Jeff Ballard was born September 17, 1963, in Southern California and grew up in Santa Cruz, where his father's weekend record sessions, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Milton Nascimento, gave him his first sense of rhythm and sound. He began playing drums at 14 and studied music theory at Cabrillo College, a Santa Cruz community college, while working in local bands across genres. Hearing Tony Williams with Miles Davis, then John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and Ornette Coleman, redirected him decisively toward modern jazz. In 1982 he met bassist Larry Grenadier, beginning a working relationship that would define much of his later career. At 24, Ballard joined Ray Charles's road band, touring eight months a year from 1988 to 1990 in Charles's big band, a stint he has credited as a foundational education in accompaniment and groove.

He moved to New York in 1990 and quickly found a place among a generation of players rethinking the jazz tradition: guitarists Kurt Rosenwinkel and Wolfgang Muthspiel, saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Ben Allison, pianist Danilo Pérez, and bassist Avishai Cohen, on whose Adama (1998), Devotion (1999), and Colors (2000) he played drums and percussion. Around the same period he began a recurring association with Chick Corea, first documented on Corea's Change (1999, Stretch Records) with the band Origin, and continuing intermittently for decades: Corea.Concerto (1999), the Chick Corea New Trio's Past, Present & Futures (2001), the live double album Rendezvous in New York (2003, on which he guests on two tracks), the trio session Chillin' in Chelan with Christian McBride (2007), a guest slot on the 75th-birthday box set The Musician (2016), and a place in SFJAZZ Collective's 2013 concert program devoted to Corea's music.

Ballard, Turner, and Grenadier formed the collective trio Fly in the early 2000s, releasing three albums on two labels: Fly (2004, Savoy Jazz), Sky & Country (2009, ECM, produced by Manfred Eicher), and Year of the Snake (2012, ECM). During a Fly performance in New York in 2005, pianist Brad Mehldau sat in, and the encounter led Mehldau to invite Ballard into his own trio, replacing Jorge Rossy, who was shifting his focus toward piano and a move back to Spain. Ballard's first recording with the group, Day Is Done (2005, Nonesuch), began a tenure that has continued for two decades through Brad Mehldau Trio Live (2008), Highway Rider (2010), Ode and Where Do You Start (both 2012), Blues and Ballads (2016), and Seymour Reads the Constitution! (2018), alongside the related Metheny/Mehldau collaborations Metheny Mehldau (2006) and the Metheny Mehldau Quartet (2007) with Pat Metheny.

Ballard made his recording debut as a leader in 2013 with Time's Tales (Okeh Records), the first release from the Jeff Ballard Trio with guitarist Lionel Loueke and saxophonist Miguel Zenón, which won Best Debut Album in the 2014 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll and Best Instrumentalist, International Drums/Percussion, at the 2015 Echo Jazz Awards. His second leader release, Fairgrounds (2019, Edition Records), recorded live in 2015, expanded his working band, Jeff Ballard Fairgrounds, to include Loueke, pianist Kevin Hays, and bassist Reid Anderson, with guest appearances from Mark Turner and Chris Cheek. In 2021 he formed a further co-led trio, Puerta, with drummer-turned-vibraphonist Jorge Rossy and bassist Robert Landfermann, released on ECM. Across four decades he has also built one of the busiest freelance careers among New York-based drummers, recording with Maria Schneider's orchestra, Joshua Redman's Elastic Band, Ted Nash, Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos, Chihiro Yamanaka, and dozens of others in New York and Europe.

Among the earliest of these credits is Anat Cohen's debut as a leader, Place & Time (2005, Anzic Records), where Ballard is the album's core drummer alongside pianist Jason Lindner, bassist Ben Street, and trumpeter Avishai E. Cohen.

Ballard's playing draws on an unusually wide set of sources, absorbed one genre at a time rather than blended into a single signature groove: big-band drive from his early listening and the Ray Charles years, Brazilian and Afro-Cuban feels, reggae's relaxed sophistication, and the open, conversational freedom he found in Ornette Coleman and Elvin Jones. That range let him move fluidly between Chick Corea's virtuosic, through-composed writing, Brad Mehldau's harmonically dense trio interplay, and the deliberately spare, chamber-like conversations of Fly, where he, Turner, and Grenadier built entire performances without a chordal instrument. Critics and peers have singled him out as one of the most stylistically diverse drummers of his generation, equally at home driving a big band, coloring a ballad with brushes, or pushing a trio toward free improvisation.