Shunzo Ohno (大野俊三, also romanised Shunzo Ono) was born in Gifu, Japan, on March 22, 1949. He started on trombone at about 13 because it was the only instrument his public school offered, switched to trumpet at 17, and had his first private lessons at 18. Most of his schooling as a player came from working nightclubs: in 1968 he joined Keiichiro Ebihara and His Lobsters, and his official biography has him recognised as Japan's leading young jazz trumpeter by the age of 19.

By 1970 he was in the middle of Tokyo's jazz-rock scene. He is on Sound Limited recordings from 1970 and 1971 led by drummer Takeshi Inomata, including Sounds of Sound L.T.D., recorded in March 1970, and on 21 July 1970 he played trumpet at the Midsummer Night's Jazz & Rock concert at Hibiya Amphitheater with Jiro Inagaki's Soul Media, a concert Columbia released as Jazz & Rock "Out". From 1971 he was the trumpet and flugelhorn voice of drummer George Otsuka's quintet, on Sea Breeze (recorded February 8, 1971, for Union), Go On (Three Blind Mice, recorded November 28 and 29, 1972, at Aoi Studio) and the live In Concert! (October 11, 1973, at Kosei Nenkin Hall). Between the last two he made his own first record. Falter Out was cut on August 28, 1972, at Teichiku Studio in Tokyo and issued by Victor the following year as the Shunzo Ohno Quartet, with Mikio Masuda on piano and electric piano, Mitsuaki Furuno on bass and Arihide Kurata on drums. He also appears on Sadao Watanabe's Open Road (1973).

In 1974 he moved to New York City. According to his official biography, the reason was Art Blakey, who heard him in Japan, invited him to tour with the Jazz Messengers and suggested he relocate. He recorded his first American leader date, Something's Comming (sic on the sleeve), at The Basement studio in New York on February 20 and 21 and March 6, 1975, for the Japanese East Wind label, with Roy Haynes on drums, Masabumi Kikuchi on organ, Reggie Lucas on guitar, Cedric Lawson on keyboards and Don Pate on electric bass. He recorded Bubbles with Haynes again at Vanguard Studio that July, and the drummer contributed the tune "Bullfight." The same years put him on trumpet on Norman Connors's You Are My Starship (1976), the breakthrough soul-jazz record that went gold.

Back-to-back records for Japan's Electric Bird label followed. Quarter Moon was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in May 1979 with Marcus Miller and T.M. Stevens on electric bass, Victor Lewis on drums, Kenny Kirkland and Onaje Allan Gumbs on keyboards, and Carter Jefferson on trumpet and saxophone. Two months later, in the same studio, he conducted Yasuaki Shimizu's Far East Express. Antares followed in February 1980 at A&R Studio, with Ronnie Burrage and J.T. Lewis on drums, Marcus Miller and Wayne Braithwaite on bass, a string section arranged by Gumbs, and Sybil Thomas singing. A Brazilian side project, The Brazilian Beat of Guanabara, billed him with percussionist Nana Vasconcelos on the sleeve and came out on Baystate in 1982.

The 1980s took him into two of the great New York big bands. He is on Machito and His Salsa Big Band's 1982 album, which won a Grammy for Best Latin Recording, and on the band's Live at North Sea '82, and toured with Machito in the United States, Europe and South America. In 1983 he joined Gil Evans's Monday Night Orchestra, the Sweet Basil band, and is credited on its Live at Sweet Basil volumes, on Bud and Bird (recorded in December 1986 and awarded a Grammy), on Farewell: Live at Sweet Basil (1988), on Evans's collaboration with Helen Merrill, and on Sting and Gil Evans's Perugia concert of July 11, 1987. Evans became a lifelong mentor. His own Manhattan Blue (Electric Bird, 1987) brought together Mike Stern, Darryl Jones, Kenny Kirkland, Victor Lewis, Gil Goldstein and Pete Levin, and it holds the first recorded version of "Musashi," the piece that would win him a songwriting prize decades later. In March 1989, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, he was the trumpeter on Buster Williams's Something More, a quintet with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Al Foster.

In December 1988 a car accident permanently injured his lips and front teeth, and he spent months rebuilding his embouchure before the Van Gelder session. In 1996 he was diagnosed with stage-four cancer of the tonsils. Treatment ran for roughly three years and included surgery that removed more than a hundred muscle structures, along with nerves and tendons, from his face, neck and shoulders. Doctors told him he would likely never play again. He did. Maya, a quintet record with Steve Wilson, Renee Rosnes, James Genus and Billy Drummond, had been recorded in July 1991 at Sear Sound and released by Three Blind Mice; after the illness he recorded a set of Japanese folk songs in November 1999 in New York for the Min-On Concert Association, toured with Larry Coryell and Wayne Shorter, and in the early 2000s received the Min-On Award of Highest Honor and the Asian American Jazz Connection Award. His story was told in the short documentary Never Defeated: The Shunzo Ohno Story, narrated by Buster Williams, which premiered at The Cutting Room in New York in June 2015.

Since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami he has returned repeatedly to northern Japan to play at schools, shelters and temporary housing, and has donated instruments and lessons to local music programs. The New York label Pulsebeats Records has issued Home (2004), ReNew (2016), Dreamer (2018) and Runner (2020), the last built around "EPIC," his first symphonic suite; his composition "Musashi" won the Grand Prize at the International Songwriting Competition, making him the first jazz artist and the first Japanese native to take it. In 2021 he recorded with the Japanese group Root Bagu on O@Bag. His daughter, the cellist Sasha Ono, plays on several of his recent records, and on April 17, 2026, Pulsebeats released Live at Joe's Pub, recorded across three evenings at the New York club with a string quartet led by her. He turned 77 in March 2026 and is still performing.

Ohno plays with a bright, singing tone and a strong ear for melody, and the line from his early listening is easy to trace. A biography on Jazz.com lists Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown, Art Blakey, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter among the players he learned from. His Tokyo recordings, especially Falter Out, sit in a post-bop and fusion idiom, with a twelve-minute opener and shorter pieces after it.

In New York the palette widened. The Electric Bird records of 1979 to 1987 are electric, groove-based fusion with strings, vocals and rhythm sections from the city's session scene. The Machito years gave him a Latin big-band vocabulary, and the Gil Evans years taught him orchestral writing; his later suites and string arrangements, up to the symphonic "EPIC" and the string quartet on Live at Joe's Pub, carry that influence. Japanese melody is a constant. Folk songs such as "Ringo Oiwake," "Akatombo," "Yamanaka Bushi" and "Tairyo Bushi" turn up on his records from the 1980s to the 2010s, and the 2000 Min-On album is devoted to them. His reading of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata on Live at Joe's Pub shows how far the repertoire has travelled from the bebop he started with.

His playing was also rebuilt twice. After the 1988 accident and again after the cancer surgery he had to relearn how to produce a sound on the horn, and he has talked about developing new practice methods for his embouchure each time.