Jeff Hamilton was born August 4, 1953, in Richmond, Indiana. He started on piano as a small child, but a Gene Krupa record caught his ear at age five, and by eight he was behind a drum kit himself. His parents' big-band and Oscar Peterson records shaped his early listening, and as a teenager he added Buddy Rich, Mel Lewis, Philly Joe Jones, and Shelly Manne to the list of drummers he studied. At fifteen he was already good enough to be invited into the jazz ensemble at Earlham College, near his hometown. He went on to Indiana University for his music degree, studying privately along the way with drummer John Von Ohlen.

His first professional break came in 1974 with the New Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. A year later he moved to Lionel Hampton's band, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, and then, still in 1975, into pianist Monty Alexander's trio alongside a young bassist named John Clayton, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. That Alexander-Clayton-Hamilton trio was captured live at the Montreux Festival on June 10, 1976, and released the following year as Montreux Alexander – Live! At The Montreux Festival — one of the more celebrated piano-trio recordings of the decade. Hamilton spent 1977 and part of 1978 with Woody Herman's Thundering Herd before joining the L.A. Four in 1978, the co-op group with Ray Brown, Bud Shank, and guitarist Laurindo Almeida, recording six albums with them into the early 1980s. In between L.A. Four commitments he rejoined a later edition of Alexander's trio — this time with Ray Brown on bass rather than Clayton — for Facets, recorded at Coast Recorders in San Francisco in August 1979 and released on Concord in 1980.

The mid-1980s found him working steadily as a first-call studio and touring drummer behind Ella Fitzgerald, the Count Basie Orchestra, Rosemary Clooney, and Monty Alexander again. In 1985 he, John Clayton, and Clayton's brother, saxophonist Jeff Clayton, co-founded the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, a Los Angeles big band built to play Clayton's arrangements with the discipline of the classic Basie book and the drive of a working road band; it debuted on record with 1991's Heart And Soul. In 1988 Hamilton joined the Ray Brown Trio, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, staying until March 1995. That tenure overlapped with a parallel, closely related gig: from 1990 through the early 1990s he was the drummer of choice when Brown, guitarist Herb Ellis, and Oscar Peterson reunited the "Legendary Oscar Peterson Trio" lineup for club dates and recordings, including the March 1990 live album Saturday Night at the Blue Note, cut at New York's Blue Note with Hamilton on the stool in place of the trio's 1970s drummer, Bobby Durham.

When he left Ray Brown's group in 1995, Hamilton shifted his focus to leading his own working trio, a group he had already begun documenting the year before with 1994's It's Hamilton Time on Lake Street Records. The trio's stable working lineup — pianist Tamir Hendelman and bassist Christoph Luty, later succeeded by Jon Hamar — carried the group through more than a dozen studio and live albums for labels including Mons, Azica, Capri, and Cellar Live, from 2009's Symbiosis and 2012's Red Sparkle through 2020's Catch Me If You Can and 2021's holiday set Merry & Bright. The trio's most recent record, March 2026's A New Chapter on R.M.I. Records, is a genuine break with that history: recorded live in Memphis with pianist Tadataka Unno and bassist Jon Hamar, it's the first Jeff Hamilton Trio album without Hendelman in the piano chair.

The Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, meanwhile, kept working in parallel with Hamilton's trio and backed vocalists including Diana Krall — on 2005's Christmas Songs and elsewhere — and John Pizzarelli. Co-founder Jeff Clayton died of kidney cancer on December 16, 2020, at 65; the orchestra's first full album after his death, 2023's And So It Goes on R.M.I. Records, was dedicated to his memory and earned the group a Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 2025 ceremony (it did not win; the award went to the Dan Pugach Big Band).

Across both bands and his own trio, Hamilton has appeared on more than 300 recordings, working with Natalie Cole, Diana Krall, Milt Jackson, Rosemary Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Mel Tormé, John Pizzarelli, Benny Carter, George Shearing, Clark Terry, Paul McCartney (2012's Kisses on the Bottom), Queen Latifah, and Gladys Knight, among many others. His honors include four Modern Drummer magazine Readers' Poll wins, the Los Angeles Jazz Society's 2006 Musician of the Year award (shared with John Clayton), induction into the Jazz Cruise Hall of Fame in 2014, a term as the Monterey Jazz Festival's 2017 Artist in Residence, and the Jazz Club of Sarasota's 2018 Louis Armstrong ("Satchmo") Award. Off the bandstand, he has been an equipment innovator as well as a player: he co-owned Bosphorus Cymbals and later co-founded Crescent Cymbals, a line eventually acquired by Sabian.

Hamilton's playing sits at the intersection of two traditions he absorbed early: the propulsive, showman's drive of Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, and the more textured, brush-driven subtlety of Shelly Manne and Philly Joe Jones. That combination made him equally credible leading his own trio with sticks and mallets and holding down the back of a full big band, where his work co-leading the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra channels a Basie-style rhythmic discipline — economical, riff-driven, built to swing a sixteen-piece band without ever overplaying. Decades inside two of the most demanding small-group traditions in jazz, the Ray Brown Trio and the reunited Oscar Peterson Trio lineup, sharpened that same instinct for support over spectacle, which is a large part of why singers and pianists from Ella Fitzgerald to Diana Krall have kept calling him.