Patrice Rushen started on classical piano at three and was performing recitals by six. At seventeen, she and her band won a competition that put them on stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival, which led to a recording contract with Prestige. She signed in 1973, and by twenty she'd released her debut, Prelusion (1974), an almost entirely self-composed acoustic jazz record made a month before her twentieth birthday. Two more Prestige albums followed, Before the Dawn (1975) and Shout It Out (1977), the trilogy that moved her from straight-ahead jazz toward fusion and funk while she built a parallel career as an in-demand session keyboardist, playing on Jean-Luc Ponty's Upon the Wings of Music (1975) and Aurora (1976) and Donald Byrd's Caricatures (1976).

In 1978 she signed with Elektra, and the sound opened toward radio. Patrice (1978), Pizzazz (1979), and Posh (1980) built her R&B profile, and 1982's Straight from the Heart produced her signature hit: "Forget Me Nots" reached No. 4 on the R&B chart, No. 2 on the dance chart, No. 23 on the Hot 100, and No. 8 in the UK, earning her a Grammy nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. Now (1984) followed with "Feels So Real (Won't Let Go)," and Watch Out! (1987), her only album for Arista, closed the run of Top 10 R&B hits with its title single.

"Forget Me Nots" kept finding new audiences long after 1982. Will Smith built "Men in Black" (1997) around it and Rushen picked up a writing credit and an ASCAP Award for Most Performed Song in Motion Pictures. George Michael's "Fastlove" sampled it too, keeping her original vocal on the track, and in 2021 it resurfaced again as the backbone of a TikTok dance trend.

She never left jazz behind while any of that was happening. Signature (1997) marked her full return to the genre and earned a second career Grammy nomination, this time for Best Contemporary Jazz Performance. She's continued working in jazz settings since, including a 2016 quintet date with Wallace Roney, Gary Bartz, Buster Williams, and Lenny White on Roney's A Place in Time.

Rushen broke ground off the bandstand as well. In 1990 she was the only woman running music on a late-night television show, CBS's The Midnight Hour. In 2004 she became the first woman to serve as musical director for the Grammy Awards telecast, a role she held for three consecutive ceremonies through 2006. She has continued composing for film and television, including a credit on 2023's American Fiction.

Today she chairs the Popular Music Program at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, a post she held from 2014 to 2024, and has served as Berklee College of Music's Ambassador for Artistry in Education since 2008, having received an honorary doctorate from Berklee in 2005. In November 2025, the National Endowment for the Arts named her a 2026 NEA Jazz Master, the nation's highest honor in jazz, alongside honorees Carmen Lundy and Airto Moreira. Her tribute concert, originally scheduled for April 2026 at the Kennedy Center, was postponed and is being rescheduled for later in the year.

Rushen's catalog is the crossover jazz template in miniature: a classically trained, conservatory-caliber jazz pianist who moved fluently between acoustic jazz, jazz-funk fusion, and radio-built R&B without abandoning the musicianship any of those styles demands. Her Prestige-era recordings sit in straight-ahead and fusion jazz; her Elektra run leans on electric keys, synthesizers, and pop-song structure aimed at the R&B and dance charts; and her later work, especially Signature and the Roney date, returns to acoustic jazz vocabulary. Where many artists are described as crossing over once, Rushen's arc runs jazz to pop and back again more than once, a genuinely two-way relationship with the genre rather than a one-way exit from it.