Harvie Swartz was born December 6, 1948, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He learned piano as a child but did not pick up the bass until 1967, at nineteen. He enrolled at Berklee College of Music and spent the late 1960s working around Boston with Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Mose Allison, and Chris Connor, absorbing the mainstream and bebop repertoire he would draw on for the rest of his career.

In 1972 he moved to New York City, where he quickly built a sideman career across the downtown and midtown jazz scenes: vocalist Jackie Paris, Thad Jones, Gil Evans, Lee Konitz, guitarist Barry Miles's Silverlight band, vibraphonist David Friedman's group Double Image, and Paul Motian. From 1977 to 1981 he held the bass chair in pianist Steve Kuhn's group, recording Motility (1977) and Non-Fiction (1978) on ECM. It was through the Kuhn band that he met vocalist Sheila Jordan, who was fronting a parallel Kuhn ensemble; Swartz appears alongside her on Playground (recorded 1979, released 1980) and Last Year's Waltz (1982), both on ECM.

That meeting started the defining partnership of his career. Swartz and Jordan cut their first duo album, Old Time Feeling, in 1983 for Palo Alto Records, then expanded to a working quartet with pianist Kenny Barron, drummer Ben Riley and, on 1986's The Crossing (BlackHawk), trumpeter Tom Harrell; the same core group made Body and Soul (1987, CBS/Sony Japan, with tenor saxophonist Frank Wess added) and Lost and Found (1990, Muse). Swartz and Jordan also returned repeatedly to the stripped-down duo format that suited her free, unaccompanied phrasing best, recording Songs From Within (1993, MA Recordings) as a true two-instrument session and Yesterdays, a HighNote release from 2012 drawn from a private early-1990s concert tape, the fourth Jordan/Swartz duo recording to reach disc and one that JazzTimes later named among its best 100 releases of 2012. A quartet reunion with pianist Alan Broadbent, Live at Mezzrow (Cellar Live), followed in 2022. The partnership closed with Portrait Now (Dot Time Records, released February 14, 2025 but recorded three years earlier, in 2022, at RVS Studio in the Bronx), on which Jordan, then 96, was joined only by guitarist Roni Ben-Hur and Swartz; released the same day as her final live performance, it echoed the repertoire of her 1962 Blue Note debut Portrait of Sheila and turned out to be the last album she made before she passed away on August 11, 2025.

Swartz built a substantial leader catalog in parallel, beginning with the vibraphone-and-bass group Double Image's self-titled 1977 Inner City date and his own Chartreuse (1978, Enja, co-billed with pianist Bob Degen). His solo breakthrough was Underneath It All (1982, Gramavision), followed by Urban Earth (1985, Gramavision), a fusion-leaning quartet-plus-guests session with David Sanborn, Mike Stern and Victor Lewis that reached the U.S. jazz albums chart. He adopted the professional name "Harvie S" in 2001, tired of seeing "Swartz" misspelled on record labels and club marquees, and has recorded and performed under that name exclusively since. He joined the bass faculty of the Manhattan School of Music in 1984, a post he still holds, and in the fall of 2003 spent six weeks touring Southeast Asia as a U.S. State Department Jazz Ambassador.

The 2000s and 2010s brought a run of Latin- and Brazilian-inflected leader dates for the Zoho and Blue Bamboo labels, including Havana Mañana (1999), Texas Rumba (2004), Funky Cha (2006) and Cocolamus Bridge (2010), alongside a second major duo partnership: two albums with pianist Kenny Barron, Now Was the Time (2008) and Witchcraft (2013), both on Savant. His association with guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, which Ben-Hur has called the longest-running current partnership of his own career, produced the co-billed duo album Introspection (2018, with drummer Tim Horner), sideman work on Ben-Hur's Stories (2021), and the co-billed Wondering (2022, with drummer Sylvia Cuenca), on top of the shared Portrait Now session with Sheila Jordan.

Swartz remains active into 2026. Bright Dawn (Origin Records, released March 20, 2025 and promoted into 2026), his most recent leader date, is a quartet session with guitarist Peter Bernstein, pianist Miki Hayama and drummer Matt Wilson; its ballad "Yukimi's Song" is dedicated to his wife, pianist Yukimi Maeda, with whom he has also recorded as a duo. He continues to teach at the Manhattan School of Music and perform internationally.

Swartz's career runs on two tracks that rarely overlap in a single bassist: an accompanist's ear refined over four decades of duo and small-group work behind a singer, and a composer-leader's command of Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and straight-ahead postbop settings. The Sheila Jordan partnership in particular demanded a harmonic and rhythmic self-sufficiency that most bassists never have to develop, since a bass-and-voice duo leaves no piano or drums to lean on; critics singled out the interplay on 2012's Yesterdays for exactly that quality, with JazzTimes calling Jordan "in exceptional voice and form" and Swartz responding "in dazzling kind." As a leader, his catalog moves comfortably between the fusion-adjacent electric-and-acoustic writing of Urban Earth, the Cuban and Brazilian rhythmic vocabulary of his 2000s Zoho albums, and the harmonically dense postbop of his duo recordings with Kenny Barron and his current quartet on Bright Dawn.