Eric Sebastian Revis was born in Los Angeles on May 31, 1967 and grew up in Fresno, California, in a family with no musicians in it. He started on guitar and had moved to bass by thirteen, a switch he has traced to the sleeve of the first album by the rhythm and blues group A Taste of Honey, which pictures its co-leader Janice Marie Johnson standing with her instrument. During his senior year of high school the family moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he worked steadily in an alternative rock band. One of his bandmates had spent time in Japan and come home with an enormous record collection, and handed Revis a pile of albums every week. Jazz was what stuck, and it arrived without any sorting by period or school: Miles Davis and Kenny Dorham came in the same stack as Ornette Coleman and the AACM. Volunteering for the Arts Council of San Antonio, he met the trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis, who told him to go and study with his father.

He took the advice in 1990. At the University of New Orleans he studied under Ellis Marsalis, with Harold Battiste and Victor Goines also on the faculty, and graduated in 1993. The New Orleans years put him among a group of players who would keep turning up in his working life for the next three decades, among them Brian Blade, Nicholas Payton, Mark Turner, Chris Thomas, Peter Martin, Troy Davis and Greg Tardy. He moved to New York in 1994 and within a few months was in Betty Carter's band, the hardest and most respected finishing school available to a young rhythm-section player at the time. He stayed roughly two years. Carter's own late records used other bassists, so the apprenticeship left no studio trace, but it made his reputation on the bandstand. Work with Lionel Hampton, Billy Harper and Louis Hayes followed, alongside dates with players closer to his own age. His earliest surviving studio credits are from that stretch: the alto saxophonist Sherman Irby's Full Circle, cut direct to two-track analogue for Blue Note on May 17, 1996, and the trumpeter Russell Gunn's Gunn Fu for HighNote the following year.

Gunn, who had come to New York from New Orleans at the same time, is the one who recommended Revis to Branford Marsalis. Revis joined Marsalis's electric Buckshot LeFonque project for Music Evolution (Columbia, 1997) and then took the bass chair in the saxophonist's re-formed acoustic quartet alongside pianist Kenny Kirkland and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts. He has held it ever since, which makes him by a wide margin the group's longest-serving member. Requiem, taped at the Tarrytown Music Hall in New York State on August 17 to 20 and December 9 to 10, 1998, was Kirkland's last recording; he passed away that November, and the surviving three cut the closing "Elysium" as a trio. The record that followed, Contemporary Jazz, was made at Bearsville Sound Studios near Woodstock on December 1 to 4, 1999 with Joey Calderazzo now at the piano, and won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group at the 43rd ceremony in 2001.

The quartet's catalogue since then runs through Footsteps of Our Fathers (recorded December 2001), Romare Bearden Revealed (June 2003), the complete A Love Supreme filmed and recorded at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam on March 30, 2003, Eternal (October 2003), Braggtown (recorded at the Hayti Center in Durham, North Carolina in March 2006), Metamorphosen (August 2008), Four MFs Playin' Tunes (October 2011, the first with Justin Faulkner in the drum chair), Upward Spiral with the singer Kurt Elling (December 2015, at the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music in New Orleans), The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul (2019) and Belonging, the band's Blue Note debut, recorded back at the Ellis Marsalis Center on March 25 to 29, 2024 and released on March 28, 2025. A rereading of the 1974 Keith Jarrett album of that name, it was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 68th Grammy Awards. Revis also plays on Marsalis's score for the Netflix film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and appears on the Marsalis Family's Music Redeems, taped live at the Kennedy Center on June 15, 2009.

