Teruo Nakamura (中村照夫) was born in Kanda, Tokyo, on March 1, 1942. He left the College of Art at Nihon University without graduating and, in May 1964, moved to New York on his own. He studied the bass with Reggie Workman, and in 1969 made his professional debut in the band of the drummer Roy Haynes. From that point his career ran through New York, with Japan as the audience and, for many years, the record label.

The first years show up in the Discogs credits as a run of sessions around the Japanese trumpeter Terumasa Hino's New York circle. In March 1970 he played bass, Gibson electric bass and the kokyu, a Japanese bowed string instrument, on Hino's Journey to Air at Upsurge Studio, in a band that also had Dave Holland, Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman. A month later he is credited as supervisor of Hino's Alone Together, recorded on April 6 and 7, 1970, with Grossman, the pianist Harold Mabern, the bassist Richard Davis and Hino's brother Motohiko Hino on drums. He also appears on Just Flash in the Cosmic Pan, the Everything Is Everything session, where the credits list him on bass alongside Reggie Workman, Randy Brecker, John Abercrombie, Liebman, Grossman and Lenny White. On September 14, 1970, at the same studio, he produced Chick Corea's The Sun with Holland on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Grossman on tenor saxophone and suona, which Toshiba issued in Japan in 1971.

In 1971 he plays bass on Roy Haynes's Hip Ensemble (Mainstream), beside George Adams on tenor saxophone and flute and Hannibal Marvin Peterson on trumpet. He would later work for Haynes as a producer. In October 1973 he produced and played percussion on Haynes's Togyu at Sound Ideas Studio in New York, with Richard Davis on bass and Kenny Barron on piano, and in January 1976 he produced Haynes's Sugar Roy, with Ron Carter and Tommy Flanagan. Both records were released in Japan, on RCA and on the Kitty label respectively. Years later he named a track on his own Route 80 "Snap Krackle (For King Roy Haynes)."

Unicorn (Three Blind Mice, TBM-18), his debut as a leader, was recorded at the same Sound Ideas Studio on May 18 and June 8, 1973. Grossman plays soprano and tenor saxophone, Lenny White and Alphonse Mouzon share the drum chair, and Hubert Eaves III and George Cables play the keyboards, with Charles Sullivan on trumpet for two tracks and Sandy Hewitt singing on two. Nakamura plays double bass on four tracks and electric bass on the other two, and he produced the record with Takeshi Fujii. It has returned to print repeatedly, including on CD in 2000.

By his own biography he was then a regular in the band of Stanley Turrentine before forming his own group, The Rising Sun, in 1976. That year's Rising Sun was recorded at A&R Studio in New York on April 1, 13 and 26, produced by Nakamura for Kitty, and released by Kitty in Japan and by Polydor in the United States. The follow-up, Song of the Birds in Japan and Manhattan Special in the United States, came from sessions at the same studio between February and May 1977 and added Herbie Hancock on electric piano and synthesizer, with Shiro Mori on guitar and horn arrangements. His own biography says that the two albums reached the top ten of the American jazz charts, which he describes as unprecedented for a Japanese jazz musician. He also played bass on Takashi Mizuhashi's One Tuesday in New York, recorded at A&R on February 22, 1977 with Hancock at the piano.

The Rising Sun Band played Carnegie Hall, and on June 15, 1979 the concert was recorded with a mobile unit and released as At Carnegie Hall with Randy Brecker, Grossman, Bob Mintzer, Mark Gray, Ronnie Burrage and Dom Um Romao in the band. The studio album Big Apple followed the same year, and Route 80 followed in 1981. His own biography describes the Carnegie Hall date as the first by a Japanese musician.

Through the 1980s and 1990s he worked mainly as a producer. His producer credits on Discogs include Bob Mintzer's Horn Man and Source (1982) and Papa Lips (1984), Jorge Dalto's Rendez-Vous (1983) and New York Nightline (1984), Dick Griffin's A Dream for Rahsaan (1985), the pianist Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's P.S. I Love You (1980, on which he also plays bass), and the pianist Kunihiko Sugano's Estaté, recorded in September 1983 and issued in 1990. He also kept making records of his own: Super Friends in 1985, and Wind Smile in 1990, which features Jimmy Heath, Eddie Henderson, John Stubblefield and Barry Finnerty. In 1999 Swing Journal gave him the 24th Fumio Nanri Award. Red Shoes, for Avex, followed in 2001.

Japanese-language biographies add a producing life outside the studio: large concerts including the 100,000 Liberty Jazz Festival (1992), a JAL Jazz Concert for UNICEF (1994) and the Mount Fuji Music Festival (2009), AIDS-relief concerts in Japan and the United States for more than twenty years, and a radio programme, Hip Pocket. In December 2009 he launched the Cheetah label with Pony Canyon, for which he produced Bob Mintzer's Canyon Cove (2010) and Steve Grossman's Homecoming (2011). His 2015 album New York Groove, a four-year project with Lenny White, Jay Rodriguez and Bill Washer among the players, was marked by a photography exhibition of his New York pictures in Tokyo from December 11, 2015 to January 11, 2016. He has since continued to show his photographs, most recently in the exhibition New York Groove 25 at Bankrobber LABO in Shibuya from May 23 to June 2, 2025, which was preceded by concerts at Shinjuku PIT INN on May 16 and 17.

Nakamura is a bassist who moves between instruments inside a single record. On Unicorn he plays double bass on four tracks and electric bass on "Unicorn Lady" and "Umma Be Me," and on Song of the Birds his credit stretches to harmonica, synthesizer and percussion as well as bass. By his own account his training came from Reggie Workman and from the New York musicians around Roy Haynes, whose band he joined at 27.

As a leader he turned that background toward groove-oriented fusion and jazz-funk. The Rising Sun Band records of 1976 to 1981 draw on a pool of New York players, among them Steve Grossman, Bob Mintzer, Randy Brecker, Herbie Hancock and Shiro Mori, rather than a fixed lineup, and the credits show a horn section, several keyboardists and sometimes five drummers on a single album. His later records follow the same method: New York Groove in 2015 pairs him with Lenny White, Jay Rodriguez and Bill Washer.

The producer's ear is the other thread. From the early 1970s he recorded fellow New York players for the Japanese market, and his credits run from a Roy Haynes quartet and a Chick Corea trio to Bob Mintzer's own sessions, Japanese pop dates and the New York recordings of Japanese pianists such as Tsuyoshi Yamamoto and Kunihiko Sugano.