Jorge Rossy was born August 21, 1964, in Barcelona, into a musical family: his sister Mercedes played piano, his older brother Mario became a professional jazz bassist, and Jorge himself started on percussion at eleven, was given a drum kit a year later, and picked up a cheap vibraphone at fourteen, practicing it for two years before adding trumpet to sharpen his ear. Between 1980 and 1989 he worked through the Spanish jazz scene alongside pianist Lluís Vidal while also touring and recording with visiting Americans — Sal Nistico, Dave Schnitter, Woody Shaw, Kenny Wheeler, and Jack Walrath among them.

In 1989 he moved to Boston to study trumpet at Berklee College of Music, despite already being a working drummer; within two years he had shifted his focus back to drums and become, in his own circle, the player other students called first. He worked in the Danilo Pérez Trio and Paquito D'Rivera's sextet during this period. In 1991 he moved to New York with his wife, jazz singer María de Angelis — the two had met through the same Boston circle that included saxophonists Joshua Redman and Mark Turner, and for a time the group shared a communal house together, Rossy's sister Mercedes Rossy among them. The city's Fresh Sound New Talent scene of the mid-1990s became his early recording home, backing dates by Chris Cheek, Ben Waltzer, José Luis Gámez, and dozens of others — the beginning of what would grow into more than 180 recordings as a sideman.

The pivotal partnership began in 1994. Rossy first documented it that year on record with brother Mario Rossy on bass and Brad Mehldau on piano — When I Fall in Love (Fresh Sound New Talent, billed to the "Mehldau & Rossy Trio") — before bassist Larry Grenadier, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, joined to complete the trio that would define Mehldau's sound for the rest of the decade. From 1995 the Brad Mehldau Trio toured the world and recorded the numbered Art of the Trio series for Warner Bros. — Introducing Brad Mehldau (1995), Volume One (1997), Live at the Village Vanguard: Volume Two and Songs: Volume Three (both 1998), Back at the Vanguard: Volume Four (1999), and Progression: Volume Five (2001) — plus Places (2000), the film score Ma Femme Est Une Actrice (2001), Anything Goes (2004), and House on Hill (2006, largely recorded in 2002). Mehldau has credited a year of working out rhythmic vocabulary directly with Rossy as formative to his own playing. Rossy returned to Barcelona in 2000 to raise a family but kept touring internationally with the trio until 2005, when Jeff Ballard took the drum chair — the two drummers would go on to record together themselves, sixteen years later, on Rossy's own album Puerta.

Away from Mehldau, Rossy's sideman catalog stretches from Chick Corea and Avishai Cohen's leader debut Adama (1998) to the Kurt Rosenwinkel Trio's East Coast Love Affair (recorded 1996, released 1999), Steve Swallow's Into the Woodwork (2013), a co-op reunion with Grenadier on Ethan Iverson and Lee Konitz's Costumes Are Mandatory (2013), and Enrico Pieranunzi's Common View (2020). A long-running relationship with guitarist Jakob Bro has produced some of his most recent studio work: Uma Elmo (2021, ECM), Once Around the Room: A Tribute to Paul Motian with Joe Lovano (2022, ECM), Music for Black Pigeons (2024), and a 2023-recorded, 2025-released Live at the Village Vanguard reuniting him with Grenadier and pairing him with fellow drummer Joey Baron across the set.

Rossy's own leader career began under the Catalan form of his name, Jordi Rossy, and on piano rather than drums: Wicca (Fresh Sound New Talent, recorded and released 2007) paired him with organist Albert Sanz and drummer R.J. Miller, with his son Félix Rossy guesting on trumpet — a family session repeated on the Jordi Rossy Quintet albums Ivlianvs Suite (2010) and Iri's Blues (2012), the latter recorded with bassist Ben Street. From around 2013 the vibraphone took over as his primary voice as a leader. Stay There (2016, Pirouet), recorded at Basel's Jazzcampus with Al Foster on drums, Mark Turner on tenor, Peter Bernstein on guitar, and Doug Weiss on bass, is the fullest studio statement of that turn — Rossy himself on vibraphone and marimba, directing a band built around one of jazz's great drummers rather than sitting behind the kit himself. A parallel songbook project, the Rossy & Kanan Quartet with pianist Michael Kanan, bassist Putter Smith, and drummer Jimmy Wormworth, worked through Gershwin (2016), Play the Music of Harold Arlen (2017), Bud (2018), and Tadd & Thad (2020) on the Swiss label Swit Records. The Jorge Rossy Vibes Quintet, with Turner, Weiss, guitarist Jaume Llombart, and rotating drummers Al Foster and Billy Hart, produced Beyond Sunday (2019) and the live Tower Tapes #6 (2020). Puerta (2021), an ECM production helmed by Manfred Eicher and recorded at Jazzcampus Basel with bassist Robert Landfermann and his old trio-mate Jeff Ballard on drums, is his highest-profile leader date to date; he has also continued to record on drums under his own name, on Who Cares? (2019, with Nathanael Su and Dominique Girod), Inviting (2022, with Per Møllehøj and Richard Andersson), and Three Trios (2024).

Since the mid-2010s Rossy has held a teaching post as Lecturer for Drums/Vibraphone at the Jazz Institute of the Hochschule für Musik FHNW, the Basel Academy of Music in Switzerland — the reason both Stay There and Puerta were tracked at the school's own Jazzcampus studio. He continues to divide his time between performing, recording, and teaching across Spain, the United States, and Europe.

Rossy's playing was shaped first as a drummer — a decade inside the Brad Mehldau Trio built his reputation as, in Mehldau's own account, a rhythmic collaborator he worked out an entire vocabulary alongside — and it's the same musical instinct, redirected, that carried him from drums into piano in the years after he left the trio and then into vibraphone and marimba from 2013 onward as his primary voice as a bandleader. That progression shows in his own catalog: family-band piano dates under the Catalan "Jordi Rossy" billing gave way to the vibraphone-led quartets and quintets — the Rossy & Kanan songbook project, the Jorge Rossy Vibes Quintet, and the ECM trio Puerta — that define his current work, often built around a first-call drummer (Al Foster, Billy Hart, Jeff Ballard) rather than Rossy occupying the drum chair himself. As a sideman his post-bop vocabulary has proven equally at home with Kurt Rosenwinkel and Avishai Cohen's turn-of-the-century Fresh Sound and Stretch Records scenes, with Steve Swallow and Enrico Pieranunzi's more chamber-oriented European jazz, and most recently with Jakob Bro's spacious, ECM-associated trio and quartet writing — a range that mirrors his own instrumental range across more than four decades of recording.