Boney James was born James Oppenheim on September 1, 1961, in Lowell, Massachusetts. He started on clarinet at eight and switched to saxophone at ten, and he spent his early teens in New Rochelle, New York, absorbing Motown and the playing of Grover Washington Jr. When his family moved to Los Angeles he joined a fusion band that opened shows for Flora Purim and the Yellowjackets; another member was the guitarist John Shanks, later a pop producer. He earned a history degree at UCLA and went into music full time after graduating.

He began as a hired hand rather than a headliner. In 1985 he joined Morris Day's band as a keyboardist and, according to AllMusic, eventually convinced Day to let him play saxophone. Seven years of touring and session work followed with Day, the Isley Brothers, Bobby Caldwell, Randy Crawford, Teena Marie and others. The nickname came on the road with Crawford in 1986, when a bandmate joked that he was thin enough to be called Boney James.

On tour with Caldwell's band in the early 1990s he met the engineer and producer Paul Brown, and the two worked together for about ten years. His first album as a leader, Trust, came out in 1992 on the independent label Spindletop and led to a Warner Bros. contract in 1994. Backbone (1994) was his first Warner record, and Seduction (1995), Sweet Thing (1997) and Body Language (1999) each went Gold. Sweet Thing includes "I Still Dream," a duet with Al Jarreau, and Body Language reached No. 1 on Billboard's jazz albums chart. In 1998 he won a Soul Train Music Award for Best Jazz Album. In 2000 he and the trumpeter Rick Braun made Shake It Up, which pairs a revival of Hugh Masekela's "Grazin' in the Grass" with a version of Horace Silver's "Song for My Father." Ride (2001) and Pure (2004) each earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Album, at the ceremonies of 2003 and 2005.

In 2006 he moved to Concord Records. Shine, produced by James himself, reached No. 44 on the Billboard 200, then his best pop-chart showing, and yielded the No. 1 smooth jazz singles "The Total Experience," with George Duke on Rhodes piano, and "Hypnotic," with George Benson on lead guitar. Send One Your Love (2009) brought a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional R&B Performance, for its James Taylor cover "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight," sung by Quinn. On May 15, 2010, a drunk driver rear-ended his car as he was driving home from a concert. He fractured his jaw, lost two teeth and was off the stage for about two months. Contact (2011), on Verve, reached No. 1 on Billboard's jazz albums chart and No. 53 on the Billboard 200. He was back on Concord by 2012, and The Beat (2013) was nominated for Best Pop Instrumental Album at the 56th Grammy Awards, where the winner was Herb Alpert's Steppin' Out.

In 2014 he produced two tracks on Al Jarreau's tribute to George Duke, My Old Friend: "No Rhyme No Reason" and "Bring Me Joy," the second with Duke himself. futuresoul (2015), with the trumpeter Marquis Hill as a guest, spent eleven weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's contemporary jazz albums chart and was the best-selling contemporary jazz album of 2015. That August he made his first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Honestly (2017), which includes a reading of the Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer standard "Skylark," was his eleventh No. 1 on the Billboard jazz albums chart. Solid (June 2020) debuted at No. 10 on Billboard's Top Albums chart, his highest pop-chart entry to that point, and Detour followed on September 23, 2022.

In April 2024 Billboard reported that he had become the first artist with 20 No. 1 songs on its Smooth Jazz Airplay chart. The one that made twenty was "Cigar Lounge," on which he is the featured saxophonist behind Big Mike Hart. Slow Burn, released October 18, 2024, brought in Marcus Miller on acoustic bass for the opener "Arcadia," the keyboardist Cory Henry, Rick Braun and the singer October London, and it includes James's versions of Herbie Hancock's "Butterfly" and Stanley Turrentine's "Sugar." A holiday album, 'Tis the Season, followed in November 2025. His latest studio album is A Simple Man, released October 2, 2026 and billed by Concord as his 20th studio album. It features Ledisi, Marquis Hill and Larry Carlton and includes Duke Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood." He is married to the actress and director Lily Mariye, whose first feature, Model Minority (2012), he scored.

Boney James is a smooth jazz saxophonist with R&B roots, and his career is a commercial one: radio-length instrumentals built on a melody and a groove, vocal guests drawn mostly from soul and R&B (Lalah Hathaway, Ledisi, Raheem DeVaughn, Faith Evans, Dwele, Angie Stone, Philip Bailey), and success measured on the Smooth Jazz Airplay, contemporary jazz album and Adult R&B charts. AllMusic describes his sound as grittier and more muscular than the genre usually is, a blend of soul-jazz, R&B, funk and pop. His models are Motown and Grover Washington Jr. rather than the bebop saxophone line, and he is a multi-instrumentalist who often builds his own tracks: on several tracks of Trust he is credited with nearly all of the instruments, and he has played the Yamaha WX7 wind controller alongside tenor, soprano and alto saxophones, keyboards and, on Shine and The Beat, flute.

The jazz side is documented rather than central. He came up in a fusion band that opened for Flora Purim and the Yellowjackets. He has recorded with Bob James, Larry Carlton, Joe Sample, George Duke, George Benson, Marcus Miller, Nathan East, the vibraphonist Stefan Harris and the trumpeter Marquis Hill. His repertoire reaches past R&B to Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Stanley Turrentine, Antonio Carlos Jobim ("Águas de Março" on Shine), Vince Guaraldi ("Skating" on Christmas Present) and Duke Ellington, and Billboard files his albums on its jazz charts, where he has topped the list repeatedly. His four Grammy nominations came in pop instrumental and R&B categories, not a jazz category, and he has no win. Billboard named him one of the top three contemporary jazz artists of the 2000s, and he has three NAACP Image Award nominations for Best Jazz Album. Press accounts put his sales above four million albums, and four of his records are RIAA-certified Gold.