Harvey William Mason Sr. was born on February 22, 1947 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the eldest of eight children in a family on welfare. He began formal drum lessons at seven and did not own a kit until he was fourteen, when he got a three-piece Gretsch. What followed was not the usual road story. Mason went to the Berklee College of Music, then transferred to the New England Conservatory on a full scholarship, where he studied with the composer and conductor Gunther Schuller and with Vic Firth, principal timpanist of the Boston Symphony. He graduated in 1970 with a degree in education and performance.

That training matters to everything after it. Mason arrived in the professional world as a conservatory-trained percussionist rather than a self-taught feel player, and it is the reason he could move between a Herbie Hancock date, a Henry Mancini orchestra session and a disco single without sounding like a visitor on any of them. After graduating he toured internationally with the pianist Erroll Garner, then moved to Los Angeles, arriving at the exact moment the record industry decided jazz musicians could be sold to a pop audience.

His first significant session was Donald Byrd's Black Byrd, recorded across April and November 1972 and released in 1973, produced by Larry Mizell with his brother Fonce. It became one of the best-selling albums in Blue Note's history and effectively created the template for the label's crossover decade.

Later in 1972 and into 1973 came the record that defines him. Mason played drums on Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters, cut in September 1973 at Wally Heider Studios and Different Fur in San Francisco and released on October 26, 1973. His contribution went well past timekeeping. "Chameleon" is credited to four writers, Hancock, bassist Paul Jackson, saxophonist Bennie Maupin and Mason, and Mason also arranged the album's radically rebuilt version of "Watermelon Man." The album reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 R&B and became the best-selling jazz album ever made.

It held that title until 1976, when George Benson's Breezin' passed it. Mason is the drummer on Breezin' too. Recorded January 6 to 8, 1976 at Capitol Studios in Hollywood and released that March, it went to No. 1 on both the pop and R&B album charts, was certified triple platinum, and won Best Pop Instrumental Performance at the 19th Grammy Awards while its single "This Masquerade" took Record of the Year. The same session drummer sits on both sides of the record he broke.

Between and around those two albums Mason built one of the largest session catalogs in American music. Grover Washington Jr.'s Mister Magic (1975). The Brothers Johnson's "Strawberry Letter 23" (1977), produced by Quincy Jones. Lee Ritenour's Captain Fingers. Bob James's Three. Patrice Rushen's Before the Dawn. John Klemmer's Touch. The Brecker Brothers' debut. Discogs credits his artist ID with 1,381 releases across all roles.

As a leader he has been less prolific and considerably stranger than his session reputation suggests. Arista released five albums between 1975 and 1981: Marching in the Street, Earthmover, Funk in a Mason Jar, Groovin' You and M.V.P. They are drummer-led funk and disco sides, and by Mason's own account the run brought five Grammy nominations. Stone Mason followed on Alfa in 1982, after which he largely stopped leading for well over a decade.

When he returned, he went the opposite way from the smooth-jazz radio format his own session work had helped invent. Ratamacue (Atlantic, 1996) was co-produced with his son Harvey Mason Jr. With All My Heart (2003 in Japan, 2004 more widely) is a straight-ahead acoustic trio record that won Japan's Silver Disc Award, and Changing Partners (2006) continued it across shifting piano trios. His Concord debut Chameleon (2014) closed several loops at once: it re-cut the tune he co-wrote in 1973, with Paul Jackson, the original bassist and fellow co-writer, playing bass on it, and it put a then-little-known Kamasi Washington on tenor and soprano. The rest of the album covers Donald Byrd's "Places and Spaces," Patrice Rushen's "Before the Dawn" and Grover Washington Jr.'s "Black Frost," records Mason had played on the first time around.

In 1990 he co-founded Fourplay with keyboardist Bob James, guitarist Lee Ritenour and bassist Nathan East. The debut album, released September 17, 1991 on Warner Bros., topped the jazz chart, reached No. 16 R&B and landed in the upper half of the Billboard 200. The group made twelve studio albums through Silver in 2015, its 25th-anniversary record, before entering an indefinite hiatus around 2017. Ritenour's guitar chair passed to Larry Carlton in 1998 and to Chuck Loeb in 2010; Mason held the drum chair for the entire run.

Mason remains active as a performer and educator. Berklee awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2015. In March 2026 he completed his second residency at Michigan State University, running rehearsals, masterclasses and mentoring sessions from March 9 to 15 and touring the state, closing the week with a concert alongside the MSU Jazz Orchestras at the Wharton Center on March 15. In March 2025 his 2006 trio album Changing Partners was reissued in an expanded audiophile edition. He turned 79 in February 2026.

His son, Harvey Mason Jr., is CEO of the Recording Academy.

Mason's defining quality is adaptability without anonymity. He is a conservatory-trained percussionist who spent his career in commercial studios, and the combination produced a player who could deliver an exact, repeatable groove take after take while still sounding like a specific person. The "Chameleon" and "Watermelon Man" credits on Head Hunters are the clearest evidence that he was contributing compositional and arranging ideas from the drum chair, not simply executing charts.

His feel sits at the intersection of jazz phrasing and funk time-keeping, which is precisely the intersection this genre is built on. He can play behind a vocalist with almost no visible activity, as on Breezin', and then drive a hard jazz-funk date. His own Arista records show the funk and disco side pushed to the front; the acoustic trio records of the 2000s show a straight-ahead jazz player who had been there the whole time.

A less-noted dimension is his Japanese career. Sadao Watanabe (12 shared works) and Casiopea (10) rank among his most frequent collaborators, and two of his own trio albums were made for the Japanese label Videoarts Music.