Larry Grenadier was born February 6, 1966, in San Francisco, California, into a musical family. His father, Albert, had played trumpet in army bands during World War II; Larry started on trumpet himself in fifth grade before switching to bass a year later, drawn in first by an electric bass so he and his brothers — including future jazz trumpeter Phil Grenadier — could play together as a band. At 12 he saw the bassist Ray Brown perform live, a formative moment that turned him toward the acoustic instrument for good; he began formal study with local jazz bassists Chris Poehlor, Paul Breslin, and Frank Tusa, and later with classical bassists Michael Burr and Stephen Tramontozzi, while absorbing the recorded lineage of Charles Mingus, Paul Chambers, Wilbur Ware, and Oscar Pettiford.

By 16 he was already working professionally in the San Francisco Bay Area, backing both local musicians and touring names who needed a bassist on short notice — an apprenticeship that put him on the bandstand with Johnny Griffin, Toots Thielmans, Bobby Hutcherson, Art Farmer, Charles McPherson, Anita O'Day, Frank Morgan, and, notably, a young relationship with saxophone giant Joe Henderson, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Pianist Larry Vuckovich became an early mentor, giving Grenadier his first substantial recording credit on the 1985 quartet album Blues for Red alongside McPherson and Dusko Goykovich.

Rather than attending a conservatory, Grenadier earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from Stanford University, graduating in 1989 — while there, he studied and toured with Stan Getz, then the university's artist-in-residence, and deepened the connection to Joe Henderson that would carry into his New York years. After Stanford he moved to Boston to tour internationally with vibraphonist Gary Burton, then relocated to New York in 1991, where he worked in vocalist Betty Carter's demanding band and renewed his relationship with Henderson.

The most enduringly fruitful relationship of Grenadier's career began in 1994, when he met pianist Brad Mehldau and joined a new trio alongside drummer Jorge Rossy — whose own JazzProfiles.com profile covers the group's formation in more detail. Introducing Brad Mehldau (1995, Warner Bros.) began a run that grew into the five-volume Art of the Trio series and continued through Anything Goes (2004); Jeff Ballard replaced Rossy on drums in 2005, and the trio's Nonesuch-era catalog — Day Is Done, House on Hill, Live, Ode, Where Do You Start, Blues and Ballads, and Seymour Reads the Constitution! (2018, two Grammy nominations) — has made Grenadier the one constant across three decades of one of contemporary jazz's most acclaimed working groups.

Beyond Mehldau, Grenadier built one of the busiest and most respected sideman careers of his generation. He toured and recorded extensively with Pat Metheny (whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile) around the Metheny Mehldau collaborations of 2006-2007, and became a key member of drummer Paul Motian's later-career trio, appearing across five albums including a three-volume Live at the Village Vanguard series. His discography also runs through Joshua Redman, Chris Potter, Charles Lloyd, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Enrico Rava, and a long-running relationship with Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel that produced several ECM dates. He co-leads the cooperative trio Fly with saxophonist Mark Turner and drummer Jeff Ballard — a group whose roots trace to the early 1980s, when Grenadier and Ballard played together as California teenagers — and the quartet Hudson with drummer Jack DeJohnette, keyboardist John Medeski, and guitarist John Scofield, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Named for the Hudson Valley the band's members call home, Hudson (2017) became one of the best-selling jazz albums of that year.

Praised by The New York Times as "a deeply intuitive" musician and by Bass Player magazine for his "fluid sense of melody," Grenadier issued his first — and to date only — album of unaccompanied solo bass, The Gleaners, on ECM Records in February 2019. Produced by Manfred Eicher and recorded at Avatar Studios in New York, it paired originals (including "Pettiford," a tribute to the bassist who first drew him to the instrument's recorded lineage) with a Coltrane/Motian medley, a Gershwin standard, two "Bagatelles" written for him by Wolfgang Muthspiel, and a composition by his wife, vocalist and composer Rebecca Martin. The record joins a small ECM lineage of solo-bass statements from Miroslav Vitous, Barre Phillips, and Dave Holland, and is widely regarded as a career-summarizing showcase of an artist who has spent three decades defined as much by generosity within a band as by any individual spotlight.

Grenadier and Martin have been married since the mid-1990s and have a son, Charlie, born in 2005; the couple lives in New York's Hudson Valley and have recorded and toured together across numerous albums, from Thoroughfare (1999) through After Midnight (2022, with the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos).

Grenadier's playing is built on the foundation of the bass lineage he studied obsessively as a teenager — Mingus, Chambers, Ware, and above all Oscar Pettiford, whom he memorialized directly on The Gleaners — filtered through a career-long commitment to serving the music of whichever bandstand he's on rather than asserting a signature voice. That range shows in the breadth of his catalog: the harmonic conversation of the Brad Mehldau Trio, the groove-driven rock inflections of Hudson, the fully democratic composition-sharing of Fly, and the unaccompanied intimacy of his solo record all draw on the same fluid, listening-first technique. It's a versatility that has made him one of the most trusted bassists of the contemporary post-bop scene — a first-call name across an unusually wide swath of the music, from Paul Motian's abstracted trio conception to Pat Metheny's more song-based vocabulary — while The Gleaners confirmed he also has a fully-formed voice as a soloist when he chooses to step into that role.