Joel Ross was born in 1995 on Chicago's South Side, one of two twin boys in a household with three older sisters and two police officers for parents. The music started in church, where his father was choir director: Joel and his twin brother Josh were given toddler-sized drum kits at the age of three and played behind the Baptist congregation before either of them could read. Gospel and R&B were the daily diet at home, and the jazz records that came with it were Milt Jackson, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

The vibraphone was an accident of school bureaucracy. Ross joined the school band at ten, and because his brother had already claimed the drum chair he was handed the xylophone instead. When both twins made Chicago's All City concert and jazz bands, the instructors pointed out that the boy already playing mallets should move to vibraphone. He did so reluctantly. He enrolled in 2009 at the Chicago High School for the Arts, in the school's first intake, and studied there with the flutist Nicole Mitchell; through the school's link to the Jazz Institute of Chicago and the Thelonious Monk Institute he met peers from across the country and heard a keynote from Herbie Hancock. In 2013 he was chosen for the Monk Institute's All-Star Sextet.

The decisive meeting was with the vibraphonist Stefon Harris, whom Ross approached backstage at the Chicago Jazz Festival. Harris invited him to audition for the Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Ross won the seat and spent two years there rebuilding his technique under Harris, who remains the single largest influence on how he holds the instrument. The pianist Gerald Clayton, met through the same Chicago network, pointed him toward Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire and J Dilla.

In 2015 Ross moved to New York to study at The New School and almost immediately assembled the band he named Good Vibes, drawn from players he had met at camps and competitions: Immanuel Wilkins on alto saxophone, Jeremy Corren on piano, and a rotating rhythm section. He toured through the same years as the vibraphonist in the Marquis Hill Blacktet, and in 2017 became one of the youngest musicians ever awarded a Residency Commission by The Jazz Gallery. His recorded career began as a sideman that year, on Ulysses Owens Jr.'s Falling Forward, and expanded quickly in 2018 with Marquis Hill's Modern Flows Vol. 2, the collective quintet album In Common alongside Walter Smith III, Matthew Stevens, Harish Raghavan and Marcus Gilmore, and Makaya McCraven's Universal Beings, where he plays the whole New York side of the record.

He recorded his own debut in December 2016, but it sat until Blue Note picked it up. KingMaker was released on May 3, 2019, and its twelve tracks are almost entirely his own writing, with Wilkins, Corren, Ben Tiberio and Jeremy Dutton behind him and a guest vocal from Gretchen Parlato. Who Are You? followed on October 23, 2020, adding harpist Brandee Younger and bassist Kanoa Mendenhall and closing an arc that runs from a Coltrane ballad to a piece titled for Chicago's area code. The Parable of the Poet (April 15, 2022) is the outlier and the most ambitious record he has made: an octet suite of seven movements with trumpet, trombone, flute and two saxophones added to the core group. nublues (February 9, 2024), cut at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, came out of a blues class he took while finishing his New School degree during the pandemic lockdown, and reads the blues as an energy rather than a form, setting his own writing beside Coltrane's "Equinox" and "Central Park West" and Monk's "Evidence." Gospel Music, released January 30, 2026, is a seventeen-track sextet record built on the church music he grew up inside, with Josh Johnson and Maria Grand on saxophones and an opening piece dedicated to Barry Harris.

Alongside the leader dates he has become one of the most heavily recorded sidemen of his generation, and increasingly a producer. He appears on five Makaya McCraven projects, including the Gil Scott-Heron reworking We're New Again (2020) and In These Times (2022), where he adds marimba to the vibraphone. He is the vibraphonist on both of Johnathan Blake's Blue Note quintet albums, guests on Joshua Redman's Where Are We (2023), and co-leads the Blue Note collective Out Of / Into with Gerald Clayton, Immanuel Wilkins, Matt Brewer and Kendrick Scott. He produced and co-arranged bassist Or Bareket's Sahar (Enja, 2022) and produced Bareket's Yōm (Enja, 2024) without playing on it. He took first place for vibraphone in the DownBeat Critics Poll in 2021, 2022 and 2023 after winning the Rising Star category in 2019, was named Mallet Instrumentalist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2020 and 2021, and won a Dutch Edison Award for KingMaker. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at The New School and the Manhattan School of Music.

Ross plays with two mallets where most modern vibraphonists use four, a deliberate refusal to dictate harmony: with two hands full of chords the vibraphone becomes a second piano, and with two mallets it stays a melodic and rhythmic voice that leaves the chords to the pianist. He uses the sustain pedal sparingly, so notes stop where he stops them rather than blurring into a wash, and the resulting sound is dry, articulate and percussive, closer to the drum kit he started on than to the shimmer the instrument is usually asked for. Milt Jackson is the root influence and Stefon Harris the direct teacher, with Bobby Hutcherson the obvious precedent for using the instrument inside an open post-bop band rather than in front of it. His compositions typically begin from a vamp and develop by rhythmic displacement, an approach he traces to the way Miles Davis's second quintet let each player carry a different pulse. Underneath all of it is the Black church: the call and response, the hymn shapes and the long collective builds that surface plainly on Gospel Music were audible in his writing a decade earlier. He has said he has a love-hate relationship with the vibraphone, calling it cold metal bars that are hard to get expression out of, which is a fair description of the problem his whole technique is designed to solve.