Jeffrey Arthur Berlin was born January 17, 1953, in Queens, New York, to a father who sang opera and a mother who played piano. A child prodigy, he studied violin from age five to fifteen and performed with New York orchestras before switching to bass guitar after seeing the Beatles perform. He went on to study bass formally at Berklee College of Music in Boston, then returned to New York, where for a short period he played in an unrecorded trio with guitarist Allan Holdsworth and drummer Tony Williams, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Early influences ran from Jack Bruce, Paul McCartney, Tim Bogert, and Jack Casady toward Rocco Prestia and Jaco Pastorius — though Berlin has been outspoken about his distaste for bassists who merely imitate Jaco's licks rather than absorb his musicality.

Berlin's professional career opened with mid-1970s session work for a striking range of artists: Patrick Moraz (The Story of I, 1976), Patti Austin (End of a Rainbow, 1976), David Liebman (Light'n Up, Please!, 1977), Ray Barretto, Pee Wee Ellis, Don Pullen (Montreux Concert, 1978), and Gil Evans, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. The break that made his name came in 1977, when English drummer Bill Bruford, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, recruited him for the debut album by his own jazz-fusion quartet, alongside guitarist Allan Holdsworth and keyboardist Dave Stewart. Berlin stayed with Bruford's band through all four of its studio-era releases — Feels Good to Me (1978), One of a Kind (1979), The Bruford Tapes (1979), and Gradually Going Tornado (1980), on which he also took a rare lead-vocal credit — giving him substantial international exposure and, by his own account, a musical education that ran deeper than anything he'd absorbed in school: Bruford, he has said, "taught me to hear music unlike the way they taught me in music school."

It was during this period that Berlin began developing what became his signature "lead-bass" concept: treating the electric bass as a primary melodic voice, capable of carrying and soloing over a tune the way a saxophone or guitar would, rather than functioning purely as a rhythmic anchor. Allan Holdsworth brought him back into the studio for his own 1983 Warner Bros. mini-album Road Games. Around the same time, Berlin relocated to Los Angeles, where he worked the club scene alongside guitarists Scott Henderson and Frank Gambale and helped found the Bass Institute of Technology, an early and influential dedicated bass-education program. It was also in this period that Eddie Van Halen — a fan of Bruford's band — began jamming with Berlin and eventually invited him to join Van Halen outright. Berlin turned the offer down, reasoning that joining a band means signing on for its entire way of life, not just its music, and that his own instincts didn't mesh with what he saw in the group at the time.

Berlin launched his solo recording career with 20th Century Impressions (1981, alongside guitarist Joe Diorio and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta), followed by two Passport Jazz albums produced with Ronnie Montrose, Champion (1985) and Pump It! (1986); Denon later compiled highlights from both, plus new material, as Crossroads (1998). His two Denon albums proper, Taking Notes (1997) and the aforementioned Crossroads, moved him toward a more song-based, groove-oriented solo voice. In September 1989, Bruford connections pulled him into another high-profile, short-notice assignment: he substituted for an ailing Tony Levin on the American tour by Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe, the Yes spin-off project, learning the entire set in roughly two days on the strength of years spent transcribing music by ear. The Shoreline Amphitheatre performance from that tour was later released as the live album An Evening of Yes Music Plus.

In 1990, Berlin relocated to Florida, and in 1995 he co-founded the Players School of Music in Clearwater with his then-wife, bassist and educator Vicky Fulop. The school became one of the most respected — and most opinionated — outposts of jazz pedagogy in the country, built on Berlin's insistence that "content must precede technique": traditional fundamentals of reading, ear training, harmony, and ensemble playing, learned in the lineage of his own mentor Charlie Banacos, rather than shortcuts like tablature or metronome drilling. The Clearwater campus ran for 25 years before the COVID-19 pandemic forced its closure in 2020; the school now operates online. Berlin and Fulop divorced amicably in 2013, with Fulop assuming full ownership of the school; Berlin married jazz vocalist and vocal coach Gabriela Sinagra later that same year.

Berlin's leader catalog through the 1990s and 2000s kept pace with his teaching: In Harmony's Way (2000/2001), featuring guests David Liebman, Gary Burton, and Mike Stern; Lumpy Jazz (2004), with harmonica guest Toots Thielemans; and Ace of Bass (2005, released internationally as Aneurythms), produced by fellow bassist Brian Bromberg. He also kept up a run of high-profile collaborative projects: Boston T Party (2006) with drummer Dennis Chambers, guitarist David Fiuczynski, and keyboardist T Lavitz; Caravaggio (2005) with pianist Massimo Colombo and drummer Billy Cobham; and Spinning Globe (2013) with Japanese fusion guitarist Kazumi Watanabe and drummer Virgil Donati — a relationship that also produced composing/performing credits on Watanabe's Spice of Life album series in the late 1980s. In 2012 he formed the power trio HBC with guitarist Scott Henderson and drummer Dennis Chambers.

His most recent solo work returned him to a stripped-down, standards-facing trio format: High Standards (2010) and Low Standards (2013), both with pianist/bassist Richard Drexler and drummer Danny Gottlieb, largely improvised rather than charted. Jack Songs (2022), a tribute to his friend Jack Bruce recorded with an all-star cast including Steve Vai, Frank Gambale, and Alex Lifeson, is his most recent studio album. Geddy Lee of Rush has called him "the greatest bass player on the planet," and the late Jaco Pastorius reportedly considered Berlin a better soloist than himself — praise that sits alongside Berlin's own continuing conviction, voiced in interviews late in his career, that he has "never, for one moment," felt he'd hit his peak.

Berlin's lead-bass concept — elevating the electric bass to a melodic voice on par with a horn, guitar, or piano, capable of carrying and soloing over a tune's changes rather than just outlining them — made him one of the defining fusion bassists of his generation, and his four years with Bill Bruford's band placed him squarely at the crossroads of progressive rock's rhythmic complexity and modern jazz improvisation during fusion's most fertile period. His playing traces a lineage from Jack Bruce's melodic rock bass and Jaco Pastorius's harmonic freedom, filtered through a classically grounded technical foundation (violin training, then Berklee, then years of study under bass pedagogue Charlie Banacos) that shows up as much in his teaching as in his playing: a conviction that content — reading, ear training, harmonic understanding — has to precede technique, and that showmanship divorced from musical substance is, in his own blunt phrasing, "bogus." That same tension between virtuosic freedom and old-school discipline runs through his catalog, from the prog-adjacent fusion of the Bruford years to the standards-based, largely unwritten trio dates of his later solo career.