Michael Stephen Blake was born in Montreal on May 19, 1964, to Merle Stevens, a professional dancer, and Francis Patrick "Paddy" Blake. His father's work moved the family to Toronto, to Vancouver, and then to the San Francisco Bay Area for a public relations job with the San Francisco Opera, so that the psychedelic rock, funk and soul of the early 1970s reached him before jazz did. His parents divorced in 1973 and the family settled back in Vancouver. He tried violin and piano, then picked up the clarinet at fourteen, around the time his older brother started on alto saxophone. What turned him toward the tenor was a book rather than a record: he read J.C. Thomas's Coltrane biography Chasin' the Trane before he had properly heard the music, then went through his brother's John Coltrane collection and, by his own account, listened to almost nothing else for five years. He also went to concerts in Vancouver as a teenager and heard Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis.

He graduated from Vancouver Technical Secondary School in 1982 with the school's Music Award and entered the Vancouver Community College jazz and commercial music program, where he studied saxophone and clarinet with David Branter, and afterwards took private lessons with the saxophonist Patric Caird. In 1984 and 1985 he attended the summer jazz workshop at the Banff Centre under Dave Holland's direction, hearing Muhal Richard Abrams and Cecil Taylor as guest artists and taking masterclasses with Holland, Kenny Wheeler, Don Thompson, John Abercrombie, Steve Coleman and David Liebman. He began working professionally on the Vancouver scene alongside the trombonist and pianist Hugh Fraser, Phil Dwyer, John Korsrud, Jim Chivers and the singer Kate Hammett-Vaughan, and also played in the west coast rhythm-and-blues outfits of the Powder Blues Band and Rocket Norton. A 1986 Canada Council for the Arts grant sent him to New York to study saxophone and theory with Liebman, and he moved there for good in 1987.

New York took a while to open. He supported himself in salsa, merengue and funk bands, and worked as a sideman for Jack McDuff, Charlie Persip, the Gil Evans Orchestra and the salsa singer Henry Fiol. The break came in the autumn of 1989, when John Lurie auditioned him for The Lounge Lizards, the downtown band Lurie had formed with his brother Evan in the late 1970s. Blake stayed a decade, until 1999, and it was for that group that he took up the soprano saxophone. He is on both volumes of Live in Berlin 1991, cut at the Quartier Latin over four nights that March, and on Queen of All Ears (1998); he appears in the concert film John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards Live in Berlin 1991; and he played saxophone and clarinet on Lurie's television series Fishing with John and on his scores for Get Shorty and Excess Baggage. The Lounge Lizards remained the association strangers recognised him by, and he was still in the room for it three decades later, rejoining his old colleagues in 2021 and 2022 to record music for Lurie's HBO series Painting with John.

Two things happened in the second half of the 1990s that made him a leader. In 1995 he became a composer in residence at the Jazz Composers Collective and joined The Herbie Nichols Project, the repertory ensemble the collective built around the pianist's neglected book; in 1998 he joined bassist Ben Allison's band Medicine Wheel, an association that ran to seven albums across thirteen years. And in 1996 he signed with the German label Intuition and made Kingdom of Champa, a concept record about postwar Vietnam recorded at Sorcerer Studios over two days in August 1996, produced by Miles Davis's old producer Teo Macero and engineered by Scott Harding. The band was a downtown cross-section: Thomas Chapin on flutes and baritone, Steven Bernstein on trumpet, Marcus Rojas on tuba, David Tronzo on slide guitar, Tony Scherr on bass, Billy Martin on percussion. DownBeat did not review it, which stung, but the record established the pattern he has followed since, which is that no two of his albums use the same instrumentation. He reassembled Macero and Harding for Drift (2000), an eleven-piece date that Germany's Jazzthing magazine voted its album of the year, then stripped down to a quartet with Frank Kimbrough, Allison and Mike Mazor for Elevated (2001), the most conventionally beautiful record he had made and the one that got him written up outside the jazz press. In 1997 he had also formed Slow Poke with Tronzo, Scherr and Kenny Wollesen, a deliberately slow, twangy instrumental quartet that made Slow Poke at Home live in Scherr's Brooklyn house in 1998 and Redemption for Intuition in 1999. In 2002 DownBeat's critics named him in three Talent Deserving Wider Recognition categories at once: artist of the year, tenor saxophone and soprano saxophone.

