Ben Perowsky was born in New York City on May 12, 1966, into the family business. His father, Frank Perowsky, is a saxophonist, clarinetist and big-band arranger; his mother, Ginger Perowsky, was a modern dancer. His main teacher was his father's Juilliard classmate, friend and neighbor, the drummer Bobby Thomas, but the jazz his father played was the thing he pushed against first. "I needed to drown out my father," he has said of picking up the sticks, and the drummers he actually copied as a teenager were John Bonham, Keith Moon and Mitch Mitchell. The route back was through them: by fifteen he had worked out that all three came out of Tony Williams and Elvin Jones, and he decided to go to the source. He graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Harlem in 1984, playing in the jazz band under Justin DiCiccio, and performed with Dizzy Gillespie in DiCiccio's tri-state band on the Merv Griffin Show. He spent 1984 to 1986 at Berklee, studying privately in Boston with Alan Dawson, and also took lessons at the Manhattan School of Music and the Banff Centre.

Work started almost immediately. From late 1986 he was playing for James Moody, the singer Rickie Lee Jones, David Liebman and Richie Beirach, then joined the vibraphonist Roy Ayers, backing Lonnie Liston Smith and Bobbi Humphrey on the same bills. His first documented appearance with Ayers is a set recorded live at Ronnie Scott's in London on November 27, 1988, later issued as the album Fast Money and again on DVD. From 1990 to 1993 he toured in Mike Stern's trio and appeared on four of Stern's Atlantic records, splitting the drum chair with Dennis Chambers on Odds or Evens (1991) and with Al Foster on Standards (And Other Songs) (1992) before taking the larger share of Is What It Is (1994) and Play (1999). Across the same decade he recorded for Bob Berg, David Kikoski, Jim Beard, Ronnie Cuber, Ralph Bowen, Walter Becker and Pat Martino.

The other half of his working life ran downtown. He became a fixture of the New York scene around the Knitting Factory and Tzadik, playing for John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Wayne Horvitz, John Cale and Don Byron, and in Spanish Fly with Steven Bernstein, Marcus Rojas and David Tronzo. He played percussion in John Lurie's Lounge Lizards and is on their last studio album, Queen of All Ears (1998), in a band that also held Michael Blake, Bernstein, Tronzo and Evan Lurie. In 1988 he had formed Lost Tribe with two high-school friends, the guitarist Adam Rogers and the bassist Fima Ephron, later adding the saxophonist David Binney and the guitarist David Gilmore. Meeting Walter Becker in 1991 got the band an invitation to record at Becker's Hyperbolic Sound studio in Maui, and Becker produced their 1993 Windham Hill Jazz debut. Its credits list Perowsky on drums and sampling, which is worth noting: the sampling rig that later reshaped another band was already part of his kit at the start of the 1990s. Two more Lost Tribe albums followed, Soulfish (1994) and Many Lifetimes (1998). In 1995 he joined Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles in the new band Elysian Fields, an association that ran to eight albums over thirteen years.

His own leader career started with a weekly gig. He formed the Ben Perowsky Trio in 1997 with the reed player Chris Speed and the bassist Scott Colley for a residency in the Knitting Factory's Tap Room, and the self-titled album cut live there across five nights in 1997 and 1998 came out on his father's label, JazzKey Music, on May 12, 1999. The band's reading of Charlie Parker's "Segment" later carried a pivotal scene in the 2006 film Talladega Nights. Gary Giddins wrote about the record twice in the Village Voice that year, and Bill Milkowski profiled him around it for JazzTimes.

In 2000 Perowsky toured extensively with John Scofield's band, and it is there that a piece of jazz history turns on a piece of equipment he owned. Scofield later told Sound on Sound that "the drummer I had at the time, Ben Perowski, had a little sampling box and offered to program some samples and trigger them from his drum set." When Perowsky left and Adam Deitch took the drum chair, the sampling passed to the band's new rhythm guitarist: "when Ben left the band Avi got really into sampling, and he is now doing a lot of it, programming samples and loops, using different boxes and even a laptop to trigger them from." That is the origin of Avi Bortnick's entire role in the Uberjam trilogy, a band Perowsky himself never recorded with. His only meeting with Scofield on record is Mike Stern's Play, where Scofield guests on the first three tracks and Perowsky is the drummer on seven of ten.

