Brian Blade was born on July 25, 1970, in Shreveport, Louisiana, and grew up in the Zion Baptist Church, where his father, Brady L. Blade Sr., was pastor. He sang in the church choir, took up the violin, and absorbed gospel and praise music before settling on drums by following his older brother, Brady Blade Jr., who played in the church band; Brian began by filling in for him. In high school he studied with Dorsey Summerfield Jr. and started listening closely to John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk and to the drumming of Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, Papa Jo Jones and Paul Motian.

At eighteen he moved to New Orleans to attend Loyola University, and between 1988 and 1993 he studied and played with much of the city's jazz community, among them the drummer Johnny Vidacovich, the pianist Ellis Marsalis, the guitarist Steve Masakowski, the vocalist Germaine Bazzle and the composer and saxophonist Harold Battiste. He settled in New York in 1992 and quickly became a first-call drummer, recording with Kenny Garrett, Mark Turner and Joshua Redman. His breakthrough came with Redman's quartet, with pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Christian McBride, on MoodSwing (1994). Work outside jazz came early: he played on Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball (1995), produced by Daniel Lanois, and in 1997 Lanois hired him for the sessions of Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, on which he plays drums on six tracks. He went on to record with Marianne Faithfull and, from Taming the Tiger (1998), with Joni Mitchell.

In 1997 he also formed the Fellowship Band with pianist Jon Cowherd, a fellow Loyola graduate, bassist Christopher Thomas, saxophonists Myron Walden and Melvin Butler, guitarist Jeff Parker and pedal steel guitarist Dave Easley. Brian Blade Fellowship (Blue Note, 1998) was produced by Lanois, who also played on it. Perceptual (Blue Note, 2000), recorded in September 1999 and produced by Blade and Cowherd, added guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. The band has recorded irregularly since: Season of Changes (Verve, 2008), Landmarks (Blue Note, 2014), Body and Shadow (Blue Note, 2017), a 2000 concert from Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. issued in 2022, and Kings Highway, recorded in Berkeley in 2018 and released in 2023, the last two on Stoner Hill, the label Blade launched. Alongside it he released Mama Rosa (Verve Forecast, 2009), an album of songs, nearly all his own, sung by him and played largely on guitar, dedicated to his grandmother and family. In January 2023 he released Lifecycles, a septet record made in 2018 that honors the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson.

In 2000 he joined the quartet that Wayne Shorter formed with pianist Danilo Pérez and bassist John Patitucci. The group, sometimes called the Footprints Quartet, was Shorter's first permanent acoustic band and lasted until his death on March 2, 2023. Its live records are Footprints Live! (Verve, 2002), Beyond the Sound Barrier (Verve, 2005), which won the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Without a Net (Blue Note, 2013) and the three-disc Emanon (Blue Note, 2018). In 2001 he also played in Herbie Hancock's quintet with Michael Brecker, Roy Hargrove and Patitucci, recorded at Massey Hall in Toronto on October 25, 2001; the album, Directions in Music, won the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group. Other partnerships of those years include the trio Yaya3 with Redman and organist Sam Yahel (2002), which became the Joshua Redman Elastic Band; a season in the inaugural SFJAZZ Collective in 2004; Black Dub, a band formed with Lanois in 2009; and a trio with guitarist Bill Frisell and cornetist Ron Miles whose 2012 album Quiver brought him Germany's ECHO Jazz Award for International Artist of the Year in drums and percussion in 2013. In 2003 he co-produced Lizz Wright's debut, Salt, and wrote one of its songs.

By 2013 he was the drummer in the trio of pianist Chick Corea and bassist McBride. Their first album, Trilogy (Concord, 2013), won the 2014 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, and Trilogy 2 (2018 in Japan, 2019 on Concord) won the same category at the 63rd Grammy Awards. The trio's last tour was in 2020, the year before Corea's death in 2021; Trilogy 3 (Candid, 2025), drawn from that tour, was nominated in the same album category at the 68th Grammy Awards, held on February 1, 2026, and its track "Windows - Live" won the Grammy for Best Jazz Performance. Blade's other recent work includes Charles Lloyd's The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (2024), and Spirit Fall (Edition, 2025), a trio record with Patitucci and saxophonist Chris Potter that was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the same ceremony. He also reunited with Redman, Mehldau and McBride for RoundAgain (2020) and LongGone (2022). On April 30, 2016, he played at the International Jazz Day Global Concert at the White House.

Blade's drumming draws on two sources that rarely share a kit: the gospel and praise music of his father's church, and the line of Coltrane-era drummers he studied as a teenager, Elvin Jones and Art Blakey among them, along with the open, pulse-implying approach of Paul Motian and the older swing of Papa Jo Jones. AllMusic's Matt Collar calls him an intensely thoughtful drummer, composer and bandleader who is comfortable in adventurous jazz settings but also drawn to folky introspection and cross-genre collaboration, which his work with Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Lanois and Harris bears out. Critics have described the interplay of the Wayne Shorter quartet as nearly telepathic and have treated Blade's contribution as one of the keys to it. As a composer and bandleader he writes for the Fellowship Band, whose records, in one reviewer's account, blend folkloric references, hints of church and spiritual concerns, jazz modality and country touchstones, with guitar and pedal steel in the palette. His jazz work sits mostly in post-bop and straight-ahead playing, while his Fellowship albums and Mama Rosa draw on gospel, folk and country forms. He plays vintage Gretsch, Ludwig, Sonor and Slingerland drums and, when touring in Japan, Canopus kits.