Yoshiaki Miyanoue (宮之上貴昭, Miyanoue Yoshiaki in Japanese order, sometimes billed as Miya Miyanoue) was born on 7 October 1953 in Setagaya, Tokyo. He took up the guitar at ten, and in his last year of junior high school he heard a record by Wes Montgomery and became interested in jazz. At Musashino High School in Tokyo he formed a band. After graduating he joined a trio called New Group, with the organist Joe Davis and the drummer Jerry Eddy, and played for three years at the N.C.O. Club on Yokota Air Base, the American base in western Tokyo. At the same time he ran his own quartet in Tokyo jazz clubs and bars. In 1977 he went to New York to build his strength as a player, and he came home to start recording.

His first album, What's Happened? Miya., was taped on 21 January 1978 for ALM Records, with Naoki Kitajima on piano, Yuzo Yamaguchi on bass and Minoru Sakata on drums. The record that made him known nationally came out the next year. Song for Wes was recorded on 25 September 1978 with the American drummer Philly Joe Jones as guest, Kitajima on piano and Takashi Mizuhashi on bass, and was issued in 1979 on the Seven Seas and King Records label. By his own account Jones was in Japan at the time with the Bill Evans trio. The album is a tribute to Montgomery in title and in sound, and it opens the long run of leader albums that followed, nearly one a year through the early 1980s.

Mellow Around (1980) added a string ensemble arranged and conducted by Chikara Ueda, with Kitajima on piano and electric piano, Yamaguchi on bass and electric bass, Sakata on drums, Takashi Ooi on vibraphone and Masato Kawase on percussion. Riviera (recorded 11 and 12 March 1981 at the Higashimatsuyama cultural hall) was the fourth album, and he says it was the one for which he named his working group Smokin'. Hiroshi Hatsuyama is the vibraphonist on it. Later that year, on 26 and 29 September 1981 at AOI Studios, he recorded Touch of Love for Vap with the organist Jimmy Smith as special guest, plus Hatsuyama, the tenor saxophonist Q Ishikawa, Yamaguchi and the drummer Kenny Dixon. He had already played guitar that May on Three Cushion, a session led by the bassist Isao Suzuki (recorded 6 May 1981 at King Studio 2, with Motohiko Hino on drums and Akira Miyazawa on tenor saxophone), and in June 1983 he was on Suzuki's Dark Eyes, with Mizuhashi on bass and Hino again on drums. In 1984 he is credited on the organist Toshihiko Kankawa's Quarter Run, which has Jimmy Smith on organ as well.

Smokin' kept working as his live band. Its double album Dedicated to Wes Montgomery (1985), recorded in jazz clubs between November 1984 and February 1985 with the pianist Hideaki Yoshioka, three bassists and the drummer Kazuyoshi Okayama, is the record most often singled out. His own site and Japanese Wikipedia both say it was picked for the book "Nihon no Jazz 100 sen" (Japanese Jazz, 100 Selections). In 1988 he took the opposite direction with Foxy Eyes (Toshiba EMI), an easy-listening set with the Maeda Strings, arranged and programmed by Shiro Sagisu, and with Masato Honda on synthesizer. The 1990s brought Smokin' (1991), Bluesland (1993), The Thumb (1995) and a guitar duet album, Yoshiaki!! (1996), with a fellow guitarist who shares his given name, Yoshiaki Okayasu. L.A. Connection (1997) was his first album recorded abroad: taped at Daniel May's studio in Long Beach, California, on 12 to 15 February 1997, with the bassist Andy Simpkins (who also produced), the pianist Frank Collett and the drummer Sherman Ferguson. Me, Myself & I (1999) is a set of standards for solo guitar.

He has toured and played festivals abroad since the late 1980s. His biography lists Jazz Yatra in India in 1988, a trip to Guangzhou in 1990 to teach jazz to Chinese musicians through recordings, the Monterey Jazz Festival with the clarinetist Eiji Kitamura almost every year from 1991, the Queensland festival in Brisbane in 1992 and 1993, the University of Hawaii's Hawaii Jazz Guitar Festival in June 1993, and six straight years at the International Jazz Party in Los Angeles from 1993. He has played in Hawaii nearly every year since 1999, at the San Jose Jazz Festival in 2000 to 2002 with Kitamura and again in 2006, 2010, 2012 and 2018 with his own groups, and in Mexico City in August 2013. With Kitamura he made Eiji Meets Smokin' (1996) and Delivery (recorded May 2000, issued 2002). He also runs a teaching school, the Miyanoue Jazz Guitar Dojo, which takes students from complete beginners to professionals.

Since 2000 most of his records have come out on the SFC Record and YPM labels: the trio and quartet sets Spirits, Sunset Street, Summertime and I Remember Wes, the solo album Reflection (2015), Live in Mexico (2014) with the saxophonist Jun Oka, Taste of Jazzguiter (2019), The Masters (2021), Edge (2022) and Live at Fontana (2024). He turned 73 on 7 October 2026, which is also the release date his own website gives for his newest album, the solo guitar record Guitar Man (YPM-099), announced on his blog in September. He keeps a live schedule on his site.

Miyanoue plays without a pick, plucking the strings with his right thumb, the technique Montgomery made famous, and he describes himself as belonging to Montgomery's school while developing it further. The tribute records are his most direct statements: Song for Wes and Dedicated to Wes Montgomery in the 1980s, I Remember Wes in 2011, and a steady supply of Montgomery's tunes (Blues for Wes, Jingles, West Coast Blues, Sun Down, Road Song) in his recorded repertoire. A reviewer who heard his trio at the club Rooster in Tokyo on 9 January 2002 for the Jazz in Japan site described chord-melody playing built on Montgomery, Tal Farlow and Joe Pass that still sounded like his own, with bop numbers drawing the loudest response from the room and the blues numbers giving space for soulful single-note solos.

His core is mainstream hard bop and blues-based jazz in guitar-piano-bass-drums format, with Touch of Love as a soul-jazz organ session and Mellow Around and Foxy Eyes leaning toward smooth, easy-listening and jazz-funk arrangements with strings. Discogs classes most of his records as plain jazz, with L.A. Connection and Song for Wes under hard bop and post bop. The Japanese magazine Swing Journal's reader polls have, by his own account, ranked him among the top guitarists for more than 25 years.