Terumasa Hino grew up around two instruments that don't usually share a household: his father worked as both a tap dancer and a trumpeter. Hino followed the same order his father had, tap dancing from age four before he ever touched a horn. He picked up trumpet at nine, made his professional debut at thirteen, and by his teens was transcribing solos off records by Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, and Lee Morgan — the vocabulary that would define his own playing for the next two decades.

He joined drummer Hideo Shiraki's Quintet in 1965, staying until 1969 while also beginning to lead his own band as early as 1964. His first record as a leader, Alone, Alone and Alone, came out in 1967. A year later he teamed with pianist Masabumi Kikuchi for the Hino-Kikuchi Quintet, a pairing the two would return to repeatedly over the following four decades. Then, in 1969, came the record that turned him into a name beyond Japan: Hi-Nology, recorded July 31 at Yamaha Hall in Ginza with his brother Motohiko Hino on drums, Hiromasa Suzuki on electric piano, Kunimitsu Inaba on electric bass, and Takeru Muraoka on tenor saxophone. That quartet's chemistry mattered beyond this one record — seven years later, the same four musicians (minus Hino himself) backed a different leader, trombonist Hiroshi Suzuki, on 1976's Cat, a record covered elsewhere in this project. Hino and Suzuki's paths crossed directly, too: Discogs credits them together on 1968's All Japan Jazz Festival single and Hino's own 1968 session Feelin' Good (credited to "Terumasa Hino And His Group," with Suzuki on trombone alongside Masabumi Kikuchi, Kunimitsu Inaba, Motohiko Hino, and Takeru Muraoka), plus Terumasa Hino Concert (recorded Nov. 22, 1968, released 1969).

The 1970s pulled him in several directions at once — funk, free jazz, and the avant-garde all show up across Into the Heaven (1970, Columbia), Vibrations (1971, Enja), Fuji (1972, Victor), Taro's Mood (1973, Enja), Journey Into My Mind (1974), and Speak to Loneliness (1975, East Wind, recorded that January at PSC Recording Studio in Tokyo). By 1975 he had relocated to New York, and the working relationships that followed read like a cross-section of the era's American scene: Gil Evans, Jackie McLean, Dave Liebman, Elvin Jones, Joachim Kühn, Hal Galper, Sam Jones, John Scofield, Mal Waldron, George Russell, and Randy Brecker are all documented collaborators. He recorded for Columbia, RCA, Enja, and Blue Note during this stretch, alongside later work for Japanese labels Pony Canyon and Space Shower Music.

From the 1980s on he split his time increasingly back toward Japan, folding fusion and avant-garde elements into a catalog that runs to 396 credited entries — leader albums, sideman dates, and compilation appearances spanning 1964 through 2025 (his earliest documented credit predates his first billed leader session by three years), one of the longest continuously active discographies of any Japanese jazz musician. He has been honored at home with Japan's Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon (2014) and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette (2019). His most recent studio album as leader, Beyond the Mirage (2019, Space Shower Music), paired him with a younger generation of Japanese players — guitarist Ippei Kato, pianist Akira Ishii, bassist Tomokazu Sugimoto, drummer Shun Ishiwaka — and included a rearranged version of his signature composition "Still Be Bop." As of 2026 he remains an active performer, with dates listed on his own site well into the year.

Hino built his voice on the hard-bop trumpet lineage — Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan — and reviewers have consistently placed him alongside Hubbard and Woody Shaw as a contemporary working the same expressive, big-toned post-bop language. What sets his catalog apart is restlessness: rather than staying inside that hard-bop frame, he pushed repeatedly into funk, fusion, and free improvisation across the 1970s, then folded all of it back into a more settled, still exploratory sound once he split his career between New York and Tokyo. The throughline is a large, powerful tone and an improviser's willingness to follow a session wherever a specific lineup — Gil Evans's orchestra, a Kikuchi duo, a young Tokyo rhythm section on Beyond the Mirage — wants to take it.