Jay Anderson was born on October 24, 1955 in the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles and took up the acoustic bass at twelve. He collected school and college prizes in both jazz and classical playing, and his first issued recording is a student one: the 1976 album by the California State University Long Beach Studio Day Band and Jazz Vocal Ensemble, on which he is credited with acoustic bass and Fender electric bass. Two years later he was on a Los Angeles fusion bandstand with the group Fejj, whose Alive at the Pilgrimage was taped at the Pilgrimage Theater on June 11, 1978 with Steve Bartek on guitar and Ralph Humphrey on drums. When the band recorded again at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco the following year the bass chair had passed to John Patitucci, because Anderson had gone on the road. One week after taking his performance degree from California State University, Long Beach in 1978 he was asked to join the Woody Herman Orchestra, and he spent a year in the Thundering Herd before Carmen McRae called him. He worked for the singer for the next two years.

He moved to New York in 1982 and joined the quintet co-led by the trumpeter Red Rodney and the multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan, which turned out to be the association that made his name. Spirit Within (Elektra Musician, 1982) and Sprint (1983) were followed by a decade in Rodney's bands: One for Bird, recorded live at the Slukefter in Tivoli, Copenhagen on July 11 and 12, 1988 with Dick Oatts, Garry Dial and John Riley; Red Snapper and No Turn on Red in 1989; and Then and Now in 1992. He was in Michael Brecker's working band in the same period, playing acoustic bass on two tracks of Now You See It... (Now You Don't) (GRP, 1990) and touring the group heard on Live at Fabrik, Hamburg 1987. By the end of the decade he had also become the bassist Bob Belden used for his large-ensemble projects, playing acoustic bass on seven of the ten pieces on Straight to My Heart: The Bob Belden Ensemble Performs the Music of Sting (Blue Note, 1991) and going on to Puccini's Turandot and La Cigale.

The 1990s made him one of the busiest bassists in New York and gave him a leader catalogue. Digital Music Products issued Next Exit in 1992, an electric-tinged sextet with Randy Brecker, Billy Drewes, Wayne Krantz, David Witham and Jeff Hirshfield, and Local Color in 1994, which Anderson produced himself and which set Toots Thielemans's harmonica and Arto Tuncboyaciyan's percussion against readings of Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun" and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On." The same label made him the house bassist for Warren Bernhardt's trio and for Bob Mintzer's big band, and for Lynne Arriale's The Eyes Have It (1994). He joined the Maria Schneider Orchestra for Evanescence (Enja, 1994) and stayed in the bass chair for thirty years. In Denmark, Nils Winther's SteepleChase label began calling him for date after date: Paul Bley's quartet and trio records from If We May (1994) to Notes on Ornette (1998), Lee Konitz's Dearly Beloved and Out of Nowhere (both 1997), George Cables's trio, Rich Perry's long series of quartet albums, Vic Juris's guitar dates, and the label's jam-session volumes. He also spent 1992 to 2006 in Joe Sample's band, and picked up the non-jazz session work a New York first call accumulates: Frank Zappa's Thing-Fish, Tom Waits's Frank's Wild Years, Chaka Khan's ClassiKhan and Céline Dion's Falling into You.

In 2000 he finished converting a barn at his home in New Paltz, in the Hudson Valley, into Mountain Rest Studio, and a second career as a producer and engineer opened alongside the playing. He recorded, mixed and mastered records for Vic Juris (A Second Look, Blue Horizon, Omega Is the Alpha), for the singer Jay Clayton, for Joe Locke's quartet on the Italian label Jazz Eyes, and for Karl Berger and Kirk Knuffke's Heart Is a Melody in 2022. The engineering and the bass playing are usually the same job: on most of these he is credited both as a player and as the person who recorded the session.

