Ben Tankard was born on January 10, 1964, in Daytona Beach, Florida, the son of a minister and a missionary. He started on drums in the church as a small child, played tuba at school, and was offered music scholarships before accepting a basketball scholarship instead. He was invited to an NBA camp, but a knee injury before the season ended that route. What followed was a stretch of depression and homelessness, and he has told the story of a revival service that turned him around. He began playing keyboards soon after, and his official biography says he never took a lesson or learned to read music.

He recorded for Tribute Records, a gospel label, where he also held an executive vice president's title. Gospel Music Association coverage dates his first Stellar Award, for New Artist of the Year, to 1989, the year Wikipedia lists his earliest album, All Keyed Up. Keynote Speaker followed in 1990, then Keys to Life (1991), Sunday Drivin' (1993), Play Me in Your Key (1994) and Instrumentally Yours (1996). AllMusic describes these as light jazz instrumentals built from gospel material, comparable in approach to the mainstream records of George Benson and Kenny G.

Production carried his name further than his own records did. Tankard found Yolanda Adams, then a third-grade teacher, and signed her to Tribute. He produced her albums Through the Storm (1991), Save the World (1993), More Than a Melody (1995) and Yolanda... Live in Washington (1996), and the two wrote more than forty songs together. He also produced the Alabama Mass Choir, Michael Bruce and Donnie Harper's New Jersey Mass Choir, and has worked with Take 6, Fred Hammond, John P. Kee, Shirley Murdock, Kelly Price, Twinkie Clark and Gerald Albright. AllMusic quotes the nickname that stuck, "the Quincy Jones of Gospel," a reference to Quincy Jones, and his own biography counts three Grammy nominations.

His solo albums moved steadily toward smooth jazz. Let's Get Quiet: The Smooth Jazz Experience (Verity, 2007) is an almost entirely solo record on which he programmed the drums and played keyboards, guitars and the trumpet parts on a Yamaha EZ-TP, with covers of Frankie Beverly's "Before I Let Go," Al Green's "Everything's Gonna Be Alright" and Patrice Rushen's "Remind Me." Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (Verity, June 2009) won the Stellar Award for Best Instrumental Album in 2010. In 2012 he released Full Tank on his own BEN-Jamin' Universal Music label, with guests including Gerald Albright, Take 6, Tim Bowman, Tribe of Benjamin and Cynthia Jones; that album earned a Soul Train Music Award nomination for Best Contemporary Jazz Artist. Full Tank 2.0 (2015) brought his fourteenth Stellar Award in February 2016, Full Tank 3: CanTANKerous (2017) again featured Albright and Take 6, and Rise! (2018) was followed by an NAACP Image Award nomination. He was inducted into the Stellar Awards Hall of Fame in 2018. Shine! arrived in April 2021.

Beyond the studio, Tankard and his wife, Jewel, were the subjects of the Bravo series Thicker Than Water: The Tankards, which premiered on November 10, 2013 and returned for a third season in March 2016. He is a licensed pilot who flies to his own engagements, and in August 2016 he published a self-help book, The Full Tank Life: Fuel Your Dreams, Ignite Your Destiny. The couple pastor the Destiny Center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which was marking twenty-five years of ministry in October 2026 and now meets from a business center at the Murfreesboro Airport after selling its church building.

His recent releases include The Godfather Collection (2024), a smooth jazz set, and Re-Imagined Songbook (November 20, 2025), a fourteen-track collection of favorites in his own style. Morning Prayers (Quiet Reflections) (2026), a set of instrumental worship pieces, had passed one million Spotify streams by October 2026, and the same month he released the smooth jazz single "Tall, Dark, and Jazzy." He continues to record and perform.

Tankard's catalog sits mostly on the gospel side of the line, and he says so himself: before the smooth jazz albums, he performed familiar church songs in a jazzy manner with some original material, and because the music came from the church where he first played, the records were filed as gospel. His audience, his awards (Stellar and Dove) and most of his production work belong to gospel music. The jazz side is real but specific. It is the smooth jazz and contemporary jazz idiom: a keyboard lead, programmed rhythm, R&B-flavored grooves, and hymns or praise songs treated as instrumental melodies. His own biography calls him the Godfather of Gospel Jazz, and Wikipedia describes him as a gospel and smooth jazz musician.

Reviewers reach for jazz piano names when they describe him. A Cross Rhythms review of Mercy, Mercy, Mercy compared his style to the relaxed swing of Oscar Peterson and the churchy dynamics of Ramsey Lewis, and AllMusic points to George Benson and Kenny G as the nearest mainstream parallels. His repertoire crosses over in the other direction as well: soul and R&B material by Frankie Beverly, Al Green, Patrice Rushen and Sade appears alongside Chris Tomlin's "How Great Is Our God." The jazz-festival context is documented too, with a 2009 appearance at the Newport News Jazz Festival, and the 2012 Soul Train nomination was in a contemporary jazz category.