From 2000 he began a long run with Uri Caine, first in the Tin Pan Alley project The Sidewalks of New York and then in the trio, which recorded Live at the Village Vanguard over three nights in May 2003 and Siren live to two-track at Sear Sound in September 2010. He also made three records with Dave Douglas between 1998 and 2000 in a quartet with Chris Potter and James Genus. In 2002 he founded El Destructo Records and began a weekly Brooklyn series called Beatshop, held in the cavernous lobby of the club then known as North Six; one night of it, recorded with the keyboardist Glenn Patscha and the turntablist Markus Miller, became El Destructo Volume 1 in March of that year. Camp Songs, made for Zorn's Tzadik label in 2003 with Uri Caine on piano, Drew Gress on bass and Danny Blume on guitar, was voted one of JazzTimes' top fifty albums of the year. The same year he produced Bop on Pop for his father, a trio date with Sam Yahel on organ.

Two more bands came out of the next decade. In 2002 he started playing duo with the songwriter Joan Wasser, and with the bassist Rainy Orteca they became Joan As Police Woman; he is the drummer on nine of the ten tracks of Real Life (2006) and stayed through To Survive, Cover and the Joanthology retrospective. In 2006 he formed a quartet in the Catskills with Chris Speed, John Medeski and Larry Grenadier, billed at the time as Red Cred, that met regularly to play concerts near his home upstate. The trio version of it recorded in Woodstock on May 13, 2014 and released the results as Upstream in November 2019, eight pieces built around originals by Medeski and Perowsky and homages to Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius. His own Ben Perowsky Quartet, with Speed, the accordionist Ted Reichman and Drew Gress, toured Europe in 2005 and recorded Esopus Opus at Brooklyn Recording on March 1, 2006, though Skirl did not release it until August 2009. Ben Perowsky Presents: Moodswing Orchestra arrived a month later, an expansion of the El Destructo idea into a nine-piece with four more instrumentalists and five guest singers.

Since then his working life has spread across a wider range than most drummers manage. He played on Hercules and Love Affair's 2008 single "Blind", sung and written by Anohni, and on two tracks of the band's debut album. He held the drum chair in Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra from its first album in 2006 through MTO Plays Sly and later records, and joined Rufus Wainwright's touring band in 2012. He was the house drummer for a string of Hal Willner productions between 2001 and 2019. He produced the Woodstock Jazz Festival in 2014 with Liz Penta and WDST, and in 2017 produced and played on An Afternoon in Gowanus, the Frank Perowsky Jazz Orchestra's debut, where he takes the drum solo on "Two Bass Hit". In 2016 he joined the band for the off-Broadway production of Anais Mitchell's Hadestown at New York Theatre Workshop, creating the show's drum and percussion parts, then carried them into the Broadway production that opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre in March 2019. The cast recording won the 2020 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album, and the show took eight Tony Awards including Best Musical. He is still on stage in it.

Perowsky is a melodic drummer in the Tony Williams line, and the description that has stuck to him since his first leader date is Bill Milkowski's, who heard "so much depth and versatility" on the kit that it explained an unusually wide sideman list. What makes him unusual is not range for its own sake but the specific way rock and jazz meet in his playing. He came to jazz through Bonham, Moon and Mitchell rather than around them, and he has been explicit about what he kept: "I hear that same raw, guttural thing that I'm going for in the first Monk trio records with Art Blakey, or Sonny Rollins' Night at the Village Vanguard and East Broadway Rundown with Elvin Jones. Those are some of my favorite records, and they have that punk rock essence that I was going for." The sampler is the other half of it. He was triggering samples from the drum kit with Lost Tribe in 1993, years before that was ordinary in a jazz band, and the El Destructo and Moodswing Orchestra records treat electronics, turntables and drums as one instrument rather than as a rhythm section with effects on top; his single instruction to the Moodswing musicians was "Less Herbie, more Eno". Critics have generally read him as a bandleader who edits rather than solos. Nate Chinen, reviewing Esopus Opus in The New York Times, called the playing sharp and the rapport effortless and singled out how much commitment the original tunes drew from the band, and JazzTimes described him as a bandleader with a flair for transforming rock repertory, which is fair for a catalog that has put Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Olivier Messiaen and Pink Floyd next to Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Hermeto Pascoal and Jacob do Bandolim.