The Jazz Eyes connection produced the one record he is formally a co-leader of. BANN, a co-operative quartet whose name is the four members' initials, put Seamus Blake on tenor saxophone, Anderson on bass, Oz Noy on guitar and Adam Nussbaum on drums, and released As You Like on Jazz Eyes on October 25, 2010. Anderson recorded, mixed and mastered it as well as playing on it, and two of the nine pieces are his own compositions, "Will Call" and "At Sundown," both carried over from his DMP albums. The band toured Europe behind the record, and the concert photograph at the head of this profile was taken at one of those dates, in Innsbruck in January 2011.

Alongside all of it he became the bassist on a run of Grammy-winning large-ensemble records. Maria Schneider's Concert in the Garden (2004) won Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, Sky Blue (2007) carried the winning instrumental composition "Cerulean Skies," and The Thompson Fields (2015) and Data Lords (2020) both took the large-ensemble award; Winter Morning Walks (2013), on which he plays the nine Ted Kooser settings with Dawn Upshaw and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, won three classical Grammys. He also played on David Bowie's "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)," the Schneider-arranged 2014 single that won Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals, and he has been in Ryan Truesdell's Gil Evans Project since its first album, Centennial, in 2012.

His own recording resumed after a twenty-five-year gap. Deepscape, cut at Mountain Rest in May and June 2018 and issued by SteepleChase in 2019, is a spacious sextet record with Billy Drewes, Kirk Knuffke, Matt Wilson, Frank Kimbrough on harmonium and Rogerio Boccato on percussion, built around Ornette Coleman's "Shades of Jazz," a movement of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel, Jim Pepper's "Witchi-Tai-To" and "Tennessee Waltz." Three duo and trio projects followed: Living a Dream We're Not In with the pianist Garry Dial (SteepleChase, 2021), Empathy with the pianist Mark Soskin (SteepleChase, 2023), and In the Briar Patch (Nonotes, September 1, 2023), a co-led trio with the saxophonist Marc Mommaas and the guitarist Kenny Wessel which Anderson also recorded. He has been on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music since 1999 and is its Professor of Jazz Bass Studies; among the bassists who have studied with him there are Linda Oh and Hamish Smith. He has held an NEA composition grant and two Meet the Composer grants. He remains in the Schneider orchestra's bass chair, playing on three pieces of American Crow (ArtistShare, 2026), and turns up on new records at the rate he has kept for forty years, most recently Steve Wilson's Enduring Sonance (Smoke Sessions, 2026).

Anderson is a big-toned, centre-of-the-beat bassist whose reputation rests on something harder to demonstrate than virtuosity: he makes other people's bands sound settled. Leonard Feather called him "a flawless section bassist and a fleet full toned soloist," and Ted Panken's line about him, which he has kept on his own website for a quarter of a century, is that he "is bedrock, unfailingly solid and dependable" while still being "part of the ensemble" rather than under it. What that leaves out is the melodic cast of his solos, which is what the critics who have written about him at length keep returning to. He tends to build a chorus as a tune rather than as a run of eighth notes, and John S. Wilson's judgement in the New York Times, that "Mr. Anderson has a melodic sense that effectively shapes his solos," is the same observation Will Friedwald later made in the Wall Street Journal about Frank Kimbrough using "Single Petal of a Rose" as a bass feature. The range of the work is the other thing that defines him. The player who anchored Red Rodney's bebop quintet is also the bassist Maria Schneider has used for thirty years of through-composed large-ensemble writing, the one Paul Bley wanted for four SteepleChase records built largely on Ornette Coleman's tunes, and the one who turns up on a Céline Dion album. As a writer he is sparing: four tunes, "At Sundown," "Will Call," "Days On End" and "Time Like the Present," account for most of what he has published, and he has recycled them across three decades, which is why "Will Call" opens Next Exit in 1992 and reappears on BANN's As You Like eighteen years later. His leader records are correspondingly interpretive rather than compositional, and Deepscape in particular reads as a curator's programme: Ornette Coleman, Morton Feldman, Jim Pepper, a Miles Davis and Gil Evans piece, and a country waltz, arranged for a band with no chordal instrument except a harmonium.