Toshiyuki Miyama (宮間利之) spent more than fifty years in front of one band. He formed it in 1950 as a small group called Jive Aces, grew it into a full big band, renamed it the New Herd (ニューハード) in 1958, and led it until he passed away on 24 May 2016 at the age of 94. In that time the New Herd played Monterey and Newport, recorded with Charles Mingus in Tokyo, and gave its repertoire to outside composers: the pianist Masahiko Satoh, the drummer Masahiko Togashi and the arranger Norio Maeda all wrote long-form works for it.

Miyama was born in Chiba on 31 October 1921. By the band's own account he joined a Navy band in 1939 and served on board the battleships Hyuga, Yamashiro, Nagato and Yamato until the end of the war. After the war he worked with the Lucky Puppy Orchestra and entered the jazz scene as an alto saxophonist; reference works list him as a clarinetist and saxophonist, and his name appears on most records as leader or conductor. In 1950 he started Jive Aces, which played the American military clubs of the occupation years. In 1958 the group, by then the size of a full orchestra, took the name New Herd.

For its first decade it was a working dance and television band, and it never entirely stopped being one. The New Herd accompanied pop singers on dozens of Toshiba, Crown and King records of the early 1960s, recorded screen-theme and march albums, and made a 1970 LP of Japanese military marches. Its jazz reputation was built alongside that work, not instead of it. The turn came in the mid-1960s, when the guitarist and arranger Kozaburo Yamaki and the alto saxophonist and arranger Hiroshi Takami steered the library toward modern jazz. Modern Jazz Highlights (Columbia, 1965) already has Hiroshi Suzuki on trombone and Akira Ishikawa on drums, playing film-jazz themes and hard bop standards such as "'Round Midnight", "Night in Tunisia" and "Work Song".

Perspective (Columbia, July 1969) is the record that changed the band's standing. Six pieces came from six different hands: Satoh, Maeda and Yamaki wrote originals, and the band took on the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows", Charles Mingus's "Pithecanthropus Erectus" and John Coltrane's "Africa". The band's own history records it as a winner of a special planning award in the Jazz Disk Grand Prize. A run of long-form works by outside composers followed. Four Jazz Compositions Based on Japanese Classical Themes (Toshiba, 1970) is four pieces by four writers, Satoh, Takami, Maeda and Yamaki, with a koto in the first, entered in that year's National Arts Festival. Canto of Libra (1970) is Satoh's five-part suite for the orchestra, Canto of Aries (1971) is Togashi's, and Yamataifu (1972) is a set of three movements by Satoh, who plays electric piano with the band. The band's history credits the two Cantos with Japan Jazz Awards and Four Jazz Compositions and Yamataifu with Arts Festival excellence awards.

January 1971 was crowded. On the 14th, Charles Mingus came to Nippon Columbia's studio in Tokyo. Charles Mingus with Orchestra has Mingus on bass with the trumpeter Eddie Preston, the tenor saxophonist Bobby Jones and Satoh on piano, with Jaki Byard credited as arranger and the New Herd as the band behind them, playing "The Man Who Never Sleeps", "O.P." and "Portrait". It has been described as a minor entry in Mingus's discography, but it documents a meeting between Mingus and a Japanese big band that had already put his "Pithecanthropus Erectus" on a record in 1969. On 22 and 27 January the band recorded Canto of Aries, and on the 27th Metempsychosis, a piece for percussion and jazz orchestra by Satoh and Stomu Yamash'ta. After Mingus passed away in January 1979, the band recorded So Long Charles that April, an entire album of his music arranged by Yamaki and Maeda, with the trumpeter Natsuki Tamura in the second trumpet chair.

The Three Blind Mice label recorded the band repeatedly in the mid-1970s. New Herd (1974) was cut at Aoi Studio, Tokyo, on 27 September 1974 as a studio account of the band's set at the 17th Monterey Jazz Festival. The festival concerts themselves, recorded on 20 and 22 September 1974, came out as the double LP The New Herd at Monterey, with Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet for three tracks. The band's own history calls it the first Japanese jazz band to appear at Monterey. It played the Newport Jazz Festival in 1975, a bill on which, according to the band, it shared the stage with the Count Basie Orchestra, and Live at Newport '75 followed on RCA. On Three Blind Mice the band also recorded Take the "A" Train live at the label's "5 Days in Jazz" festival (May 1975) and, as the large ensemble on Shuko Mizuno's Jazz Orchestra '73 and '75, accompanied soloists including Terumasa Hino and Kazumi Watanabe.

The late 1970s were its most varied years. Orchestrane (1977) is an album of John Coltrane pieces, "Impressions", "Naima", "Giant Steps" and "A Love Supreme". Tribute (Union, 1978) is seven pieces written and arranged by the American arranger Sy Johnson, each dedicated to a musician from Bill Evans to Mingus. Vintage Tenor (RCA, April 1978) is a direct-to-disc recording of Lew Tabackin playing standards live in Saitama with the band. El Al (Union, 1979) is the pianist Takashi Kako's four-part score, with Akira Sakata on alto saxophone and alto clarinet and Togashi on drums and percussion. There was also a steady list of film, pop, bossa nova and Latin albums. In 1978 the band toured South America and recorded New Herd en Chile in Santiago on 12 March 1978; in 1982 it went to India and played the Bombay Jazz Yatra; in 1984 it toured Eastern Europe and played the Nice Jazz Festival.

Formal recognition followed. The tenth Nanri Fumio Prize went to Miyama in 1985. The prize bears the name of the trumpeter Fumio Nanri, with whom the New Herd had made St. Louis Blues in 1970. In 1983 the band began a school music appreciation programme, taking jazz into Japanese classrooms. In 2000 it marked its 50th anniversary, played the JVC Jazz Festival in New York in June (an album, New Herd in New York, followed in September), and Miyama received the Agency for Cultural Affairs's Arts Festival Excellence Award. The band kept working after he passed away. In 2017 it was renamed Toshiyuki Miyama NEWHERD (宮間利之ニューハード), with the tenor saxophonist Yuji Kawamura as concertmaster, and its official site lists a concert at Westa Kawagoe on 23 November 2026.

The New Herd's sound is a mainstream big band, brass-led and swing-based, that kept its books open to composers from outside the band. Miyama treated the orchestra as an instrument for others to write for, and the result is a catalogue that moves from bebop arrangements (Be Bop / Up to Date, 1973, arranged by Norio Maeda) to Satoh's and Togashi's free-leaning large-form scores (Canto of Libra, Canto of Aries, Yamataifu, Nayuta Genjo), to Yamaki's own writing, which draws on Japanese folklore and sound (Nio to Hato, 1972, and Tsuchi no Oto, 1973, on legend themes including the kappa and Kurozuka), to jazz-rock and jazz-funk in the early 1970s (Superstar, 1972, with Satoh on Moog synthesizer).

The second constant is tribute. The book returns again and again to American jazz masters: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell on Be Bop / Up to Date, Coltrane on Orchestrane, Mingus on Perspective, with Mingus himself in 1971, and on So Long Charles. The band also played traditional-jazz repertoire with Fumio Nanri and standards with Lew Tabackin.

The third strand is commercial, and it is large. A bandleader who worked for television and the record companies from 1960 on made a great many records that were not jazz records: screen-theme albums, military marches, Group Sounds covers, Latin and pops albums, and accompaniment for singers such as Mieko Hirota, Kyu Sakamoto and Chiemi Eri. Miyama's jazz identity rests on the albums listed above, the festival appearances, the commissioned works and the 50-year orchestra itself, and not on those sessions.