James Emory Garrison was born March 3, 1934, in Miami, Florida, and moved to Philadelphia with his family at the age of ten. He came to the bass late by the standards of his generation, picking up the instrument only in his senior year of high school, but Philadelphia in the early 1950s was an unusually good place to catch up: the same city produced bassists Reggie Workman and Henry Grimes, pianist McCoy Tyner, and trumpeter Lee Morgan, all of them working the same clubs and rehearsal rooms. Garrison worked his way through that scene and moved to New York toward the end of the decade.

His first substantial recording work came in a fast run of late-1950s hard bop dates. He played on three albums by drummer Philly Joe Jones (Blues for Dracula, 1958; Drums Around the World and Showcase, both 1959), and on May 21, 1959, at Van Gelder Studio in Hackensack, he cut Blues-ette with trombonist Curtis Fuller, Benny Golson, Tommy Flanagan, and Al Harewood, a record that has never gone out of favor. Jackie McLean's Swing, Swang, Swingin' (1959), Kenny Dorham's two 1960 Time albums, and J. R. Monterose's Straight Ahead followed. He also spent time in a very different room: the Half Note, where Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh worked the Lennie Tristano orbit and Bill Evans sat in on the nights Tristano stayed home to teach. Tapes from February 1959 with Garrison and Paul Motian in the rhythm section sat unissued until Verve put them out in 1994 as Live at the Half Note. Garrison also passed through a short-lived Bill Evans trio with drummer Kenny Dennis around this period.

The job that first made his name outside the hard bop circuit was with Ornette Coleman. On March 22 and 27, 1961, at Atlantic Studios in New York, Garrison recorded Ornette on Tenor with Coleman, Don Cherry, and Ed Blackwell, the final album by the quartet Coleman had assembled in the 1950s. Coleman broke the group up later that year. Garrison's next employer would keep him for the rest of the saxophonist's life.

John Coltrane brought Garrison onto the bandstand during the Village Vanguard engagement of November 1961, a run in which Reggie Workman was on his way out and Garrison on his way in, the two of them sometimes alternating and sometimes playing together. On November 2, Garrison and Elvin Jones backed Coltrane with no piano at all on "Chasin' the Trane," sixteen minutes of tenor saxophone over bass and drums that became the centerpiece of Coltrane "Live" at the Village Vanguard. Garrison joined the band outright in 1962, completing the lineup now universally called the classic quartet: Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Garrison, Elvin Jones. Over the next three years that group made Coltrane, Ballads, Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, Impressions, Live at Birdland (with "Alabama," Coltrane's response to the Birmingham church bombing), and Crescent. On the last of those, recorded April 27 and June 1, 1964, Coltrane takes no solo at all on side two of the original LP: "Lonnie's Lament" hands the space to Garrison instead, in one of the longest bass features on any album released under a major saxophonist's name.

A Love Supreme, cut in a single session at Van Gelder Studio on December 9, 1964, made Garrison's playing famous whether or not listeners knew the name. The suite opens on his bass with the four-note figure that carries the album's title, and the whole first movement is built over it. At the close of "Pursuance" he is left entirely alone, and the long unaccompanied passage he plays is what carries the record out of the storm of the third movement and into the hymn of "Psalm." Coltrane reconvened the following day with Archie Shepp and a second bassist, Art Davis, and remade "Acknowledgement" as a sextet, then set the results aside and issued the quartet version.

Garrison stayed through everything that came next. He was one of two bassists, with Art Davis again, on the eleven-piece Ascension session of June 28, 1965; he is on Transition, Sun Ship, First Meditations, Kulu Sé Mama, Live in Seattle, Om, and Meditations, recorded November 23, 1965, the date that added Rashied Ali as a second drummer alongside Elvin Jones. When Tyner and Jones left within months of each other and Alice Coltrane and Ali took their places, Garrison was the only man left from the quartet, and he held the chair to the end. The clearest single document of what he had become by then is Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, recorded May 28, 1966 with Pharoah Sanders added on tenor: the album's second track is titled "Introduction to My Favorite Things," runs 6:09, is credited as a Garrison composition, and is nothing but Garrison, alone. Indexing a bassist's solo as a separate piece of music on a saxophonist's live album was close to unheard of. He is also on Live in Japan from that July, and on Expression, The Olatunji Concert, and Stellar Regions from 1967. Outside the band he cut East Broadway Run Down with Sonny Rollins, Freddie Hubbard, and Elvin Jones on May 9, 1966.

After Coltrane's passing in July 1967 Garrison kept working with nearly everyone the band had touched. He anchored Alice Coltrane's first records, A Monastic Trio and Cosmic Music (both 1968) and Universal Consciousness (1971). He joined Elvin Jones's piano-less trio with saxophonist Joe Farrell for Puttin' It Together (April 1968) and The Ultimate (September 1968), the latter carrying three Garrison originals among its six tracks. Ornette Coleman called him back in 1968 for New York Is Now! and Love Call, with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones filling out a rhythm section that DownBeat's five-star review credited with pushing Coleman harder than usual. In Paris in December 1967 he recorded with Hampton Hawes, saxophonist Nathan Davis, and Art Taylor, a session issued as Rules of Freedom. He appeared on Bill Dixon's Intents and Purposes (1967) and Clifford Thornton's Freedom & Unity (1967), and across three of Archie Shepp's most political records: Attica Blues (recorded January 1972), The Cry of My People (September 1972), and There's a Trumpet in My Soul (1975).

Garrison taught as a visiting artist at Wesleyan University and Bennington College in 1971 and 1972, and worked privately with younger bassists, among them William Parker, who names him alongside Richard Davis and Wilbur Ware as the players who taught him the tradition. Lung cancer ended his career and then his life: he passed away in New York City on April 7, 1976, at 42. He left five children from two marriages, including the vocalist Joy Garrison and the bassist Matthew Garrison, who in June 1992 recorded with Rashied Ali and Ravi Coltrane on a quintet session finally released in 2001 as No One in Particular, the sons of two of the classic quartet in a room with the man who had drummed for their fathers.

Garrison rebuilt the job description of the jazz bassist inside the most closely watched band of the 1960s. Rather than walking four to the bar behind John Coltrane, he worked in broken time, dropping in and out of the pulse and running melodic counter-lines against the horn, and he backed it with a heavy, blunt gut-string tone that carried without amplification through Elvin Jones's drumming. His technical vocabulary was unusual for the era: double stops, open strings and fifths struck for resonance, thumb-strummed chordal passages closer to flamenco guitar than to jazz bass, and long stretches of arco. Above all he made the unaccompanied bass solo a standing feature rather than an occasional courtesy, to the point that Coltrane's live sets were built around Garrison's introductions, and Impulse! indexed one of them as its own composition on Live at the Village Vanguard Again!. He also wrote: "Gettin' On Way" on Illumination! and three of the six tracks on Elvin Jones's The Ultimate. Bassists from William Parker onward have taken the solo-bass tradition he opened as ordinary equipment.