James Ross Lovelace was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 6, 1940. Nothing about his childhood, his musical training, or how he came to leave Missouri appears to have been published anywhere: no interview, obituary, liner note, or reference entry consulted for this profile covers the first two decades of his life. The record of Jimmy Lovelace begins abruptly, with him already a working professional.

The earliest documented Lovelace performance is a radio broadcast from The Penthouse in Seattle on December 12, 1962, taped for KING-FM and finally released in 2021 as part of tenor saxophonist Harold Land's Westward Bound!. He is the drummer on that night's three surviving numbers, in a band with trumpeter Carmell Jones and, in the rhythm section, the pianist Buddy Montgomery and the bassist Monk Montgomery. Those two were the brothers of Wes Montgomery, and three years later Lovelace would be the guitarist's touring drummer, though no source found states outright that one led to the other.

That Montgomery job is the most visible thing he ever did. By early 1965 Lovelace was the drummer in a working quartet with Montgomery, pianist Harold Mabern, and bassist Arthur Harper, a band that had been playing together for months. DownBeat placed them at McKie's Lounge in Chicago that February. When Montgomery finally agreed to cross the Atlantic, having avoided it for years out of a fear of flying, he took the working group rather than assembling an all-star band, and Lovelace went with him on what became Montgomery's only European tour. The quartet recorded for the BBC's Jazz 625 radio and television programs in London on March 25, 1965, and two nights later played the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where Johnny Griffin sat in on three numbers. The Paris tape sat in the archives of the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française for half a century and circulated as a bootleg before Resonance Records issued it officially in 2017 as In Paris: The Definitive ORTF Recording. Montgomery broke up the trio in early April and finished the tour with locally hired musicians, so Lovelace's European work amounts to roughly three weeks in March 1965, not a residency abroad.

Back in New York he became a reliable studio and club drummer for about a decade. He is on both of the records that introduced George Benson as a leader, It's Uptown (1966) and The George Benson Cookbook (1967), organ-quartet dates for Columbia produced by John Hammond with Lonnie Smith on Hammond organ and Ronnie Cuber on baritone saxophone. He played on part of pianist Junior Mance's The Good Life, and on clarinetist Tony Scott's self-titled 1968 Verve album, a strange and appealing session that set Scott against oud, dumbek, and Attila Zoller's guitar. A 1965 date at CBS studios in New York with the reedman Prince Lasha, Herbie Hancock on piano and Cecil McBee on bass, went unreleased until Enja put it out in 1981 as Inside Story. He also worked with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a credit that survives in the Resonance liner notes rather than on any record. In October or November 1967 he turned up at Columbia Studio E for the sessions that became Songs of Leonard Cohen, and he is credited with drums on exactly one track, "So Long, Marianne," on an album its author had wanted to make without any drums at all.

The work thinned after that. There is a 1975 Tokyo-produced date for guitarist Yoshiaki Masuo, 111 Sullivan Street; a 1980 Leo Records session with the singer and organist Amina Claudine Myers, Salutes Bessie Smith, on which he plays drums and bells; a 1992 live recording with saxophonist George Braith at the University of the Street; and a London club date the same year with guitarist William Ash that went unissued until 2023. For most of the 1980s the trail goes cold, and no source found explains what he was doing.

What restored him was Smalls. From the mid-1990s Lovelace was a fixture at the basement club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, most often behind the house pianist Frank Hewitt, whose trio and quintet he anchored for years. He also held down Sunday nights with Across 7 Street, the bebop group co-led by bassist Ari Roland and saxophonist Chris Byars, with Sacha Perry on piano and John Mosca on trombone. The band ran nine years at Smalls until the original club closed in 2003, and Lovelace was on the drum throne for seven of them, known around the room as "The Ancient One." Almost all of it went unrecorded at the time. The single commercial release from those years made during his lifetime is one track, "Prince Albert," on the Impulse! compilation Jazz Underground: Live at Smalls (1998). Everything else surfaced afterward, when Luke Kaven's Smalls Records began issuing Hewitt's tapes: We Loved You (2004), Four Hundred Saturdays (2005), Fresh from the Cooler (2006), Out of the Clear Black Sky (2007), and Salience (2011).

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and could not cover the cost of treatment. On September 19, 2004, more than thirty musicians played a benefit for him at St. Peter's Church on Lexington Avenue, among them George Coleman, Hank Jones, Roy Haynes, Lou Donaldson, Barry Harris, Jimmy Cobb, Brad Mehldau, Harold Mabern, Louis Hayes, Bob Cranshaw, Reggie Workman, and Ben Riley. Ten days later Smalls Records put five Across 7 Street tracks online as a pay-what-you-can download to raise more, an "electronic 10-inch record" issued under the title The Eternal Pyramid. Lovelace died in Manhattan on October 29, 2004, at 64, survived by his wife, Okaru Hoshino, and a sister.

Lovelace was an accompanist, and the praise for him is consistently about what he did for other people rather than what he played himself. Mabern, asked about the 1965 rhythm section, said the tightness was not designed: get the bass player and the drummer hooking up and the rest follows. He also remembered Lovelace's verdict on a pianist he approved of, delivered very quietly and twice: "Solid. Solid." Smalls Records described his accompaniment as unparalleled in the eyes of the horn players who worked with him, and noted that he was the one musician the room reliably cheered. The clearest statement of what he actually did comes from Brad Mehldau, who wrote in his 2023 memoir Formation that Lovelace swung "right down the middle," perhaps comparable to Art Taylor but entirely his own, and drew the distinction that where other drummers had pulled him along, Lovelace held him in place, gently and absolutely. That is a description of a beat used as ground rather than as propulsion, which is also why almost nobody outside the musicians noticed him.