George B. Duvivier was born in New York City on August 17, 1920, to Leon V. Duvivier and Ismay Blakely Duvivier, a dancer who would later become the custodian of her son's archive. He came up through formal classical training rather than the bandstand: he studied violin at the Conservatory of Music and Art, and at sixteen he was assistant concertmaster of the Central Manhattan Symphony Orchestra. He switched to double bass and went on to New York University, where he concentrated on composition. That double grounding, a string player's ear plus a writer's grasp of harmony and voicing, shaped everything he did afterward.

He turned professional in the early 1940s, working with Lucky Millinder's orchestra (he is on the 1942 coupling "Hey Huss!" / "Ride, Red, Ride" and the 1945 hit "Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well"), with Eddie Barefield, and with Coleman Hawkins. After a stretch in the U.S. Army he came back not as a bassist but as a writer, serving as staff arranger for Jimmie Lunceford from 1945 until Lunceford's death in 1947 and appearing on the band's 1946 Majestic sides "Sit Back and Ree-Lax" / "Jay Gee." He then joined Sy Oliver's big band, doubling as bassist and arranger, the only period in his life when the writing and the playing were formally the same job.

The 1950s turned him into one of the busiest musicians in New York. He toured Europe accompanying Lena Horne, worked with Nellie Lutcher, and moved deep into the commercial studios, cutting jingles, television dates, and film soundtracks alongside the jazz work. Beginning in 1953 he spent four years as Bud Powell's bassist; the August 14, 1953 Blue Note session that produced "Glass Enclosure," "Collard Greens and Black-Eye Peas," and "Audrey" is Duvivier with drummer Art Taylor. From 1957 to 1959 he held the bass chair in Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis's organ quartet with Shirley Scott, a run that generated the three-volume Prestige Cookbook series and the four-tenor summit Very Saxy, recorded April 29, 1959. On November 19, 1957, at Van Gelder Studio in Hackensack, he played bass on Pepper Adams's The Cool Sound of Pepper Adams, a quintet date with Bernard McKinney on euphonium, Hank Jones on piano, and Elvin Jones on drums.

The stretch from 1960 to 1962 is the densest and most adventurous in his catalog. He is the bassist on Eric Dolphy's Out There (August 15, 1960), where Ron Carter plays cello and Duvivier carries the bottom alone; on Randy Weston's Uhuru Afrika (Roulette, 1961), a large-ensemble suite with Langston Hughes lyrics, Yusef Lateef, Cecil Payne, Kenny Burrell, Freddie Hubbard, and Max Roach in the personnel; on Gunther Schuller's Third Stream landmark Jazz Abstractions, recorded December 19 and 20, 1960 with Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Jim Hall, and two other bassists; and on Ron Carter's leader debut Where? (June 20, 1961), where Carter again plays cello and Duvivier the bass. Time Records billed him equally on a March 23, 1960 piano trio date issued as Max Roach / Sonny Clark / George Duvivier, and Impulse! put him with Shelly Manne, Coleman Hawkins, and Eddie Costa on 2-3-4 in February 1962. The same years brought sessions with Oliver Nelson, John Lewis, Cal Tjader, Sarah Vaughan, Milt Jackson, and Aretha Franklin, whose 1964 Columbia album Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington he played on.

From the late 1960s onward Duvivier's reputation as a reader and a tone made him first call well outside jazz. He is on John Lennon's Imagine (Apple, 1971), Janis Ian's Stars (1974) and Between the Lines (1975), Don McLean's Homeless Brother (1974), Frank Sinatra's Trilogy: Past Present Future (1980), and Barry Manilow's 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe (1984). He kept the jazz side going at the same time, joining Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern's Soprano Summit in the mid-1970s, touring and recording in Japan in 1979 with Hank Jones and Shelly Manne (the direct-to-disc Easy to Love), and backing George Benson on the Jazz on a Sunday Afternoon live volumes. One of his last engagements was the Town Hall Swing Reunion concerts of March 1 and 2, 1985, with Teddy Wilson, Benny Carter, Red Norvo, Louis Bellson, Remo Palmieri, and Freddie Green. He passed away in Manhattan of cancer on July 11, 1985, at 64. His mother donated a large collection of family and career papers to the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, and in 1993 Edward Berger and David Chevan published Bassically Speaking: An Oral History of George Duvivier, built largely from Duvivier's own recollections and including solo transcriptions and a detailed discography.

Duvivier's reputation rests on tone and accuracy rather than on solo display: a large, woody, centered sound with intonation that came from the violin training, and walking lines built with an arranger's logic, so that the bass part reads like a countermelody rather than a series of chord roots. His conservatory background made him one of the few bassists of his generation equally credible reading a Gunther Schuller score, holding a bebop trio together behind Bud Powell, grooving under Shirley Scott's organ, and cutting a Barry Manilow ballad at a union session. Colleagues consistently framed him as a musician who supplied exactly what the music needed and nothing more, which is why he became the default choice on New York dates for four decades and why Discogs credits him on 1,604 releases, only 37 of them under any kind of leader or co-leader billing. He is one of the most heavily documented sidemen in the music, and the near-total absence of a leader catalog was a preference, not a limitation.