Peter Kowald grew up in Wuppertal, an industrial city in western Germany, where he picked up double bass and tuba at fifteen for a straightforward reason: they were the instruments in his school orchestra that nobody else wanted to play. He started out in Dixieland groups before drifting toward something rougher. At seventeen he met a fellow Wuppertaler three years his senior, saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, and the two spent the next eighteen months playing twice a week in a nearly empty local bar, working out a language neither of them had heard anywhere else. It was the beginning of a partnership, and a friendship, that would run for the rest of Kowald's life.

By the mid-1960s that language had a name. Kowald and Brötzmann, drawing on Mingus, Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, pushed further outward after catching a Carla Bley performance in 1965 and touring Europe with her the following year; that same period brought them into the Globe Unity Orchestra, the pan-European free-improvisation big band that became one of Kowald's long-term musical homes. Unable to interest an existing label, Brötzmann self-financed and hand-stamped the labels for their trio record with drummer Sven-Åke Johansson, For Adolphe Sax (1967), and the group's 1968 follow-up Machine Gun pulled in players from across the continent — evidence that something larger than a Wuppertal bar act was taking shape. In 1969 Kowald joined Brötzmann, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, and producer Jost Gebers in founding FMP (Free Music Production), the Berlin-based label and musicians' collective that would document most of German free jazz's first three decades and remain Kowald's artistic base for the rest of his career.

The 1970s brought composing and organizing responsibilities alongside the playing. After Globe Unity broke up in 1969, Kowald secured municipal arts funding to revive it in 1973 and took on a compositional role, culminating in Jahrmarkt/Local Fair (1975-76), a Charles Ives-inspired piece that scattered multiple simultaneous ensembles across Wuppertal's marketplace and forced audiences to physically choose what to listen to. He left Globe Unity in 1978 to focus on his own trajectory as a bassist, and the following year formed a trio with American trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and East German drummer Günter "Baby" Sommer — a group that lasted roughly three years, produced Touch the Earth (1980) and If You Want the Kernels You Have to Break the Shells (1983), and marked a shift from pure "energy music" toward something quieter and more spacious.

The 1980s turned Kowald into an itinerant connector. He toured Japan extensively, recording with Toshinori Kondo, Sabu Toyozumi, Akira Sakata, and vocalist Lauren Newton; he built a parallel life in New York, sitting in with John Zorn, Butch Morris, Andrew Cyrille, William Parker, and Rashied Ali; and he carried the work further still, playing across Southeast Asia, India, Australia, and New Zealand, and performing for roughly 120,000 people at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He formalized the results of a decade of cross-continental duet-hunting on the Duos project — three LPs, Duos Europa, Duos America, and Duos Japan (FMP, 1991), pairing him one-on-one with nineteen different musicians as varied as Diamanda Galás, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Irène Schweizer, Han Bennink, Jeanne Lee, Andrew Cyrille, and Julius Hemphill. He called the loose, no-fixed-structure network that grew out of this touring "Global Village."

For his fiftieth birthday in 1994-95, Kowald undertook a deliberately opposite gesture: 365 days performing only in Wuppertal, converting his own loft into a weekly concert space where he opened Saturday nights with a solo set before inviting visiting improvisers — Butch Morris and Evan Parker among them — to sit in. The project was documented on the box set 365 Tage Am Ort. Out of that same stretch of intensive solo practice came Was Da Ist (What There Is, FMP, 1995), a solo double-bass recording made at Wuppertal's Artcore Studio that the Penguin Guide to Jazz gave its rare four-star "Crown" rating, and Kowald received Germany's Albert Mangelsdorff Prize not long after, in 1995. He kept touring hard into his late fifties — a 2000 U.S. tour covered roughly ninety days and sixty-two concerts, usually opening solo before pulling in local players in each city — and in 2001 stepped onto a new stage entirely, performing as featured soloist with the Stuttgart State Symphony Orchestra in a piece called "Verlorenwasser," his first outing with a full orchestra despite having almost no conservatory training behind him.

Kowald died September 21, 2002, in New York City, of a sudden heart attack, at age 58, at the Brooklyn home of bassist William Parker and dancer/choreographer Patricia Nicholson, immediately after playing a concert in Williamsburg with trombonist Masahiko Kono, percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, and guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi. His trio recording with Conrad Bauer and Günter Sommer, Between Heaven and Earth, made the previous year in Zürich, was released posthumously on Intakt in 2003; Sommer later wrote that Kowald, over their thirty years of friendship, had shown him not just "vast parts of the world" but what it meant to move through life on desire and love alone.

Kowald's bass playing was built for a specific problem: how to hold your own, without amplification, against saxophonists and drummers playing at full volume. He found his answer in extensive bowing, developed after hearing Ornette Coleman's Live at the Golden Circle, layered onto a plucking style shaped by Gary Peacock and Henry Grimes — a combination that let him generate real force and real subtlety from the same instrument, often within the same phrase. But technique was only ever half of what made him distinctive. From the mid-1980s on, Kowald increasingly treated the act of finding new duet partners as itself a compositional project, seeking out one-on-one encounters across genre and geography — European free improvisers, American loft-scene veterans, Japanese traditionalists, downtown New York experimentalists — under the banner he called "Global Village." That restless, deliberately border-crossing curiosity, more than any single stylistic signature, is what made him one of the central connective figures linking the European and American free-jazz communities across four decades, someone other musicians sought out specifically because he had already played with everyone else.