Grover Washington Jr. grew up in a house built around jazz: his mother sang in a church choir, and his father collected jazz records and played saxophone himself. At eight, his father put a horn in his hands. By his teens he was already working — touring with the Four Clefs from 1959 to 1963, and playing in the Mark III Trio before he went into the Army, where he met drummer Billy Cobham, who became his entry point into New York's jazz scene. Washington settled in Philadelphia in 1967, and the city claimed him from then on; he's as identified with Philadelphia as any musician of his generation.

His real break was someone else's absence. In 1971, producer Creed Taylor needed a replacement saxophonist for Hank Crawford on a session for his new Kudu Records imprint. Washington got the call, and that single substitution became his own debut album, Inner City Blues, recorded that September at Van Gelder Studio and released in 1972 — its title track a cover of Marvin Gaye's own recent hit, a sign of how directly Kudu's crossover instincts ran through Motown-adjacent material as much as jazz standards. Soul Box and All the King's Horses followed on Kudu through 1973.

The record that proved crossover jazz could actually cross over arrived in February 1975: Mister Magic, arranged and conducted by pianist Bob James, who also played piano and Fender Rhodes on the sessions — the direct link between this project's first two profiles. Bob James in fact arranged and conducted five of Washington's Kudu albums, not just this one: Inner City Blues (1971), All the King's Horses (1972), Soul Box (1973), Mister Magic (1975), and Feels So Good (1975). Mister Magic topped Billboard's R&B album chart and reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200, a rare crossing of the pop, R&B, and jazz worlds for an instrumental record. Feels So Good (1975) followed the same year, also hitting No. 1 R&B, and A Secret Place (recorded October 1976) closed out his Kudu run. Two further, lower-profile studio albums filled the gap after Kudu folded and before Elektra: Reed Seed (1978) and Skylarkin' (1980), both self-produced by Washington and released on Motown, confirmed via Discogs (Motown catalog numbers M7-910R1 and M7-933R1).

Washington moved to Elektra Records for 1980's Winelight, the album that defined the rest of his career. It went platinum and won the 1982 Grammy for Best Jazz Fusion Performance. Its single, "Just the Two of Us" — a duet with singer-songwriter Bill Withers, co-written by Withers, Ralph MacDonald, and William Salter — peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1981 and won its own Grammy for Best R&B Song, alongside a Song of the Year nomination. Washington kept recording through the 1980s and 1990s on Elektra and then Columbia, and he kept expanding who he worked with: Kenny Burrell (co-led Togethering, 1985, Blue Note, with Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette), Patti LaBelle ("The Best Is Yet to Come," 1982 — a song dedicated in spirit to his beloved Philadelphia 76ers and Julius Erving), Phyllis Hyman ("Sacred Kind of Love," track A3 on 1989's Time Out of Mind, reissued as a duet single with Hyman in 1990), and later a generation of smooth-jazz saxophonists — Kenny G, Kirk Whalum, Walter Beasley, Najee, Boney James — who are widely credited as following the commercial and stylistic path he opened.

He never really slowed down. Washington was inducted into the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame in 1992, and, posthumously, the Atlantic City Walk of Fame in 2023. On December 17, 1999, he collapsed backstage at GMA/CBS Studios in New York after taping an appearance for The Saturday Early Show, and died of a heart attack at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. He was 56, in the middle of an active touring and recording career, not winding down toward one.

Washington built his sound on versatility as much as tone — he played soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophone professionally, not as a gimmick, plus flute and keyboards, which let him move fluidly between the soul-jazz grooves of his Kudu years and the smoother, radio-built productions of Winelight. Coming up in Philadelphia in the late 1960s put him inside that city's deep soul and R&B tradition, and it shows: his records lean on strong rhythm-section grooves and vocal-adjacent phrasing on the horn more than on extended improvisational abstraction. He's consistently named, alongside George Benson and Wes Montgomery, as one of the founding figures of what became known as smooth jazz — not a genre he set out to invent, but one that took its basic shape from records like Mister Magic and Winelight.