Jay Lawrence has spent his working life at the point where a jazz career and a working musician's career overlap. He joined the American Federation of Musicians at fifteen and went straight into the show bands of Reno and Lake Tahoe, later Las Vegas, reading down whatever came off the stand for a touring headliner: Sammy Davis Jr., Cher, Liza Minnelli, Tom Jones, Gladys Knight, Linda Ronstadt, Lou Rawls, Della Reese, Dionne Warwick, Ben E. King, Ann-Margret, Loretta Lynn, Nancy Sinatra, Paul Anka, Roy Clark, the Coasters, the Drifters, the Moody Blues. His early teachers were the drummers Gerry Genuario and Rich Havens, and by his own account the reading, the ensemble phrasing and the sense of orchestration came from studying the scores that came with the work, Nelson Riddle's and Billy Byers's among them. That casino apprenticeship is the reason a Utah drummer can sight-read a big-band chart, play a bossa, cover a Broadway pit and keep a jazz quartet honest, and it runs under everything he has done since.

He settled in Utah and built a second career as a teacher. He took a Bachelor of Science with a music emphasis from Utah Valley University, graduating summa cum laude, and joined the University of Utah faculty in 1988 as an assistant professor of music, a post he held through 2013. In 1996 he added Brigham Young University, where he directs jazz combos and teaches arranging and composition, and over the years he has also taught at Snow College (1998 to 2020), at BYU Idaho, and at Utah Valley University, where he served as interim director of jazz. He keeps a private studio of roughly forty-five students on top of the college work. He wrote The Drummer's Workbook, a college-level drum-set manual now in an 8.5 edition, and has published further texts on improvisation and rhythmic reading. He has adjudicated and given clinics at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, the Gene Harris Jazz Festival, Park City's jazz festival, the Heritage Festivals in Las Vegas and the Utah chapter of the Percussive Arts Society, and he served a term as president of the Salt Lake City Jazz Society, as chief executive of Jazz Arts of the Mountain West, and as a founding member of the GAM Foundation's Jazz at the Sheraton concert series.

The studio work is a third career again. Lawrence played drums and percussion on scores and trailers for a long list of motion pictures, Gettysburg, U-571, The Sandlot, Jumanji, Stargate, Starship Troopers, Hercules, Mi Familia, Serial Mom, Army of Darkness, Surviving Picasso, 101 Dalmatians, Home Alone 3 and The Man in the Iron Mask among them, and on television for Xena: Warrior Princess, the Tenth Kingdom mini-series, the Hart to Hart movies, the HBO taping of Moulin Rouge, the Orange Bowl halftime show, the Merv Griffin show from Caesars Palace and Music and the Spoken Word. He composed and played the source music for an NBC episode of Crossroads. He also played the pit for the 2002 Winter Olympics sponsors and African nations athletes parties in Salt Lake City, and toured with Chris LeDoux, Liberace, the Osmonds, the vocal group Enoch Train and James Moody.

Alongside that, he has held the drum chair for visiting jazz players passing through Utah for four decades, a list that includes Kenny Burrell, Milt Jackson, Hank Jones, Roy Hargrove, Clark Terry, Phil Woods, Art Pepper, Stanley Turrentine, Randy Brecker, Herb Ellis, Lionel Hampton, Wycliffe Gordon, Bobby Shew, Gary Foster, Tom Scott, Cyrus Chestnut, Nicholas Payton, Arturo Sandoval, Mike Stern, Carl Fontana, Al Grey, Bennie Green, Marlena Shaw, Kevin Mahogany, John Pizzarelli and Tierney Sutton. His earliest documented record date is the 1994 Night Life Records album Confirmation, subtitled "Hersch Bullen Plays Utah Jazz," where he plays drums and percussion behind the pianist Tom Garvin.

His own leader catalog started late and has been consistent since. Thermal Strut (OA2 Records, 2006) is a piano trio with Tamir Hendelman and the bassist Lynn Seaton, produced by Lawrence and Hendelman together. Sweet Lime (Jazz Hang Records, 2012), cut at Umbrella Media Studios in Los Angeles, adds Bob Sheppard on tenor and swaps Seaton for John Clayton; seven of its eleven tunes are Lawrence originals, and it reached number seven on the JazzWeek radio airplay chart. Sonic Paragon (Jazz Hang Records, August 1, 2018) is the record that put him in front of a national audience. He took it to New York and hired a band that would headline anywhere: John Patitucci on bass, Renee Rosnes on piano, Harry Allen on tenor, Terell Stafford on trumpet, and three guitarists rotating through the twelve tracks, Anthony Wilson, Romero Lubambo and Yotam Silberstein. Eight of the twelve pieces are his own. WBGO named it Recording of the Month in August 2018.

Two more leader dates followed in quick succession in the autumn of 2022. Rivers of Time (LiJa Music, October 21, 2022) is a pair of Utah quintets, with Corey Christiansen, David Halliday, Curtis Woodbury, Kenji Aihara, Kurt Reeder, Matt Larson, Steve Erickson and Phil Kuehn across ten tracks that reach for Ornette Coleman's "Tears Inside," Charles Mingus's "Ballad for Very Tired and Very Sad Lotus Eaters" and Dave Brubeck's "Theme from Mr. Broadway" alongside his own writing. Payin' My Dues (Jazz Hang Records, January 20, 2023) is the big-band record, seventeen-plus players of the Platinum Jazz Orchestra with guests flown in: Bob Sheppard, Ed Calle, Wayne Bergeron, Andy Martin, Bob McChesney, Nestor Torres, Kevin Ricard, and the vocalists Dee Daniels and Clarice Assad. Lawrence wrote eight of the nine charts, arranged all of them, produced the record, and played drums, vibraphone and percussion on it. He remains an active sideman on the Jazz Hang roster, most recently on three albums by the singer Jack Wood between 2024 and 2026. He is married to Linda and has six children and nineteen grandchildren.

Lawrence is a reader and an accompanist before he is a soloist, which is what a career spent in casino pits, recording sessions and college rehearsal rooms produces. He is genuinely multi-instrumental in a way that shows up on the credits sheet rather than in press copy: on Payin' My Dues he is credited with drums, vibraphone and percussion, and on Jack Wood's 2026 album with drums on eight tracks and vibes on three. His writing runs to the same breadth as his playing history, with the Cuban and Brazilian pieces ("Full Moon in Havana," "Vamonos," "Cai Dentro"), the New Orleans street beat ("Tchoupitoulas," named for the Uptown thoroughfare), the swing and blues charts, and one straight rock cover per record, Thelonious Monk and Sting sitting on the same track listing of Sweet Lime and Jimi Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic" on Sonic Paragon. Reviewing that record for Jazz Weekly, George W. Harris singled out the press rolls that open "Tchoupitoulas" and called the Hendrix a wonderfully grooved take; Scott Yanow, quoted by the label, described the band as an impressive all-star group playing swinging originals. Utah readers have voted him Best Drummer in Utah in the Private Eye Weekly annual music poll and Utah's Favorite Jazz Drummer in the Space Agency peer poll; he was a Stan Kenton Scholarship winner at the Sacramento Jazz Festival, a KUER Voice of Jazz honoree and a Utah Arts Council commissioned composer in 2009. He endorses Vic Firth sticks and brushes, Bosphorus cymbals, Cannonball instruments, Remo heads, Musser vibraphones, Roland electronics and LP percussion.