Peter Washington was born August 28, 1964, in Los Angeles, California. He started on classical bass in his junior high school orchestra and, at fourteen, played a season with the Westchester Community Symphony before picking up electric bass in rock bands. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in English Literature while playing in the UC Symphony and the San Francisco Youth Symphony — a detour through classical training and literature rather than a conservatory jazz program, which is unusual for a bassist who would go on to become one of the most called-upon sidemen of his generation. While still in the Bay Area he worked with local jazz figures including John Handy, Bobby Hutcherson, Harold Land, Frank Morgan, Ernestine Anderson, and Chris Connor, building the kind of reading and time-feel reputation that travels by word of mouth among working musicians.

The break came in 1986. Performing in San Francisco with alto saxophonist John Handy, Washington was asked by Art Blakey — whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — to move to New York and join the Jazz Messengers. He stayed with the band from 1986 to 1989, the tail end of Blakey's decades-long run as jazz's most reliable finishing school for young talent, and used the visibility to establish himself in New York as a ubiquitous, first-call freelance bassist almost immediately.

In the early 1990s Washington joined the Tommy Flanagan Trio, a group routinely cited as one of the finest working trios in jazz, and remained with Flanagan until the pianist's death on November 16, 2001. Around the same period he became a founding member of One For All, the collective hard-bop sextet formed with pianist David Hazeltine, trumpeter Jim Rotondi, trombonist Steve Davis, saxophonist Eric Alexander, and drummer Joe Farnsworth for what began as a regular engagement at Smalls in Greenwich Village in the mid-1990s; he anchored the group's early Sharp Nine and Criss Cross dates before later giving way to bassist John Webber in the band's ongoing lineup. In 1997 he joined pianist Bill Charlap's trio alongside drummer Kenny Washington (no relation), a partnership that has now run close to three decades and produced a run of celebrated Blue Note and Impulse! recordings, several of them Grammy-nominated, including Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein and The Bill Charlap Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard. Washington is also the bassist, credited as part of "the Bill Charlap Trio," on Tony Bennett and Bill Charlap's 2015 duo album The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern, which won the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.

Washington has long been described as perhaps the most recorded bassist of his generation, and the description holds up against the numbers: Discogs alone credits him on close to 500 releases and appearances, a tally that keeps growing as new sideman dates surface. In 2008 he joined the Blue Note 7, an all-star septet — including trumpeter Nicholas Payton, saxophonists Ravi Coltrane and Steve Wilson, guitarist Peter Bernstein, drummer Lewis Nash, and Charlap on piano — assembled to tour and record in celebration of Blue Note Records' 70th anniversary. He has also worked extensively as an accompanist to singers, including Andy Bey, Freddie Cole, Karrin Allyson, Chris Connor, Mark Murphy, Georgie Fame, Ernie Andrews, Paula West, Eric Comstock, Ann Hampton Callaway, Marlena Shaw, and Ernestine Anderson, and has appeared as a visiting artist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Despite that enormous body of work, Washington has never made a record billed solely under his own name as leader. The closest he has come is Live at Mezzrow (2017), a genuine 50/50 duo billing with pianist Tardo Hammer recorded live at the Greenwich Village club, and more recent co-billed dates such as pianist John Lee's 2024 trio album Second Wind, where Washington and drummer Kenny Washington share equal credit on the cover but the record is Lee's leader date rather than a group co-led by all three. That pattern — indispensable, ubiquitous, and almost never the headline — is arguably the defining fact of his career.

Washington's reputation rests less on a signature sound than on an unshakeable reliability: a big, centered tone, time that never wavers whether he's driving a hard-bop sextet or accompanying a ballad singer, and solos that are melodically considered rather than showy. That versatility is what let him move seamlessly between the extroverted attack of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the harmonically sophisticated intimacy of the Tommy Flanagan and Bill Charlap trios, and the phrasing demands of vocalists from Andy Bey to Tony Bennett. Critics and fellow musicians have repeatedly placed him in the lineage of first-call mainstream bassists such as George Duvivier, Milt Hinton, and Ron Carter — players valued as much for what they don't do (crowd the soloist, rush the time) as for what they do. Decades spent as the bassist other musicians request, across genres from straight-ahead hard bop to the Great American Songbook to orchestral crossover work, have made him one of the most trusted and least flashy anchors in modern mainstream jazz.