Peter Michael Escovedo Jr. was born in Pittsburg, California, on July 13, 1935, and grew up in Oakland in a Mexican-American family. His memoir traces the family to Saltillo, in northern Mexico. His father sang with Latin big bands and his mother also sang. His brothers, among them Thomas "Coke" Escovedo and Phil Escovedo, all became musicians. Childhood was not easy: he and Coke spent part of it in St. Vincent's Home for Boys. At McClymonds High School in Oakland he played saxophone and began to paint, a second career he has kept up ever since, and he was offered a scholarship to an art college before Latin jazz changed his plans. He moved from saxophone to vibes and then to percussion when a pianist named Ed Kelly needed a percussionist, and he learned mostly by playing alongside other musicians.

In the late 1950s, after a spell in the Chico Ochoa Orchestra at the Sands Ballroom, he formed his own dance band. The Escovedo Brothers Band took Tito Puente as its model and leaned toward the ensemble sound of Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto. It had pianist and arranger Carlos Federico, trombonist Al Bent, Coke on timbales and Phil on bass, with Pete singing lead. As the brothers turned toward jazz the group became the Escovedo Brothers Latin Sextet, with Bent and the reed player Mel Martin, working Basin Street, El Matador, the Jazz Workshop and Keystone Korner around the Bay Area. AllMusic says he began recording in 1960 as a vocalist with Mongo Santamaría, and the Fantasy album ¡Sabroso! Charanga y Pachanga lists his name among its vocalists. In 1971 he and Coke played on two Cal Tjader albums for Fantasy, Tjader and Agua Dulce, where Pete is credited on congas, bongos, guiro and percussion as well as vocals.

In the early 1970s Carlos Santana hired Coke first and then Pete, on Coke's recommendation, and Pete played with the band on and off until about 1980. He plays timbales, guiro and maracas on four tracks of the double album Moonflower (1977), and he is credited on timbales and percussion on Inner Secrets (1978), where he also shares a writing credit on "Wham!" and appears on the front of the cover. In 1972 the two brothers formed Azteca in San Francisco. Live, the group ran from 15 to 25 players, with horns, woodwinds, several keyboardists, three vocalists and a bank of percussionists, and its members over the years included Neal Schon, Tom Harrell, Eddie Henderson, Paul Jackson and Lenny White. It toured with Stevie Wonder and made two albums for Columbia, Azteca (1972) and Pyramid of the Moon (1973). A band that large was costly to keep on the road, and it broke up in 1976. The surviving members reunited in Hollywood on September 15, 2007, their first concert together in more than thirty years, and the recording of that night led to the 2008 release From the Ruins.

Pete's daughter Sheila, then a teenager, played in his bands, and the two made Solo Two (1977) and Happy Together (1978) for Fantasy under the name Pete and Sheila Escovedo. Billy Cobham produced both. Solo Two was recorded in September 1976 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley with Tom Harrell on flugelhorn, and Happy Together has Eddie Henderson on flugelhorn. The same years brought session work: timbales on two tracks each of Cobham's Magic (1977) and Inner Conflicts (1978), with Sheila beside him on congas, and percussion on "Magic Number" from Herbie Hancock's Magic Windows (1981). Sheila joined the George Duke band in 1977 and later worked with Prince. His own records as a leader continued with The Island (1982) and the live Yesterday's Memories Tomorrow's Dreams, recorded at Mills College in Oakland in February 1985, on his own EsGo label. Mister E, recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley in the winter of 1987 and 1988 and released on Concord's Crossover label, paired a sixteen-piece Latin jazz band with R&B and earned his only Grammy nomination, for Best Tropical Latin Performance at the 1989 awards. Latina Familia, recorded live at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, put Pete, Sheila E. and Tito Puente on one bill.

Concord Picante and Concord Vista issued the records that made his name as a bandleader: Flying South (1995), E Street (1997), E Music (2000) and the live Live! (2003, recorded in 2002 at Humphrey's in San Diego), with the two-CD reissue Whatcha Gonna Do (2001), which pairs the Mills College concert with Mister E, in between. E Street was recorded in September 1996 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley with his sons Peter Michael and Juan, and Sheila sings on three tracks. E Music brought in George Duke, Sheila E. and Ray Obiedo as special guests. AllMusic singles out Flying South and E Street as the key titles of the decade. In the late 1990s he opened Mr. E's, a club on Shattuck Avenue near the University of California in Berkeley, which ran for about two years before police action against the building's owners forced him to look for a new space. He reopened in Alameda, at Spotlight on the Square, in summer 2000 and sold his share by the end of the year. At the urging of his sons he moved to Los Angeles in 2001. In July 2004 he opened Pete Escovedo's Latin & Jazz Club in downtown San Jose, a 350-capacity room that began with three nights of Sheila E.

Sons Juan and Peter Michael Escovedo have been fixtures in his orchestra, and Peter Michael has produced and arranged his later records. The Latin jazz orchestra anchored a long run of festival dates, and Live from Stern Grove Festival, recorded on July 22, 2012 and released in January 2013, captured a San Francisco show with guests Sheila E., Dave Koz, Ray Obiedo and Arturo Sandoval. On October 13, 2009 he played timbales at "In Performance at the White House: Fiesta Latina" on the South Lawn. His memoir, My Life in the Key of E, written with Sarah Spinner Escovedo, came out in 2017. Back to the Bay (May 11, 2018) recasts Bay Area soul and pop favorites for a Latin big band with singers including Sy Smith, Howard Hewett and Bobby Caldwell, and it entered the jazz album chart at number 25. Rhythm of the Night (September 3, 2021), produced and arranged by Peter Michael, reworks nine vintage soul and R&B hits for a fourteen-piece orchestra. In November 2021 the Latin Recording Academy gave Pete and Sheila E. its Lifetime Achievement Award. A block of East 21st Street in Oakland, where the Escovedo children grew up, was named Escovedo Way in January 2024, and the retrospective Lifetime Anthology had appeared in September 2023.

He turned 91 on July 13, 2026. This year he was booked to open the Sunset Concert Series at EPACENTER in East Palo Alto on May 9 with a ten-piece band that included Juan and Peter Michael, and Yoshi's in Oakland listed his 91st birthday celebration for July 10 to 12. He lives in Los Angeles and still paints.

Escovedo is a timbalero and bandleader whose sound grew out of the Bay Area dance halls of the 1940s and 1950s and the Afro-Cuban records that came through them. He names Tito Puente as his biggest influence and a lifelong friend, and he also points to Machito, Tito Rodriguez, Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto, along with the older percussionists Armando Peraza and Mongo Santamaría, who took the young Escovedo brothers under their wing. Cal Tjader's West Coast Latin jazz was a second model. What he built from those sources is a Bay Area sound that mixes Afro-Cuban rhythm, salsa, jazz harmony, funk and R&B in an orchestra that carries horn charts, vocals and a full percussion section. The crossover side of his work is plain: Azteca was a Latin rock band, Mister E mixed Latin jazz with R&B, and his two most recent new albums, Back to the Bay and Rhythm of the Night, are Latin big-band treatments of soul, R&B and Bay Area pop songs. The jazz side is just as real in his Concord catalog and in his Tjader and Billy Cobham credits. The family tradition runs forward as well, through Sheila E., Peter Michael and Juan, who all play percussion and work in his orchestra.