Peter Erskine was born June 5, 1954, in Somers Point, New Jersey, and started on drums at age four. He trained formally at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and then at Indiana University Bloomington under percussionist George Gaber, a classical-and-jazz grounding that shows up throughout a career built as much on reading and orchestral color as on groove. The professional path opened early: in 1972, at seventeen, he joined the Stan Kenton Orchestra, spending four years inside one of the last great touring big bands. In 1976 he moved to Maynard Ferguson's band, another high-volume big-band apprenticeship that sharpened the power and precision that would define his later fusion work.

The turn that made his career came through Jaco Pastorius. Erskine's connection with the bassist led to an invitation to join Weather Report, and in 1978 he relocated to Los Angeles to become the band's drummer and percussionist. From 1978 to 1982, Erskine anchored Weather Report through the closing, most commercially visible stretch of its run, appearing on Mr. Gone (1978), 8:30 (1979) — a two-LP set drawn largely from live performance that won Erskine his first Grammy Award — and Night Passage (1980), before the band's run together closed out around its 1982 self-titled album. It was, by any measure, one of the most closely watched drum chairs in jazz: following Alphonso Johnson and Chester Thompson's studio-era drummers, Erskine had to hold down a band built around Zawinul's synthesizers and Pastorius's virtuoso bass while still swinging.

When Weather Report wound down, Erskine didn't scale back — he co-founded a new band with an equally star-studded lineup. Steps Ahead grew out of an earlier all-acoustic project called Steps, reconstituted with electric instrumentation around vibraphonist Mike Mainieri, tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker, pianist Eliane Elias, and bassist Eddie Gomez, with Erskine on drums. The group's Elektra Musician-era studio albums — Steps Ahead (1983), Modern Times (1984), and Magnetic (1986) — became touchstones of 1980s jazz fusion, and Erskine stayed connected to Mainieri's projects and to the Steps Ahead name for years afterward, including a 1999 live reunion in Europe (featuring Mainieri, Bob Berg, Eliane Elias, and bassist Marc Johnson) that was eventually released as Holding Together in 2002, and a credit as drummer on Mainieri's own An American Diary: The Dreamings (1997), alongside Marc Johnson and saxophonist George Garzone.

Erskine's own leader catalog opened in 1982 with a self-titled debut for Contemporary Records — not to be confused with Weather Report's own same-year self-titled album — built around Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker, Mike Mainieri, Eddie Gomez, Don Grolnick, and Kenny Kirkland, a lineup that reads like a Steps Ahead reunion in miniature. Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s his session and sideman work broadened dramatically: he was the drummer on Marc Johnson's ECM debut Bass Desires (1986), alongside guitarists Bill Frisell and John Scofield; on the 1989 trio album billed simply as John Abercrombie, Marc Johnson, Peter Erskine; and on Ralph Towner's Open Letter (1992), one of several ECM dates that established Erskine as a first-call drummer for the label's chamber-jazz aesthetic, prized for a touch light enough to sit inside acoustic guitar and piano textures without ever losing forward motion.

That ECM relationship produced Erskine's most sustained working group as a leader: a trio with pianist John Taylor and bassist Palle Danielsson that recorded four studio albums between 1993 and 1999 — You Never Know (1993), Time Being (1994), As It Is (1996), and Juni (1999), the last credited to all three names equally. The trio's music — spacious, closely voiced, built on original compositions rather than standards — is generally regarded as the clearest statement of Erskine's own musical identity outside a sideman role. After Taylor's death in 2015, Erskine and Danielsson reunited with different pianists for two further trio recordings, Trio M/E/D (2015, with Rita Marcotulli) and Traction Avant (with Alessandro Galati), extending the group's sound into a new generation.

Alongside the ECM and Steps Ahead threads, Erskine built one of the busiest session careers in contemporary music, appearing on records by Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell (including 1979's Mingus, alongside Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock), Diana Krall, Michael Bublé, and Kate Bush's Aerial (2005), as well as film and television scores. In 2006 he won his second Grammy Award as part of the WDR Big Band Köln's recording of Some Skunk Funk, the Brecker Brothers tribute project led by Randy Brecker and Vince Mendoza. He also leads his own catalog on Fuzzy Music, the label he founded in the 1990s to release his working-band and big-band projects, including From Kenton to Now (1995), Badlands (2002), and, more recently, 3 Nights in L.A. (2019) with George Garzone, Alan Pasqua, and Darek Oleszkiewicz.

Across roughly 700 albums and film scores — about fifty of them as leader or co-leader — Erskine has become one of the most honored drummers of his generation. He has been voted "Best Jazz Drummer of the Year" ten times by the readers of Modern Drummer magazine, was inducted into that magazine's Hall of Fame in 2017, and was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society's Hall of Fame in 2022. Berklee College of Music awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1992. He has taught for decades as Professor of Practice and Director of Drumset Studies at the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, and has written a shelf of instructional books alongside No Beethoven: An Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report, his first-hand account of the band's final, most turbulent years.

Erskine's playing was forged in big bands — Kenton and Ferguson demanded power, precision, and instant reading — before Weather Report asked him to do something almost opposite: dissolve that power into color, texture, and interplay with Jaco Pastorius's bass and Joe Zawinul's synthesizers without ever losing the pulse underneath. That range, between propulsive big-band drive and near-orchestral restraint, is the throughline of his career. His ECM work, particularly the trio with John Taylor and Palle Danielsson, shows the restraint side fully developed: a drummer using cymbals and touch as compositional tools rather than as accompaniment. His Steps Ahead and session work show the other half — a fusion drummer who can drive an electric band as hard as any of his peers. Reviewers and fellow musicians alike have pointed to his sound as "more zen than macho," a description that captures how deliberately he underplays even in high-volume settings.