James Shipp was born in 1980 in Columbia, Maryland, and moved to New York to study music, where he has lived ever since. He took both a Bachelor of Music and a Master of Music at the Purchase College Conservatory of Music, part of the State University of New York, training there as a jazz vibraphone soloist and accompanist. His first sideman work of consequence came with the trumpeter Ray Vega, a veteran of Tito Puente's band, in whose Caribbean jazz quartets and quintets he played vibraphone from 2002 to 2005. In 2006 he recorded with Vega and the operatic soprano Sharon Spinetti, playing music by Debussy, Agustín Lara and Villa-Lobos in his own arrangements for jazz quartet.

Two things started in 2005 that shaped the next decade. The first was his musical partnership with the Australian singer Jo Lawry, later the vocalist in Sting's touring group and in Fred Hersch's Pocket Orchestra; her 2008 album I Want to Be Happy (Fleurieu Music) carries his vibraphone, marimba and percussion along with a number of his arrangements and one composition of his own. The second was Nós Novo, his own quartet, which set traditional Irish melodies and sea shanties against Afro-Brazilian grooves and open-ended collective improvisation. Its one album, Strange Sweethearts in America, appeared on his own Shippwrite Music imprint on September 22, 2009, thirteen tracks with Lawry singing, Thelonious Monk's "I Mean You" among the Celtic material, and Kate McGarry guesting on "As I Roved Out." Nate Chinen, writing in the New York Times, called it a striking album advancing a jazz-based take on traditional Celtic music, and the Irish Arts Center launched its "This Is Irish Music" series with the band on March 11, 2010, with Becca Stevens as special guest. The year before the Nós Novo record, Shipp had arranged one track of and played percussion on McGarry's own If Less Is More... Nothing Is Everything (Palmetto, 2008), which was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 51st Grammy Awards.

The Brazilian side of his playing became a second career in itself. He is the percussionist for Clube de Choro do Brooklyn, and he took the percussion chair in Banda Magda, Magda Giannikou's Greek-Brazilian-French band, alongside Keita Ogawa on Yerakina (GroundUP, 2014) and Tigre: Stories of Courage and Fearlessness (GroundUP, 2017). Through the same stretch he turned up as a percussion and vibraphone specialist on records that had nothing to do with each other: four tracks of Dr. Lonnie Smith's organ date Rise Up! (Palmetto, 2008), the arrangements and vibes on Peter Eldridge's Mad Heaven (Palmetto, 2011), two arrangements for the Latin percussionist Steven Kroon on Without a Doubt (Kroonatune, 2011), vibraphone, marimba and hand percussion for Joel Harrison 19 on Infinite Possibility (Sunnyside, 2013), and the vibraphone chair in The Awakening Orchestra and in Remy Le Boeuf's Assembly of Shadows. He has also performed with Etienne Charles, Paquito D'Rivera, Kurt Elling, Snarky Puppy, Bokanté, the tabla master Zakir Hussain, with whom he played Carnegie Hall in April 2009, the Kronos Quartet and Sting.

His longest-running large-ensemble chairs are the ones that made his name. He has been the vibraphonist in Miho Hazama's m_unit since its first record, playing on all four: Journey to Journey (Verve, 2012), where he is on seven of the nine pieces and takes a solo on "Paparazzi," Time River (Verve, 2015), soloing on "Cityscape," Dancer in Nowhere (2018) on vibraphone, guiro and shekere, opening the record with a solo on "Today, Not Today," and Beyond Orbits (Edition, 2023), where he solos on the first movement of the "Exoplanet Suite" beside Christian McBride. In 2016 he joined the Anat Cohen Tentet as its vibraphone and percussion chair, recording Happy Song at Avatar Studios in August 2016 under Oded Lev-Ari's direction, and Triple Helix at Sear Sound in January 2019, a three-movement suite commissioned by Carnegie Hall and Chicago's Symphony Center. At the 62nd Grammy Awards, two of the five nominees for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album were records he played on: Triple Helix and Hazama's Dancer in Nowhere.

The duo work runs in parallel. Shipp and the trumpeter Nadje Noordhuis began playing together in 2012, and he appeared on her self-titled leader debut that year on cajón and pandeiro before the partnership became a band of its own. Indigo (Little Mystery, 2017), cut at Benny's Wash 'n Dry Studio in Brooklyn across two sessions a year apart, is a trumpet-and-vibraphone duo record with three of its nine pieces written by Shipp and both musicians credited as producers; he also played synthesizers and percussion in the quintet that made her live album Gullfoss. Multitudes (Little Mystery, 2023), recorded at the Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, went further into layering and overdubbing, with Shipp writing four of the ten pieces and co-writing a fifth. Out of the Tentet came Quartetinho, a four-piece in which every member doubles: Anat Cohen on clarinets, Vitor Gonçalves on piano and accordion, Tal Mashiach on bass and guitar, and Shipp on vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, percussion and analog synthesizer. The band's first album, Quartetinho (Anzic, 2022), is billed on its sleeve to all four members by name and opens with Shipp's own "Baroquen Spirit"; Bloom (Anzic, 2024), recorded at Oktaven Audio in April 2024, is billed to the group and draws new writing from all four.

Alongside the playing, Shipp has taught and worked in community music. He was Lecturer of Jazz Studies, Vibraphone at the Purchase College Conservatory of Music, the school where he took his own degrees, listed on its jazz faculty as recently as May 2025. For more than a decade he has been a bandleader, composer, producer and workshop facilitator for Carnegie Hall's social impact programs, working in prisons, hospitals, shelters and schools across New York City; he has been musical director of the Lullaby Project since 2019 and previously directed the Future Music Project Ensemble and the music program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. He is also a member of the MakeSpeak Ensemble, a trio led by the bassist Haggai Cohen Milo that writes and performs for dance and theater: its score for Saar Magal's Jephta's Daughter was premiered at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich in 2015, and MakeSpeak wrote and played the music for Magal's A Monteverdi Project at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin in autumn 2018. In 2025 he appeared on two tracks of the soundtrack to Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt's PBS documentary The American Revolution.

Shipp is a mallet player who thinks like a colorist, and the through-line of his career is that he refuses to choose between the vibraphone and the drum. In the large ensembles that employ him most, Miho Hazama's m_unit and the Anat Cohen Tentet, he is used as an orchestral voice rather than a rhythm-section fixture: a bell-like top layer over reeds and brass, then a shift to guiro, shekere or pandeiro when the writing turns to Brazilian or Caribbean rhythm. His conservatory training was as a jazz vibraphone soloist, and the solo chair is still where the writing puts him, but the second half of his working life has been spent inside the New York Brazilian scene as a choro and samba percussionist, which is unusual for an American mallet player and is what bandleaders hire him for. The duo records with Nadje Noordhuis show the other side of it. There he is the entire accompanying band, stacking vibraphone, marimba, analog synthesizer and percussion into something an ordinary duet has no room for; reviewing Multitudes for All About Jazz in 2023, Dan Bilawsky described the pair as compelling and the record as an expansion of a duo into a broader creative design. He is a working composer as well, publishing through his own Shippwrite Music, and his tunes sit in the books of the bands he plays in: three pieces on Indigo, four on Multitudes, and "Baroquen Spirit," which opens Quartetinho's debut.