Ben Street was born July 18, 1965, in Maine, the son of saxophonist and saxophone mouthpiece maker Bill Street. He studied double bass at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston under Miroslav Vitouš, the former Weather Report bassist, and Dave Holland, then relocated to New York in 1991 to build a working career on the city's bandstands. One of his earliest documented recording credits came in 1994, backing pianist Eugene Maslov alongside drummer George Schuller on Autumn In New England (GM Recordings).

Street's association with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel dates to at least 1996, when he held the bass chair in Rosenwinkel's working quartet with pianist Brad Mehldau, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, and drummer Jeff Ballard at a Smalls Jazz Club engagement later issued as the archival release The Next Step Band: Live At Smalls 1996 (2024, Heartcore Records). He is the bassist on Rosenwinkel's Verve debut The Enemies of Energy (recorded November 1996, released 2000) and on the quartet album that followed it, The Next Step (2000), a record widely cited as Rosenwinkel's real arrival and a fixture on best-of-the-2000s lists. Street returns on select tracks of the guitarist's next Verve album, Heartcore (2003), where he also co-wrote the closing track "Tone Poem." In 2005 Street played bass on Anat Cohen's debut album as a leader, Place & Time (Anzic Records), a quintet session with pianist Jason Lindner, drummer Jeff Ballard, and Cohen's brother, trumpeter Avishai Cohen, that also marked the beginning of Cohen's Anzic Records imprint.

Alongside that sideman work, Street built an unusually deep run of collective, equally billed trio and quartet records rather than a catalog under his own name alone. With pianist Ethan Iverson, tenor saxophonist Chris Cheek, and drummer Jorge Rossy, he recorded the paired live albums Guilty and Lazy Afternoon (both 2002, Fresh Sound New Talent) during a residency at Barcelona's Jamboree club. From 2008 to 2014 he was a third of a Danish-anchored trio with pianist Søren Kjærgaard and drum innovator Andrew Cyrille, cutting four albums for the Copenhagen label ILK Music: Optics (2008), Open Opus (2010), Femklang (2011), and Syvmileskridt (2014). A parallel trio reunited him with Iverson and added bebop-era drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath for Live At Smalls (2010), Tootie's Tempo (2013), and Philadelphia Beat (2015). In 2005 he also joined veteran multi-reedist Sam Rivers and drummer Kresten Osgood for two Danish studio dates, Purple Violets and Violet Violets (both on Stunt Records), and in 2015 he sat in an unusual two-bass quartet led by Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, alongside fellow bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Osgood, on a self-titled ILK Music release.

Street's most enduring working band has been drummer Billy Hart's quartet, formed in 2003 with pianist Ethan Iverson and Mark Turner. Its debut, Quartet (2006, HighNote), was followed by three albums for ECM Records: All Our Reasons (2012), One Is The Other (2014), and Just (2025), a run of more than two decades with the same personnel. Out of that same circle, Street and Hart went on to anchor two further piano trios: with Aaron Parks on Find the Way (2017, ECM), and with Kevin Hays on All Things Are (2021) and Bridges (2023, both Smoke Sessions Records). Elsewhere in his extensive sideman work, he has recorded with pianist Danilo Pérez (...Till Then, 2003; the Danilo Perez Trio's Live At The Jazz Showcase, 2005), saxophonist David Sanchez (Cultural Survival, 2008, and Coral, 2004), guitarist Ben Monder (Dust, 1997), pianist Enrico Pieranunzi (The Extra Something: Live At The Village Vanguard, 2022), and on two further Andrew Cyrille Quartet albums for ECM, The Declaration Of Musical Independence (2016) and The News (2021). He also toured internationally with the Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko's New York Quartet, documented in performance photographs from Frankfurt's Deutsches Jazzfestival in 2013.

Street holds a standing affiliation as a guest artist with the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, the Boston program directed by Danilo Pérez, and continues to divide his time between touring, recording, and teaching out of New York.

Trained by two bassists from very different lineages, Miroslav Vitouš's fusion-rooted virtuosity and Dave Holland's harmonically exploratory post-bop language, Street built a style flexible enough to anchor settings as different as Kurt Rosenwinkel's lyrical, guitar-led post-bop, Billy Hart's long-running mainstream-modern quartet, and the freer, more open improvising of Sam Rivers and Andrew Cyrille. He is best known as a first-call rhythm section player rather than a leader in his own right, valued for a big, dark tone and a time feel steady enough to hold together some of the era's most demanding working bands, several of which (the Billy Hart Quartet chief among them) have stayed together with him in the chair for decades rather than turning over personnel from album to album.