Dave Phillips was born in Berkeley, California, and raised in San Jose, the son of avant-garde double bassist Barre Phillips. His father had relocated to southern France by 1970, so the connection through childhood was long-distance, kept alive by extended visits during summers and school breaks. Phillips graduated from San Jose's Oak Grove High School in 1980 and, rather than starting college, joined his father in France and stayed six years, absorbing the bass in a run of unlikely settings: playing French folk music, accompanying a singer from Cameroon, and leading his own jazz string trio with guitar and violin. One of those French years produced his earliest documented recording, a 1981 LP by the Provençal folk group Miquela & Chapacans on the Ventadorn label, on which he plays double bass, electric bass, and tambourine. His father gave him exactly one bass lesson during this period, a deliberate choice; Barre Phillips wanted his son finding an identity of his own rather than emulating him.

Phillips returned to the United States in 1986 aiming for a career in classical music, and a full scholarship took him to the Mannes College of Music, where he studied with the double bassist Homer Mensch while supporting himself on a nightly jazz gig in a piano bar. In 1988 his solo recital at the International Society of Bassists Convention in Mittenwald, Germany, was recorded; three years later he returned to the same convention as a performer on the various-artists document Bass-Spectren: Thomastik Live, sharing the record with his father, who plays the three tracks preceding his own. Graduate study at Juilliard with New York Philharmonic bassist Eugene Levinson followed, along with a fellowship at the Aspen Music Festival, before Phillips concluded that his late start in classical bass made an orchestral career unlikely and turned instead to freelance work: Broadway pit orchestras, classical chamber dates, and studio sessions for artists as varied as the Dixie Chicks, Richie Havens, and Pink. He also built an education practice, playing more than sixty concerts with the Lincoln Center Institute under Wynton Marsalis and David Berger and performing for the Midori Foundation.

His main creative outlet became Freedance, a New York quartet he formed in the early 1990s with guitarist Rez Abbasi, alto saxophonist John O'Gallagher, and drummer/percussionist Tony Moreno. Freedance began as a cooperative group but became, within a few years, primarily a vehicle for Phillips's own writing. Its debut album, self-titled and released in 2000 on Naxos Jazz, was recorded across three days in August 1995 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, France, with pianist Mike Nock as executive producer; Phillips wrote or co-wrote eight of its twelve tracks. The quartet followed with Prayer (2003, Sound Street Records, all original compositions), a live album recorded during a July 2004 stop in Montpellier on a European tour built around a high-profile appearance at that year's Radio France Festival, and Confluence (2012, Innova Recordings), recorded in Stamford, Connecticut, with pianist Jon Werking added to the working group. Freedance has performed at venues and series including Sonoma State University, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Arizona State University, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West.

Beyond his own group, Phillips has held a long-running chair in the trio led by accordionist Will Holshouser, best known otherwise as a member of David Krakauer's Klezmer Madness, appearing on three of the trio's albums for the Portuguese label Clean Feed between 2002 and 2009, the last a collaboration with Portuguese pianist Bernardo Sassetti, recorded in 2008, four years before Sassetti's fatal accident. He also plays bass on the ensemble Spooky Actions' jazz-quintet arrangement of Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, and on trumpeter David Sanford's big-band tribute album A Prayer for Lester Bowie (2021, Greenleaf Music, executive-produced by Dave Douglas), featuring trumpeter Hugh Ragin.

Phillips's most visible connection to his father's world of free improvisation came through a 2009 telematic performance project called Deep Tones for Peace, which linked bassists in Jerusalem and New York over a live network connection via Manhattan School of Music's distance-learning studio. The resulting record, Jerusalem - NYC - Tel-Aviv - 2009 (2010, the Israeli label Kadima Collective), documents an ensemble piece for bass conducted and composed by Mark Dresser and Sarah Weaver, with Phillips playing alongside an unusually deep bench of bassists that included his father Barre Phillips, William Parker, Henry Grimes, Rufus Reid, Bertram Turetzky, Trevor Dunn, Lindsey Horner, and Jean-Claude Jones. Father and son have also toured together as a duo under the name Basfidel, with recitals in Hawaii and at the Uzeste Festival in France.

Three years after the telematic project, on September 17 and 18, 2012, Phillips joined drummer Ehran Elisha and Israeli tenor and soprano saxophonist Albert Beger at the Spirit Room in Rossie, New York, for a pair of trio sessions that yielded two albums on the CIMP label, released years apart: Heads (2018) and Tales (2019). Phillips plays double bass across both records and contributed compositions to Tales, writing "Stepping Stone/Pogo" alone and co-writing "Exit Out/The Amish Man Waved" with Beger and Elisha.

Phillips has described his own playing as built more around tone, sound, and long, lyrical bowed lines than around technical density, a sensibility that leans toward Freedance's stated debt to European jazz and to the ECM aesthetic more broadly, setting his working style apart from his father's decades-long commitment to free improvisation even as the two have periodically performed together. That range, from the tightly composed post-bop of his own quartet to the fully improvised trio dates with Beger and Elisha, from Broadway pits to a Messiaen chamber arrangement, reflects a career built less around a single idiom than around versatility: a bassist equally credible reading a pit-orchestra chart, holding down a klezmer-adjacent accordion trio, or improvising freely alongside two of the more demanding names in Israeli and Israeli-American free jazz.