Nobuyoshi Ino (井野信義) was born on March 26, 1950, in Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, and grew up in Tokyo, where he went to Gyosei High School. While he was still a student he played R&B with a band on the club circuit. In 1969, straight out of school, he joined The Bluebell Singers, the group whose "Showa Blues" made them a talking point that year, and then left it; he went on to study classical double bass. In 1971 he met the guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, and that meeting is where every biography of him starts his jazz career.

One of his earliest documented sessions is Isao Suzuki's Blue City, recorded on March 4, 1974 at Aoi Studio in Tokyo for Three Blind Mice. Suzuki plays bass and cello himself, so the record has two bassists, with Kazumi Watanabe on guitar, Tetsujiro Obara on drums and Kunihiko Sugano as the special-guest pianist. By the following year he was inside Takayanagi's New Direction Unit. On March 14, 1975 the group recorded Eclipse in Tokyo, with Takayanagi on electric guitar, Kenji Mori on alto saxophone, flute and recorder, Hiroshi Yamazaki on drums and percussion, and Ino on electric bass. Sessions cut on April 30 and May 11 at the Yamaha Music Foundation, originally meant for the ESP label until it collapsed, were not released until 1991, as April Is The Cruellest Month. On September 5, 1975, at Yasuda Seimei Hall, the same lineup recorded Axis / Another Revolvable Thing, on which he plays bass and cello. On May 26, 1980 the unit played the Moers New Jazz Festival in West Germany, and Three Blind Mice issued the set as Live at Moers Festival, with Ino credited on cello. He is also on 850113, which Takayanagi recorded with Angry Waves in Hamamatsu on January 13, 1985, playing electric upright bass.

Takayanagi was not his only employer. Japanese reference biographies call him a top Japanese bassist and say he made a very large number of records with the drummer Motohiko Hino, and the credits support the pairing. Ryuhyo (Sailing Ice), a Three Blind Mice record, was cut at the Nemuro Shimin Kaikan on February 7, 1976 by the Hino quartet with Kazumi Watanabe on guitar and Mabumi Yamaguchi and Yasuaki Shimizu on saxophones; Toko Flash (Trio, 1977) is a piano trio with Masahiko Satoh; and in 1982 the two shared the billing on Zoomin'. With Watanabe he recorded Endless Way for Columbia on July 7, 10 and 11, 1975, a fusion set with Arihide Kurata on drums, Hidefumi Toki on soprano saxophone and Shigeharu Mukai on trombone. On November 13, 1977 Three Blind Mice recorded Tee & Company's Sonnet, another two-bass session, with Ino and Hideto Kanai, Takayanagi on electric guitar, and Masaru Imada on piano. In 1978 he was in the trios behind Aki Takase's Aki (August 1978, bass, electric bass, cello and tube bells) and Hiromasa Suzuki's Primrose (May 18 and 30, 1978, Teichiku Kaikan), and on April 30, 1980 he sat in the bass section of Masahiko Togashi's Improvisation Jazz Orchestra at Yubin Chokin Hall in Tokyo, beside Isao Suzuki, with Satoh conducting from the piano and Kazutoki Umezu in the reeds, for Al-Alaph.

His first record under his own name, Mountain, came out on the Better Days label in April 1981. It was recorded at Nippon Columbia Studios in Tokyo in two blocks, November 24 to 26, 1980 and January 7 to 10, 1981, and has seven tracks. Watanabe plays electric guitar, writes the arrangements and produces; Dave Liebman plays tenor and soprano saxophones and alto flute; Hideo Yamaki plays drums; a Prophet 5 synthesizer is programmed by Yasunori Fujii, and a string section appears on one track. Ino is credited as co-producer. Japanese Wikipedia also describes a duo project of Watanabe and Ino under the name Mountain, and Discogs files the album under jazz and electronic, with fusion and ambient styles, which makes it the least conventional record in his catalogue. He was also the bassist on trombonist Hiroshi Fukumura's Nice Day (Insights, 1981).

The 1980s are marked by duets. English Wikipedia dates a duo with the trumpeter Lester Bowie to the years 1984 to 1988. Duet (Paddle Wheel, 1985) is the studio record: seven pieces, recorded on August 1 and 2, 1985 at Sound Inn Studio A in Tokyo, with Ino on bass and synthesizer and credited as co-producer. Wikipedia credits him with writing "Kami-Fusen," "Baku-No-Akubi" and "Three-Legged Race." The title Yawning Baku (baku-no-akubi is its Japanese form) reappears on Mountain, on Four Sounds' Live at Mobs, on the 1992 Mix Dynamite Trio record and in a 1996 trio with Itaru Oki, and "Kami-Fusen" gave the 2017 release of that 1996 concert its name. In the same year as Duet he made two mainstream trio records for CBS/Sony with Takehiro Honda and Takeo Moriyama, In A Sentimental Mood (recorded April 3 and 4, 1985) and My Funny Valentine, both released on June 21, 1985. In December, at Nova Hall in Tsukuba, he and Aki Takase recorded the duo album Ten i mu ho for Mobys: Takase on piano, Chinese koto, gong and voice, Ino on bass, chanchiki cymbal, kokyu and bells.

