Reuben Renwick Rogers was born on November 15, 1974 in Saint Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to parents who were both ministers. The music he heard first was church music, and around it, on the island, were calypso, reggae and soca. He started on clarinet and piano and did not find the bass until he was fourteen. What happened next depended on one teacher: Georgia Francis, the band director at his high school, steered him toward jazz, put him in front of two Virgin Islanders who were already working professionals, the saxophonist Ron Blake and the drummer Dion Parson, and later helped him secure the grant that bought his first upright bass. Rogers has said of her that she "saw the potential in me and always pushed for her students." He spent summers at the Interlochen Arts Camp and in Berklee's summer program, then enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston on scholarship, including an award from the Fish Middleton Jazz Society, and took a Bachelor of Music there in 1997.

He was recording before he graduated. His first album credit is In Other Words (GRP, 1994), the debut of the tenor saxophonist Teodross Avery, cut with Roy Hargrove on trumpet, produced by Michael Cuscuna and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. Rogers was nineteen. Blue Note dates with the trumpeter Marcus Printup followed almost immediately: Song for the Beautiful Woman, cut in New York on December 6 and 7, 1994, and Unveiled, recorded live to a two-track analog master on February 18 and 19, 1996 with Marcus Roberts at the piano and Jason Marsalis on drums. In 1995 he shared the bass chair on Carl Allen's Testimonial with Christian McBride, and in 1996 he anchored an alto summit for Milestone with Phil Woods, Vincent Herring and Antonio Hart.

The late 1990s put him in New Orleans company. He became Nicholas Payton's working bassist for four albums between 1996 and 2001, from Gumbo Nouveau (Verve, 1996) through Payton's Place, Nick@Night and the large-cast Louis Armstrong tribute Dear Louis (2001), and he played in the same quintet on Adonis Rose's Song for Donise and The Unity for Criss Cross. He recorded twice with Donald Harrison for Impulse!, on Nouveau Swing (1997) and Free to Be (1999), and he played on Irvin Mayfield's 1999 debut for Basin Street with Ellis Marsalis at the piano and Delfeayo Marsalis producing. Alongside that he kept the Virgin Islands connection working: 21st Century (TAHMUN, 1998), the first record by the Afro-Caribbean band Ron Blake and Dion Parson co-led, has Rogers on both acoustic and electric bass next to Gary Bartz, Terell Stafford and Stephen Scott.

1999 set up the two partnerships that defined the next twenty-five years. He played on the pianist Aaron Goldberg's debut Turning Point, beginning an association that has now run through five Goldberg albums, the most recent in 2014; and, with Goldberg and the drummer Gregory Hutchinson, he formed the rhythm section of Joshua Redman's quartet, recording Beyond at Avatar Studios in May 1999 and the continuous eight-part suite Passage of Time in 2001. Redman kept calling: Rogers is one of three bassists on the pianoless Back East (2007), one of two on the double-trio Compass (2009), and one of two on Trios Live (2014). When Redman reassembled the 1999 quartet for Come What May (Nonesuch, March 29, 2019), the album was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards, held January 26, 2020. In parallel he joined Dianne Reeves's band, playing on A Little Moonlight (Blue Note, 2003) and standing in front of the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle at the Philharmonie on New Year's Eve 2003, a concert EuroArts issued as Ravel Meets Gershwin.

In 2006 he made the only album under his own name. The Things I Am, self-released on his Renwick Entertainment imprint and co-produced with Ron Blake, is an explicit joining of the two halves of his background: Sonny Rollins's calypso "St. Thomas," named for the island Rogers was born on, appears as a 102-second interlude, Blue Mitchell's "Fungi Mama" follows it, Adam Cruz plays steel drums on "Phillip," and the front line is Joshua Redman, Nicholas Payton and Blake with Aaron Goldberg, Gregory Hutchinson and two guitarists behind them. He has not made a second leader record in twenty years, though he has shared top billing on six others, most prominently Corridors (Blue Note, March 3, 2023), a pianoless trio with the drummer Kendrick Scott and the saxophonist Walter Smith III.

The longest chair of his career came in 2007, when Charles Lloyd built a new quartet around Jason Moran, Rogers and Eric Harland. That band recorded Rabo de Nube live at Theater Basel on April 24, 2007, then Mirror (2010) and the two-disc Athens Concert with the Greek singer Maria Farantouri (2011) for ECM, and Passin' Thru for Blue Note, taped at Montreux and in Santa Fe in the summer of 2016 and released on July 14, 2017. Lloyd then rebuilt around Rogers again: The Marvels, with Bill Frisell on guitar and Greg Leisz on pedal steel, made I Long to See You (2016), Vanished Gardens with Lucinda Williams (2018) and the Tone Poet release Tone Poem (2021), and Lloyd's eightieth-birthday concert album 8: Kindred Spirits (2020) put Rogers next to Gerald Clayton and Julian Lage. He also held the bass chair in Tomasz Stanko's New York Quartet for December Avenue, recorded at Studios La Buissonne in June 2016 and the Polish trumpeter's last studio album. In 2024, Walter Smith III made the point about him plainly, and titled a Blue Note album three of us are from Houston and Reuben is not.

Rogers has kept working at home. He still plays in the 21st Century Band with Blake and Parson, including a Jazz at Lincoln Center run recorded for Live at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola Vol 2 on September 3, 2011, and he returns to the Virgin Islands to run school workshops and fundraising concerts for youth music education. He teaches nationally through Open Studio, where his courses cover walking bass lines, swing and rhythm-section playing, and in 2015 he recorded an upright-bass sample library for The Loop Loft, later reissued by Yurt Rock with fourteen sessions of Caribbean, Latin American and Brazilian material covering reggae, calypso, dub and soca.

Rogers's identity as a player is the seam between the Caribbean and the American mainstream, and it is audible rather than biographical. He came up playing gospel in his parents' church and calypso, reggae and soca outside it, and he brought that rhythmic vocabulary into straight-ahead settings without ever making it a novelty: the bass lines carry a slight forward lean and a lot of low-end weight, and they hold a groove in place rather than commenting on it. He is fluent on electric as well as upright, which is unusual in his generation of acoustic-first bassists and is the reason he turns up on Tom Harrell's orchestral Wise Children playing fretless and on Ron Blake's Me'Shell NdegeOcello-produced Sonic Tonic playing both. The trait leaders keep hiring him for is durability inside a band rather than display: he has held the same chair with Joshua Redman across six albums over nineteen years, with Aaron Goldberg across five over fifteen, and with Charles Lloyd across three separate ensembles over fourteen. Kendrick Scott and Walter Smith III made him the third equal name on a Blue Note record in 2023; Smith named an album after him in 2024. His own The Things I Am is the clearest statement of what he actually hears, and it is a Virgin Islands record made by a New York rhythm section.