His own catalogue started in 2004 with Tales of the Stuttering Mime, released on 11:11 Records, the label he set up for it, and assembled from sessions at Sound On Sound on February 18 and 19, 2004 and Sear Sound in March 2003. Its cast is much broader than a bass-led debut usually is, with Yosvany Terry, J.D. Allen, Duane Eubanks, Myron Walden, Orrin Evans, Oz Noy and a string quartet spread across its eleven pieces. Laughter's Necklace of Tears, recorded at Kaleidoscope Sound in April 2007 and issued in 2009, closes with a Thelonious Monk tune. Then came five consecutive albums for the Lisbon label Clean Feed, and they are the records that established him as a leader with a distinct programme rather than a bassist making bassist albums. Parallax (2012), billed to Eric Revis' 11:11, puts Ken Vandermark, Jason Moran and Nasheet Waits alongside originals, a collective improvisation and pieces by Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton. City of Asylum, recorded on April 12, 2012 with Kris Davis and Andrew Cyrille, sets seven three-way collective compositions against Monk and Keith Jarrett. In Memory of Things Yet Seen (2014) fronts a two-tenor quartet of Bill McHenry, Darius Jones and Chad Taylor, takes on Sun Ra and Sunny Murray, and carries an uncredited guest appearance by Branford Marsalis on two tracks. Crowded Solitudes (recorded June and October 2015, with Davis and Gerald Cleaver) includes a Paul Motian piece and one written by his son Rio Sebastian Revis. Sing Me Some Cry was cut in a single day at Systems Two in Brooklyn on August 3, 2016. Slipknots Through a Looking Glass, taped at the Samurai Hotel in July 2019 and released by Davis's Pyroclastic Records on September 11, 2020, gathers the quintet of McHenry, Jones, Davis and Taylor and landed on a long run of that year's critics' lists.

Running beside the leader dates is Tarbaby, the collective trio he shares with pianist Orrin Evans and Waits, which recorded its self-titled debut in August 2006 and released it on Evans's Imani Records in 2009. Its later records repeatedly widen the trio with a guest horn: The End of Fear (Posi-Tone, 2010) brings in Oliver Lake, J.D. Allen and Nicholas Payton, Ballad of Sam Langford (2012) adds Lake and Ambrose Akinmusire, Fanon (RogueArt, recorded September 2011) pairs Lake with the guitarist Marc Ducret, and Dance of the Evil Toys (Clean Feed, 2022) sets Lake beside trumpeter Josh Lawrence. You Think This America, recorded on August 15 and 16, 2022 and issued by Giant Step Arts in 2024, is the trio's first record with nobody added. Revis co-leads elsewhere too: Eliyahu with saxophonist Avram Fefer and Taylor (recorded January 9, 2010), the co-operative quartet Nature Work with Jason Stein, Greg Ward and Jim Black (Sunnyside, 2019), and Eastside Romp with guitarist Jeff Parker and Waits, cut in Pasadena on May 31, 2016 and released six years later. In 2016 George Wein commissioned a new piece from him for the Newport Jazz Festival, Wein's last as producer. He received the inaugural Jazz Gallery Fellowship in 2017, with a residency at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Pocantico Center, was voted Rising Star bassist in that year's DownBeat Critics Poll, and took a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation grant in 2018. He now lives in Los Angeles and works the creative-music scene there with the ensemble Lancaster, alongside Parker, Guillermo Brown and Joshua White. Recent sideman work includes two albums with the pianist John Escreet, Seismic Shift (recorded January 2022) and The Epicenter of Your Dreams (2024), and two of the seventeen pieces on Marshall Allen's Ghost Horizons Live in Philadelphia (2025).

What people describe first about Revis is weight rather than speed. "It's not so much a big sound, it's a big beat," Branford Marsalis told JazzTimes in 2014. "He plays with a certain kind of physical authority you don't find very often anymore." The lineage he claims for that is specific and instructive: Wilbur Ware and Jimmy Blanton on one side, William Parker and Peter Kowald on the other, players separated by forty years and an aesthetic gulf but alike in the sheer physical presence of the note. That pairing explains the shape of his career better than any genre label does. He has spent nearly thirty years anchoring one of the most disciplined mainstream quartets in jazz while simultaneously leading free-leaning groups built around Kris Davis, Ken Vandermark, Darius Jones and Andrew Cyrille, and he does not treat the two as opposite ends of anything. His own summary is that the goal is to acknowledge the universality of all music. As a composer he writes most of the material on his own records, and the leader dates share a habit of setting his originals against unexpected repertoire, so that a Monk head, a Fats Waller stride tune, a Sun Ra line and a Keith Jarrett ballad can turn up inside the same free-improvising programme without any of it reading as a novelty. His writing partners tend to be his bandmates: several of the pieces on Parallax, City of Asylum and Crowded Solitudes are credited to the whole group rather than to any one member.