Beginning in 1989 he was a regular in the circle of the pianist Fumio Itabashi. To Be (Denon), recorded at Hino Shimin Kaikan Hall on April 18 to 20, 1989, is a trio-plus-percussion record with Kiyohiko Semba that introduced "Gospel '89." English Wikipedia says Ino founded Four Sounds that year, a quartet with Itabashi, Kohsuke Mine and the drummer Hiroshi Murakami; the group's two records, Live at Mobs (1989) and Ma-Pa (recorded April 1990), have Ino on bass in that lineup. Mix Dynamite is the name of Itabashi's own label and of his working band, and Ino is on its early catalogue: Mix Dynamite Trio On Stage, recorded at Body & Soul on November 13, 1992 with Umezu on reeds and melodica; Saiyuki, recorded at Shinjuku Pit Inn on November 3, 1992, with Shota Koyama on drums and the cellist Mayumi Tachibana and clarinetist Keizo Inoue added; and The Mix Dynamite Yu (Omagatoki, 1995), with Koyama, Hiroaki Katayama on saxophones and Etsuko Takezawa on koto and shamisen.

Meanwhile he had returned to Takayanagi. In 1990, the year before the guitarist passed away on June 23, 1991, the two recorded as a duo at Lovely in Nagoya on March 20 and at Romanisches Cafe in Tokyo on October 27, and the tapes were issued by Jinya Disc in 1992 as Reason For Being, with a hard-bop "Hackensack" and "You Don't Know What Love Is" alongside two free improvisations. A third set, from Jazz Inn Lovely in Nagoya on October 9, 1990, adds Masabumi Kikuchi on piano for three of its five tracks and came out on NoBusiness Records in 2020 as Live At Jazz Inn Lovely 1990; the March 1990 duo sessions were also filmed at Jazz Club Lovely and appeared on DVD in 2009.

Japanese Wikipedia says he began working in Europe in 1983 and in 1989 became a regular bassist with both the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra and the Globe Unity Orchestra. The record credits that confirm it are with the Berlin band: The Morlocks and Other Pieces (FMP, recorded July 10 and 11, 1993 at RIAS Berlin) with Takase conducting and playing piano, and Live in Japan '96 (DIW), with Takase and Alexander von Schlippenbach sharing the conducting, recorded at Shin-Kobe Oriental Theatre on August 6, 1996 and at Nakano ZERO Hall on July 31. On October 20 and 29, 1996, in Berlin and Bremen, he was the bassist on Light Blue: Schlippenbach Plays Monk (Enja), with Sunny Murray on drums. English and Japanese reference sources add that he toured with Elvin Jones and that Jones trusted him more than any other bassist until late in his life; no record credit with Jones has turned up, so that claim rests on the biographies alone.

The later decades are less about bandleaders and more about bass duos and trios. With Tetsu Saitoh and Barre Phillips he recorded October Bass Tri-logue across three October 2000 sessions in Saitama, Hyogo and Hiroshima (released October 10, 2001), and with Saitoh alone Bass Duet (recorded March 3, 2004, released 2005) and SoNAISH Gut Bass Duo (recorded December 8, 2005, released March 2011), the second a two-channel record with one contrabass in each speaker. In 2005 he formed the trio Ub-X with the pianist Ichiko Hashimoto and the drummer Atsuo Fujimoto; Ub-X (EWE Records, March 22, 2006) grew out of a theme Hashimoto had written for a cosmetics commercial, which became the track "Rin," and the follow-up Vega (April 18, 2007) adds Jobim and Jorge Ben to the originals. Rostbeständige Zeit (Doubtmusic, 2010) is a double CD recorded at Plan B in Tokyo on April 16 and 17, 2008, with Kazuo Imai on guitar, Axel Dörner on trumpet and Noritaka Tanaka on drums. The most recent session of his with a documented date is Tryangle, a live set at Koen-dori Classics in Tokyo on March 4, 2022 with the drummer Hiroshi Yamazaki and the alto saxophonist Eiichi Hayashi, issued by Doubtmusic. He turned 76 in March 2026.

Ino is a bassist who changes shape to fit the band. The records at one end are free improvisation: the New Direction Unit sessions of 1975, the Takayanagi duos of 1990 and the Saitoh and Phillips bass records, all of which Discogs files under free improvisation or free jazz. At the other end are straight standards trios, the 1985 CBS/Sony pair with Takehiro Honda and Takeo Moriyama among them, and a hard-bop quartet date with Motohiko Hino. Mountain sits between them as fusion, with Kazumi Watanabe's guitar and synthesizers around his bass.

The instrument list on his records is longer than "bass." He is credited on electric bass for Eclipse, on cello for Axis, the Moers concert and Takase's Aki, on kokyu, chanchiki cymbal and bells for Ten i mu ho, on synthesizer for Duet and on voice on Vega. He appears again and again as the second bassist or in a rhythm section of bassists: Isao Suzuki on Blue City, Hideto Kanai on Sonnet, Suzuki again on Al-Alaph, then Saitoh and Phillips decades later.

The Takayanagi connection is the thread that is hardest to miss. Japanese Wikipedia describes both him and Kazumi Watanabe as students of Takayanagi's circle and dates Ino's start in jazz to meeting the guitarist in 1971; his last recordings with Takayanagi, from 1990, came a year before the guitarist's death, and the archival releases from Jinya Disc and NoBusiness have kept that partnership in print.