James Charles Heard was born August 10, 1917, in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Detroit. As a child he tap-danced in local amateur contests, and his professional debut came almost by accident at Detroit's Koppin Theater, where he filled in on drums for the vaudeville act Butterbeans and Susie when their regular percussionist fell ill; billed as "The Child Wonder," he needed cushions on the seat to reach the kit. Hearing Chick Webb play at the Graystone Ballroom left a lasting impression, and at Cass Technical High School he came under the wing of drummer Jo Jones, whose sock-cymbal technique and connections to the Count Basie circle shaped Heard's own approach. His first steady job was with trumpeter Bill Johnson's combo at Detroit's Cozy Corner Café in 1938; the following year Jones's recommendation helped land him his professional breakthrough, a chair in Teddy Wilson's short-lived big band, which played New York's Golden Gate Ballroom and recorded for Columbia.

After Wilson's band broke up, Heard settled into New York as an in-demand freelance "utility drummer," valued for fitting comfortably into almost any setting. He joined Cab Calloway's orchestra in the fall of 1942, holding the drum chair through 1945 and appearing with the band in the film Stormy Weather (1943); guitarist Danny Barker said the band's rhythm section "didn't get right" until Heard joined. Esquire magazine named him a 1946 "New Star" award winner, voted on by musicians rather than critics. That same year, Café Society Downtown owner Barney Josephson hired a combo led by Heard as the club's house band, an group that featured bassist Al McKibbon, pianist/arranger Jimmy Jones, and, early on, singers Sarah Vaughan and Etta Jones. Heard's group also backed vocalist Ethel Waters on a string of 1946 sides for Continental Records, and he recorded prolifically as a sideman through the decade for Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Sidney Bechet, Don Byas, and dozens of others.

Heard became a regular on Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic tours around 1950, taking part in the tour's celebrated onstage "drum battles" against Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, and recording for Granz's Norgran label alongside pianist Oscar Peterson's regular bassist, Ray Brown, including a 1952-53 session with tenor saxophonist Lester Young that used guitarist Barney Kessel rather than Peterson's later guitarist, Herb Ellis. When JATP's thirteenth national tour reached Japan in November 1953, Heard was offered double pay to stay behind, and he accepted, sensing an opportunity as much as a booking. He led his own group in Tokyo, appeared in four Japanese films (including roles as a G.I. and a samurai), hosted a talk show through a translator, and lectured on jazz at a leading Tokyo university. During this stay Granz brought Peterson's touring rhythm section, Ray Brown on bass, Herb Ellis on guitar, and Heard on drums, into a Tokyo studio to back a young local pianist, Toshiko Akiyoshi, after Peterson had heard her play and urged Granz to record her; the result, Toshiko's Piano (1954, Norgran), became her debut LP. Heard married Hiroko Nagata during his Japan years, later overstayed his visa touring Southeast Asia, and fathered a son, Eric, with Hiroko, before returning to the United States in November 1957.

Back in New York, Heard resumed part-time work with Granz and recorded his sole outing as a leader of a full studio session, This Is Me, J.C. Heard (1958, Argo), billed to the J.C. Heard Octet. He relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, worked a drum duo with veteran Jack Sperling, briefly joined pianist Dorothy Donegan's trio in Miami in 1963, and in 1964 held the drum chair in saxophonist Bill Perkins's quintet at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach alongside guitarist Joe Pass, a stint eventually issued decades later as Live at the Lighthouse 1964 (Fresh Sound, 2018).

After twenty-five years away, Heard returned to Detroit in 1965-66 as a bandleader and mentor, reuniting Hiroko and Eric with the family in 1967. He led organ trios and quartets around the city, recorded Detroit-scene sessions for Hugh Leal's Parkwood label alongside pianist Claude Black, saxophonist George Benson (a Detroit player, not the guitarist of the same name), and bassist Dave Young, and cut a run of blues duo albums, Partners in Time (1988, Blind Pig) and Some of This, Some of That (1987, on his own Hiroko Records, named for his wife), with Ann Arbor pianist Mr. B (Mark Braun). In 1979 he organized a big band on Mackinac Island that grew into the fourteen-piece J.C. Heard Orchestra, which debuted formally at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1983 and became a fixture of the Detroit Jazz Festival. He shared a bandstand with Dizzy Gillespie at the 1984 Montreux-Detroit Kool Jazz Festival, and a reunion with Gillespie at the Detroit Institute of Arts was scheduled for late September 1988; Heard died of a heart attack in Royal Oak, Michigan, on September 27, 1988, two days before that concert, which Gillespie led instead as a memorial. He was 71.

Heard's playing was built on Jo Jones's example, particularly Jones's sophisticated use of the sock cymbal, and it stayed versatile enough across his career to move comfortably between Cab Calloway's swing-era big band, the fast small-group interplay of bebop and JATP jam sessions, and the organ trios and blues duos of his later Detroit years; critics and colleagues generally describe his style as a hybrid of swing and bop with an undercurrent of Afro-Cuban, Latin, and calypso rhythm. He favored a spare, five-piece drum kit over elaborate setups, arguing that "if you can't swing with a five-piece kit, having all that shit won't help you," and as a bandleader he had a reputation for shaping ensembles, small and large, around a tight, propulsive feel; musical director Walt Szymanski said Heard "knew how to swing any size group, that's why his big band sounded so good, it felt like a small group." The New York Times credited him, alongside Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, as one of three drummers who "wrote the rules for modern jazz drumming."