From there his working life split across three cities. In Denmark he formed Blake Tartare in 2002 with Kresten Osgood, Søren Kjærgaard and Jonas Westergaard, recording the self-titled album in Brooklyn that April and More Like Us in Copenhagen in 2004; the band toured Italy and played the Berlin Jazz Festival, and the same relationship produced Hammond Rens with the organist Lonnie Smith and, later, the Blake-and-Osgood duo record Control This. His most ambitious Danish project was The World Awakes (2007), a tribute to Lucky Thompson scored for saxophone, trumpet, clarinets, strings and rhythm section and cut at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation's studios. In Vancouver he began a run with the label Songlines in 2007, making what amounts to a Canadian trilogy with a younger generation of British Columbia improvisers: Amor de Cosmos (2007), dedicated to his grandfather Bert Stevens, who lived to 101, with Brad Turner on trumpet and Chris Gestrin on keyboards; In the Grand Scheme of Things (2012), whose pieces refer to his children and to his brother's wedding in Zambia; and Fulfillment (2016), a work of atonement about the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which his own great-granduncle, the anti-immigration MP Henry Herbert Stevens, played a disruptive part. In New York he assembled Hellbent in 2006 with G. Calvin Weston, Steven Bernstein and Marcus Rojas, a horns-and-drums band with no chordal instrument at all, documented on a live album taped in Vancouver in February 2007. He also served as musical director for Neil Sedaka's "50 Years of Hits" concert at Avery Fisher Hall in October 2007, and spent the summer of 2008 in Enrico Rava's band on the New York Stories tour, a last-minute call after Mark Turner injured his hand.

The 2010s gave him his most decorated records and his oddest sideline. A Doris Duke Charitable Foundation grant in 2013 funded Contrasts in Individualism: The Innovations of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, which he recorded with Ben Allison, Frank Kimbrough and Rudy Royston and released as Tiddy Boom on Sunnyside in 2014; DownBeat put it among its albums of the year and asked him to analyse his own solo on the title track for its Woodshed department. Red Hook Soul followed in 2016, cut over two October days in 2015 at Brooklyn Recording with a rhythm-and-blues band rather than a jazz one: Tony Scherr on lead guitar, Avi Bortnick on rhythm guitar, Erik Deutsch on piano, Tim Lüntzel on electric bass, Moses Patrou on percussion and Tony Mason on drums, playing two Blake originals alongside Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and a straight-faced reading of Lana Del Rey's "Video Games". The New York City Jazz Record gave it 2016's best album cover. The sideline was children's television: he played the soprano saxophone on the theme to Nickelodeon's The Backyardigans, whose music Evan Lurie and Doug Wieselman wrote, and between 2004 and 2010 he performed on many episodes with other Lounge Lizards and scored six of them himself. He was on the faculty of the Siena Jazz summer workshop in Italy from 2009 to 2014, teaching ensembles and saxophone and playing faculty concerts with Rava, Greg Osby, Kenny Werner, Steve Cardenas, Eric Harland and Ben Perowsky.

In 2020 a Canada Council grant let him conceive Dance of the Mystic Bliss, a record for his late mother. When the New York lockdown lifted he assembled Chroma Nova, a band of Brazilian, American and Canadian musicians with a small string section, electric guitar and two percussionists, and recorded it. In 2022 he and his brother Paul founded P&M Records, and the album became the label's first release the following year. It was John Fordham's jazz album of the month in The Guardian in June and third on the paper's list of the ten best jazz albums of the year. In between, in October 2022, Newvelle issued Combobulate, a set of arrangements for a brass-band sextet with two tuba players, Marcus Rojas and Bob Stewart, alongside Bernstein, the trombonist Clark Gayton and the drummer Allan Mednard; DownBeat gave it four stars and Bandcamp named it the best jazz of the month. Chroma Nova made a second album, Piccolos Before Rifles, recorded in a single day at Reservoir Studio in April 2025 and self-released in May 2026. Its title came from watching the Royal Life Guards Music Band on its daily round in Copenhagen, horns leading and armed soldiers following, and thinking about the part music plays in making war palatable.

Blake is a big-toned tenor player who came up through Coltrane, spent five years imitating him and then spent the rest of his career deliberately not sounding like him. His own map of the instrument runs through Lester Young and Ben Webster for phrasing and through Lucky Thompson for the soprano, and he has described his aim on tenor as finding a bond between the Coltrane cry and what he calls the deliberate cool of Prez; on soprano he wanted a round, sweet tone rather than the oboe-like whine the instrument usually gets. He also names Yusef Lateef and Rahsaan Roland Kirk as the players he actually puts on at home, and Joe Lovano as the figure who made a warmer, less pinched saxophone sound acceptable again in his generation. What makes him unusual is not the horn but the framing around it. He hates writing in one style, and no two of his records share an instrumentation: a ten-piece with tuba, cello and slide guitar for Kingdom of Champa; a piano quartet for Elevated; an organ quartet with Dr. Lonnie Smith in Denmark; a horns-and-drums trio with no chords at all for Hellbent; a brass band with two tubas for Combobulate; a string-and-percussion band for Chroma Nova. Ben Ratliff of The New York Times called him "an endlessly engaging improviser, and an inquisitive one", and the restlessness Ratliff heard is the through-line. It costs him something commercially and he has said so plainly: the same music that reviewers keep describing as accessible and tuneful has never quite found a market, and he was frank in a 2003 interview about how badly the silence around Kingdom of Champa had shaken him. The critical verdict has nonetheless been consistent for three decades, from Jazzthing's album of the year for Drift in 2000 through DownBeat's three Talent Deserving Wider Recognition nods in 2002 to The Guardian placing Dance of the Mystic Bliss third among the jazz albums of 2023. He is a working arranger as much as a soloist, and his own summary of the method is that he goes for personalities rather than instruments when he puts a band together.