Jason Ignatius Marsalis was born in New Orleans on March 4, 1977, the youngest son of the pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis Jr. and Dolores Ferdinand Marsalis. His older brothers include the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis. By his own account he had a toy drum set at three, started violin at five and got a real drum kit at six, when he began lessons with the New Orleans drummer James Black, the drummer on his father's first album, Monkey Puzzle (1963). He sat in with his father at seven, and as a teenager made his recording debut on Delfeayo's Pontius Pilate's Decision (1992). He graduated from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and McMain Magnet Secondary School in 1995, then studied classical music and performance at Loyola University New Orleans, where he worked on composition with Roger Dickerson, and left in 1998, after his third year, to work as a musician full time. He went back to Loyola during the COVID-19 pandemic, when concerts and tours stopped, and completed the degree in May 2026.

In 1994, at seventeen, he began touring with the Marcus Roberts Trio, performing selections from Roberts's Gershwin for Lovers; after finishing school he moved to New York and divided his time between Roberts and his father's trio. He recorded with Roberts on Time and Circumstance (1996), shared the drum chair with Ali Jackson on Roberts's large-ensemble album Blues for the New Millennium (1997), and played on the trio albums In Honor of Duke (1999) and Cole After Midnight (2001). On June 29, 2003, the trio joined Seiji Ozawa and the Berlin Philharmonic at the Waldbühne in Berlin for an all-Gershwin program that was released on video in 2021. His artist biography also lists work with Joe Henderson and Lionel Hampton, and at home he played with Casa Samba, a Brazilian percussion group, with Neslort, with Dr. Michael White's band and, in a Celtic setting, with Beth Patterson.

His first album as a leader, The Year of the Drummer (Basin Street, 1998), came out when he was twenty-one: a quintet with Derek Douget on alto and soprano saxophones, Antonio Gambrell on trumpet, Jonathon Lefcoski on piano and Jason Stewart on bass. The same year he helped found Los Hombres Calientes, a Latin-jazz group with the trumpeter Irvin Mayfield and the percussionist Bill Summers; he is credited with introducing Summers to Mayfield. He played drums on the group's first two albums, co-produced the second, Vol. 2 (2000), and left in 2000 to concentrate on the Roberts trio. His second leader album, Music in Motion (Basin Street, 2000), was all original music, and Don Heckman of the Los Angeles Times praised its range, from brushwork and hard swing to odd meters and Brazilian rhythms.

The vibraphone came gradually. In a 2014 interview he said his father had suggested he get a set of vibes to practice on while he was in high school and heading toward classical percussion, and by about 2000 he was playing them on New Orleans gigs, recording on vibes with the clarinetist Tim Laughlin and the drummer Shannon Powell, and building his own band around the instrument. He played vibraphone with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans in April 2008. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 he spent about a year in Brooklyn before returning to New Orleans in 2007; he is the drummer on the John Ellis & Double-Wide album Dance Like There's No Tomorrow, recorded in Brooklyn on February 28 and March 1, 2007, and in 2008 he toured with Double-Wide and Snarky Puppy. In January 2008 he began teaching at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and he has also taught at Montclair State University and the University of Central Florida. Music Update (ELM, 2009), his first album as a leader on vibraphone, with the pianist Austin Johnson, bassist Will Goble and drummer Dave Potter, drew 4.5 stars in DownBeat, and Ben Ratliff of the New York Times called him an excellent musician trying something risky without embarrassment. He followed it with In a World of Mallets (2013), billed to the Jason Marsalis Vibes Quartet, which reached number one on the JazzWeek chart; The 21st Century Trad Band (2014); the documentary soundtrack Heirs of the Crescent City (2016); and Melody Reimagined: book 1 (2017), which brought his father and Delfeayo in as guests.

Family honors and projects run through the rest of his career. In 2010 the Marsalis family released Music Redeems, a live recording from the Kennedy Center on June 15, 2009, and in 2011 the National Endowment for the Arts named Ellis and his sons Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason NEA Jazz Masters, the first time the fellowship went to a group. Jason produced and played drums on his father's trio albums On the First Occasion (2013) and On the Second Occasion (2014). Ellis played with all four sons at the 2019 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and on March 3, 2020, he sat in on three songs with the New Orleans Groovemasters, Jason's drum trio with Herlin Riley and Shannon Powell, at the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music. For All We Know, billed to Ellis Marsalis with Jason Marsalis, was recorded a few weeks before Ellis's death on April 1, 2020. Marsalis continues to play with the Marcus Roberts trio and has worked with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and he released Music for Meditation and Relaxation, Vol. 1 (2022) and Vol. 2 (2023), projects that grew out of the pandemic. As of November 2026 his website's tour listings name a trio, a sextet playing Kind of Blue reimagined, a quartet with the singer Vanisha Gould and the Groovemasters.

Marsalis is a drummer-composer whose leader albums are built from his own tunes, often with offbeat meters, Caribbean and Brazilian rhythms and blues forms, and whose titles include a running series of pieces built around the word Discipline, from The Year of the Drummer through In a World of Mallets. His drumming came out of the New Orleans line of James Black and his father's trio, and then out of the Roberts trio, where the drummer is a full voice: reviewing a Carnegie Hall Ellington program, Seth Colter Walls of the New York Times singled out the individuality of his playing on "Three Black Kings," where a simple pattern was made steadily more syncopated until the audience applauded. On vibraphone he names the Modern Jazz Quartet as the main earlier vibes group in jazz, and in the notes to In a World of Mallets he acknowledged a debt to the original members of M'Boom, the percussion ensemble founded by Max Roach; he dedicated "Blues Can Be Abstract, Too" to musicians and students who think the blues is a primitive form that modern music cannot explore. Basin Street Records describes Melody Reimagined as the first in a series of new compositions built on the chord progressions of existing pieces, an idea that grew out of his live sets with the band.