Edwin Gunther Schuller was born January 11, 1955, in New York City, the son of composer, French horn player, and music professor Gunther Schuller, and elder brother of drummer George Schuller. He learned clarinet and guitar as a child, switching to double bass at fifteen, the same year he made his first professional appearances with trumpeter Ricky Ford. He moved to Boston in 1967, studied at the New England Conservatory of Music under Jaki Byard, George Russell, Joe Maneri, Ran Blake, and Chuck Israels, and at twenty embarked on his first national tour, with guitarist Pat Martino. He returned to New York City in 1975 to begin his professional career in earnest.

The most sustained association of Schuller's early years on the New York scene was with drummer Paul Motian. Across a run of ECM and Soul Note recordings through the 1980s — Psalm (1982, ECM), The Story of Maryam (1984, Soul Note), Jack of Clubs (1985, Soul Note), and Misterioso (1987, Soul Note) — Schuller held down the bass chair in Motian's working band alongside guitarist Bill Frisell and saxophonist Joe Lovano, with Jim Pepper's tenor and soprano saxophone joining on several of the later dates. It's one of the more overlooked working units of the era: a quietly virtuosic quartet-into-quintet that helped define the loose, floating pulse Motian became known for.

A singular credit from this period ties directly back to his father: on June 3, 1989, Schuller was one of two bassists (alongside Reggie Johnson) in the orchestra that premiered Charles Mingus's long-lost extended composition Epitaph at Alice Tully Hall, a 30-piece ensemble reconstructed and conducted by Gunther Schuller after a decade of painstaking work piecing the score together following Mingus's 1979 death. The performance, produced by Mingus's widow Sue Mingus, was released as a double album on Columbia in 1990.

As a leader, Schuller has recorded prolifically for small independent labels — GM Recordings (the label his father founded), the Austrian TUTU Records, Germany's Konnex, and others — building a catalog that runs from Life Cycle (1982, GM Recordings, with pianist William Thomas McKinley, drummer Billy Hart, and a young Tom Harrell on trumpet) through Mu-Point (1993, TUTU Records, a quartet reuniting him with Paul Motian alongside saxophonist Dewey Redman and guitarist Bill Bickford) and The Force (1996, TUTU Records, with drummer Jim Black and brother George Schuller producing). Ong Song: Music for Acoustic Bass (2002, GM Recordings) is his most distinctive statement as a leader: a solo bass record, several years in the making, pairing original compositions with pieces by Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, and Thelonious Monk to explore the instrument's range on its own. Two years later, As It Grows (2004, hatOLOGY) reunited him with Motian in a trio led by pianist Russ Lossing, one of the more widely noted records of his later career.

Schuller has also played extensively with saxophonist Lee Konitz. Drummer George Schuller has recounted first hearing his brother in Konitz's nonet at Manhattan's Jazzmania Club in the late 1970s; decades later, around 2004, booking agent Andreas Scherrer suggested Konitz form a stable working rhythm section, and Konitz hired the Schuller brothers — Ed on bass, George on drums — as a touring trio, an association that by the brothers' own account took a few gigs to find its footing before settling into a steady, structured version of "free" playing that suited all three musicians. Ed Schuller's full-length AllMusic and Wikipedia biographies list Konitz alongside Joe Lovano, Ted Curson, Dave Liebman, Clark Terry, Billy Hart, and Mal Waldron among his most frequent employers and collaborators.

Schuller's connection to the Maneri family runs deep and long. He was the bassist on Joe Maneri Quartet's Coming Down the Mountain (1997, hatOLOGY, recorded 1993), and he was the bass chair — alongside drummer Randy Peterson — on violist Mat Maneri's earliest records as a bandleader: Fever Bed (1997, Leo Lab), Acceptance (1998, hatOLOGY, Mat Maneri's official leader debut, also featuring Joe Maneri, guitarist John Dirac, and trombonist Gary Valente), Fifty-One Sorrows (1999, Leo Records), and For Consequence (2003, Leo Records) — spanning the entire decade in which Mat Maneri established himself as a bandleader in his own right. Mat Maneri is profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com.

Alongside performing, Schuller has taught at the Newark Academy and Berklee College of Music, and headed the jazz department at the Schweitzer Institute of Music in Sun Valley, Idaho, starting in 1988. His Discogs artist catalog runs to more than 180 credited releases spanning five decades, from a 1975 student-association compilation to a 2022 various-artists anthology — the bulk of it as a first-call sideman for a wide circle of New York and European players, including Tim Berne, Tomasz Stańko, Perry Robinson, Mal Waldron, and Gerry Hemingway, alongside his own recordings as a leader.

Schuller's playing was shaped by the New England Conservatory's genre-crossing curriculum under Jaki Byard, George Russell, and Joe Maneri, and by a family lineage running straight through his father Gunther Schuller's foundational role in jazz composition and Third Stream music — the deliberate fusion of jazz and classical vocabulary Gunther helped name and define. That grounding shows in how comfortably Ed Schuller moves between idioms: the floating, ECM-style pulse of Paul Motian's 1980s bands; the freer, more exploratory language of Mat and Joe Maneri's microtonally-inflected sessions and Tim Berne's downtown quartets; and the straight-ahead post-bop of his long association with Lee Konitz and Joe Lovano. Few bassists of his generation moved as fluently among all three registers, which is part of why he became such a frequently called-upon sideman across such a wide stylistic range.