with its Yokohama unit until the war ended.

He auditioned for a symphony orchestra after the war, but a former navy bandmate talked him into jazz instead, and he played tenor in clubs for the occupation forces. In 1950 he joined a band called Moonlight at a cabaret in Yokohama and became its leader. The band moved to a US military club, the Villa Club in Shinagawa, Tokyo, and was renamed Sharps & Flats (written ♯&♭), while he took the stage name Hara, reportedly because the American patrons could not manage "Tsukahara." Nippon Columbia dates the start of Sharps & Flats to September 1951, with ten players, and says it soon grew into the 17-piece band it stayed: five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones and a rhythm section of guitar, piano, bass and drums.

The band's first recital, in 1958, was a success from the start. It was recorded on 18 October 1958 at Hibiya Public Hall in Tokyo and issued by King Records the following year as The Sharps and Flats Recital, with Hara on tenor, Hiroshi Suzuki in the trombone section, Kunitoshi Shinohara and Shuzo Morikawa among the trumpets and Kiyoshi Yamaya on baritone saxophone. Three days earlier several of the same players had been part of the Swing Journal All Stars 1958, recorded at Kyoritsu Hall for Radio Tokyo. Over the next few years King and Columbia kept the band busy with themed albums: Soul (Columbia, 1960), with tracks dedicated to Rollins, Davis, Monk and Clifford; Operation Glenn Miller, recorded on 17 and 18 September 1962; and Operation Benny Goodman with the clarinettist Eiji Kitamura in 1963. From 1965 the Big Band Scope records set Sharps & Flats against Tadaaki Misago's Tokyo Cuban Boys, with one band in the left channel and the other in the right.

Television and popular song gave the band a far wider audience than most Japanese jazz groups ever had, and the jazz catalogue has to be read against that. From the 14th contest in 1963 through the 20th in 1969 the band played for the red team on NHK's year-end Kohaku Uta Gassen, and again in 1971 and 1974. It backed Hibari Misora and Chiemi Eri in concert and on record, and Hara wrote for Misora: "Egao to Namida no Toi Michi" (1964), "Hibari Ondo" (1965) and the 1967 hit "Makka na Taiyo." In 1974 he conducted the band behind Shirley Bassey on her Live in Japan double album.

In 1967 Sharps & Flats became the first Japanese band to play the Newport Jazz Festival. According to the Jazz.com encyclopedia, the set consisted entirely of Japanese folk material arranged for big band, and it was well received. CBS issued the programme in Japan that year as Sharps & Flats in Newport, with the shakuhachi player Hozan Yamamoto as soloist and pieces including "Sakura Sakura," "Etenraku," "Sohran-Bushi" and Hara's own "Koto." The collaboration continued with the studio album New Jazz in Japan (Columbia, 1968), arranged by Norio Maeda, then New Dimension of Bamboo Flute (1969), which put "Hey Jude" and "Sounds of Silence" in front of the shakuhachi, and Beautiful Bamboo-Flute (Philips), recorded on 11 and 14 January 1971 from folk songs arranged by Masahiko Satoh. Encore!! Jazz & Bossa (Takt, 1968), recorded on 5 and 6 December 1967 at Bunkyo Kokaido, was a co-billed record with Sadao Watanabe, who arranged it.

The end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s is where the band sounds most like a modern-jazz orchestra. Oliver Nelson arranged and conducted 3-2-1-0 (Columbia, 1969), with Masabumi Kikuchi at the piano, and he conducted the band again on Oliver Nelson in Tokyo, recorded on 4 and 7 September 1970. On 3 and 4 March 1970 the band recorded Double Exposure for Liberty, with four arrangements by Toshiko Akiyoshi. The 1970 album Electronics put Takehiro Honda on organ and electric piano and took the band toward jazz-rock. On 3 December 1971 the band recorded The 20th Anniversary Concert (CBS/Sony), a two-LP quadraphonic set arranged by Frank Foster with Watanabe, Terumasa Hino and Kikuchi as guests, and the band accompanied Kimiko Kasai and Nelson at Yubin Chokin Hall on 24 September 1973 for her live album In Person.

Later highlights include Active Volcano (Three Blind Mice, recorded 25 to 27 June 1979 at Yamaha Epicurus Studio, Tokyo) and Giant Steps (King, 1978), on which Foster arranged and conducted and Elvin Jones played drums. The band also backed Quincy Jones at the Budokan in 1981 (the horns are credited on his Live at Budokan), and in 1982 took in a US trip that included the Cool Jazz festival, New York club dates and the Knoxville World's Fair before Montreux. Eiji Kitamura, Anli Sugano and Yasuko Agawa were guests on Jazz Unlimited Live '80, and in 2010 the band was the accompanist on Chie Ayado's My Way, a record that followed the band's appearance on her 2001 concert DVD Live! II.

Honours followed. At the end of 1981 he received the Nanri Fumio Prize, named for the trumpeter Fumio Nanri and given for the first time to a big-band leader. He received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 1988, a Special Achievement Award at the 38th Japan Record Awards in 1996 and the Order of the Rising Sun, 4th class, in 1998. From about 1990 he and members of the band also went into schools around the country to coach brass bands, and the band's arrangements are still requested by school bands.

In 2008, at 81, he announced his retirement and began a farewell tour. In September 2009 he reassembled the band to play for Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, which he later called the best memory of his career, and his final concert was on 11 February 2010 at Act City Hamamatsu. He passed away of pneumonia at a Tokyo hospital on 21 June 2021, aged 94. In 2023 his grandson, the guitarist Yuma Hara, founded a company, HARA Music Japan, to bring the band back.

Sharps & Flats was a repertory big band in the swing tradition. Its early records are programmed around the Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman book, with Ellington and Basie repertoire on later albums such as Take the "A" Train (1982). Its sound came from the standard 17-piece layout rather than from any one soloist. Hara is credited as leader and tenor saxophonist on most of the records, and the discography documents his work as a programmer and as a chooser of arrangers more than it documents him as a soloist.

The idea that tied the band's best-known records together was Japanese folk material arranged for a jazz orchestra. It is the whole of the Newport programme in 1967, the New Jazz in Japan sessions with Hozan Yamamoto, the folk songs of Beautiful Bamboo-Flute, and the "Awa Odori" and "Soran Bushi" in the Montreux set fifteen years later. Alongside it ran a steady stream of contemporary American arranging, drawn from Oliver Nelson, Frank Foster and, on an album of its own, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and a taste for the electric sounds of 1970 that produced Electronics, which Discogs files under jazz-funk and jazz-rock.

A large part of the catalogue is not jazz proper. There are Latin dance albums, film and television themes (Screen Mood '62, Western Dynamics), kayokyoku accompaniment for Hibari Misora, Chiemi Eri and the enka singer Shinichi Mori, and pop programmes for Japanese labels. Those records sit beside the big-band albums, which are what keep him in a jazz book, and they account for the television presence that made the band better known to the general public than most Japanese jazz groups.