Eric Jerome Gale was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on September 20, 1938, to an American mother and a British father. He started on guitar at 12. By his published biography he was already going to John Coltrane's house to play while still in high school, and he went on to take a master's degree in chemistry at Niagara University and teach briefly at Penn State before deciding against a doctorate and in favour of the guitar.

The career that followed is one of the largest session careers in American music. Discogs holds 900 credit rows under his name. Set aside the 192 that are compilations filed under "Various" and the rest carry the names of 303 separate artists, the earliest dating to 1961. He is the guitar on Grover Washington Jr.'s Inner City Blues (Kudu KU-03, 1971), which is Kudu's third catalogue number and Grover's first album, and he stayed on those records through Mister Magic (1975), Feels So Good (1975) and Winelight (1980), the album that carries "Just The Two Of Us." He is on Van McCoy's Disco Baby, the album "The Hustle" came off. He is on Aretha Franklin's Young, Gifted And Black, on Herbie Hancock's Fat Albert Rotunda, on Nina Simone's Nina Simone Sings The Blues, on Billy Joel's 52nd Street, and on twenty-four releases with Quincy Jones.

His first album as a leader was Forecast, cut at Van Gelder Studios in January 1973 for Kudu. Creed Taylor produced it, Rudy Van Gelder engineered and mastered it, Bob James arranged the strings and horns, and the band included Hubert Laws on flute, Ralph MacDonald on percussion, Idris Muhammad on drums and Pepper Adams on baritone saxophone. Gale arranged the rhythm section himself.

Between that record and the end of the decade he worked in Jamaica as well as New York. In 1972 he co-arranged Joe Higgs's single "There's A Reward," produced by Higgs with Chris Blackwell. In 1975 he produced Negril (Klik KLP 9005) at Harry J Studio in Kingston, playing lead guitar on it without a sleeve credit and co-writing part of it, with Peter Tosh on lead and rhythm guitar, Aston "Family Man" Barrett on bass, Joe Higgs and Uziah "Sticky" Thompson on percussion, Cedric "Im" Brooks on saxophone and Sylvan Morris engineering. It opens with Bob Marley's "I Shot The Sheriff." The same year he played lead guitar on Higgs's own Life Of Contradiction, which shares Negril's executive producer, Michael Johnston, and adds Earl "Wire" Lindo of the Wailers on piano.

In 1975 the bassist Gordon Edwards assembled a group out of the New York session pool, first called Encyclopedia of Soul and then Stuff: Gale and Cornell Dupree on guitars, Richard Tee on keyboards, and Chris Parker and later Steve Gadd on drums. A standing gig at Mikell's on the Upper West Side let them keep their studio work by day. Warner Bros. signed them, their debut appeared in 1976 produced by Herb Lovelle and Tommy LiPuma, and the band recorded into 1980.

His own run of albums after Forecast went to Columbia, and the production credits map the era. Ginseng Woman (1977) was produced and largely arranged by Bob James, with Grover Washington Jr. taking the solo saxophone and playing tin whistle, Michael Brecker and Randy Brecker in the horns and Patti Austin singing. Multiplication followed the same year with the same producer. Part Of You (1979) was produced by Ralph MacDonald, the percussionist from the Forecast session six years earlier, and used three drummers: Steve Gadd, Harvey Mason and Idris Muhammad. Touch Of Silk (1980) was produced, arranged and mostly written by Allen Toussaint with New Orleans musicians, engineered by Rudy Van Gelder anyway, with liner notes by Quincy Jones. Two more followed on Elektra Musician, Blue Horizon in 1982 and the self-produced Island Breeze in 1983.

On November 29 and 30, 1987, Gale returned to Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs to make a straight-ahead record with Ron Carter on bass, Grady Tate on drums, Lonnie Smith on organ and Houston Person on tenor saxophone. EmArcy released it in 1988 as Ron Carter Presents Eric Gale, under the title In A Jazz Tradition, with "Bloomdido," "Lover Man" and "Jordu" on it and an opening track called "Eric's Gale." The rear cover notes that he used the Gibson L4 exclusively.

Eric Gale passed away on May 25, 1994, in Baja California, Mexico, of lung cancer, at 55. Al Jarreau's Tenderness, released that year, is among his last credits.

Gale's playing is the sound of a particular kind of New York studio thinking: an archtop tone, a light touch, and a habit of laying a line under a record rather than across it. He was hired by producers who needed a guitar part that would hold a groove together without competing with the featured horn, which is why his name is on so many Creed Taylor and Bob James dates and so few solo showcases. On his own records the same instinct is visible in reverse; the leader tracks are built on riffs and vamps rather than on long single-line improvising.

The material is broader than the session résumé suggests. He recorded gospel titles ("Oh! Mary Don't You Weep," "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child"), disco-era R&B, Allen Toussaint's New Orleans piano writing, reggae in Kingston, and, at the end, Charlie Parker heads at Van Gelder's studio. That range, held inside a single recognisable tone, is the argument for hearing him as more than a sideman.