Rick Rosato was born in Montreal in 1988 and started working the city's jazz rooms at eighteen. His first recording came out of that scene: Morphology, by the Franco Proietti Morph-tet, a trio with Proietti on alto saxophone, flute and keyboards and Marc Béland on drums, issued on the Montreal label Bongo Beat Records. He had already left for New York by the time it appeared, having moved there in 2007 to enroll at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he studied with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Ari Hoenig and graduated in 2010. The classmates and near-contemporaries he met there, among them saxophonist Ben van Gelder, drummer Craig Weinrib and vibraphonist Peter Schlamb, became the core of his working life for the next decade.

In 2010 he went back to Montreal to lead a three-month artist series at the Upstairs Jazz Bar and Grill, booking a different band each time. One of them was a quintet with Aaron Parks on piano, Weinrib, Schlamb and Ben van Gelder; another was the piano trio he had been playing in with drummer Colin Stranahan and pianist Glenn Zaleski. That trio became a standing co-led group billed by all three surnames, and it recorded three albums for Capri Records: Anticipation (2011), Limitless (cut in New York on July 18, 2012 and released in 2013), and Live at Jazz Standard, taped over two nights at the Manhattan club on August 7 and 8, 2018 and released in September 2019. Rosato writes for the group as well as anchoring it, contributing "Migrations," "Vio" and "Rock Song" to Limitless and "Waltz for MD" to the live album. In 2014 the trio took the Galaxie Jazz Award for best composition at the TD Jazz Awards during the Montreal International Jazz Festival, and that same year he was a featured artist and educator at the Thai International Jazz Conference.

Through the 2010s he built one of the busier sideman ledgers in Brooklyn. He held the bass chair on all three of Ben van Gelder's leader records, Frame of Reference (2011), Reprise (Pirouet, 2013, with Mark Turner guesting on two tracks) and Among Verticals (2016), and on Gideon van Gelder's Perpetual, recorded at Systems Two in Brooklyn in November 2009. He played on both of guitarist Rafał Sarnecki's quintet albums, Cat's Dream (2014) and Climbing Trees (2018), reuniting the trio's rhythm section behind Sarnecki, and on Jonathan Kreisberg's Wave Upon Wave (2014) alongside Will Vinson and Kevin Hays. He was the bassist in Marta Sánchez's quintet for Danza Imposible (2017) and El Rayo de Luz (2019), and in saxophonist Roxy Coss's quintet across four consecutive albums between 2017 and 2022. He also appears on Will Vinson's Four Forty One (Whirlwind, 2020), a record that rotates its rhythm section from track to track; Rosato plays the two cuts recorded with Fred Hersch and drummer Jochen Rückert, Thelonious Monk's "Work" and Vinson's "KW," written for Kenny Wheeler.

His longest association with a single bandleader is with guitarist Gilad Hekselman. Hekselman's Ask for Chaos (Motéma and Hexophonic Music, September 2018) splits its program between two bands, and Rosato is the bassist in one of them, the gHEX Trio, with drummer Jonathan Pinson; the trio takes "Milton," "Little Song for You" and "Do Re Mi Fa Sol." The same two groups returned for the six-track Further Chaos EP in 2019, where the gHEX Trio plays "Toe Stepping Waltz," Jaco Pastorius's "Teen Town" and Matti Caspi's "A Part of the View." A second major chair arrived in 2022, when vibraphonist Joel Ross put him at the bottom of the octet on The Parable of the Poet (Blue Note, April 2022), a suite of seven pieces on which Rosato plays throughout and shares the writing credit on "Guilt." He was still touring that music the following summer, playing Kongsberg Jazzfestival with Ross in July 2023.

The following year he was the fourth member of trumpeter Itamar Borochov's quartet for Arba (Greenleaf Music, September 2023), recorded at Big Orange Sheep in Brooklyn on April 13 and 14, 2022 with Rob Clearfield on piano, Rhodes and B3 organ and Jay Sawyer on drums, produced by Matt Pierson with Dave Douglas as executive producer. Rosato plays double bass on all nine tracks; the leader's brother Avri Borochov adds oud to "Ya Sahbi." Other leader dates from the same years put him with vibraphonist Simon Moullier on Elements of Light (Candid, 2024), with saxophonist Matt Marantz's trio on Sonoran (2023), with Nicholas Brust and Lage Lund on Daybreak (2023), and in a co-billed saxophone trio with Tobias Meinhart and Jesse Simpson for the mini-album Sunset Park (2024), cut in the same Brooklyn studio as Arba.

His own record arrived in the middle of all this. Homage, self-released on October 14, 2022, is a solo double bass album with no overdubs, taped at Bunker Studios in Brooklyn in September 2021 by John Davis. Its eight pieces run about twenty-three minutes and set one Rosato original beside three songs by Skip James, one each by Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt, Thelonious Monk's "Crepuscule with Nellie" and Elvin Jones's "Elvin's Guitar Blues." The project began during the 2020 lockdown, when Rosato started transcribing Delta blues records he was hearing on WKCR's Saturday morning blues programming and adapting them for the instrument, using alternate tunings (one of them derived from Skip James's own guitar tuning) and prepared-bass devices, muting the strings and laying objects across them to get a drier, more percussive resonance.

He was already working with alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins by 2022, and he holds the bass chair in the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet with pianist Micah Thomas and drummer Kweku Sumbry. He plays on Blues Blood (Blue Note, October 11, 2024), Wilkins's third album for the label and his first with singers, co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello and built around vocalists Ganavya, June McDoom and Yaw Agyeman with guests including Cécile McLorin Salvant; the record was nominated for Best Alternative Jazz Album at the 2026 Grammy Awards. He toured that band through 2024 and into 2025, playing the Village Vanguard, Blue Note Tokyo, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Brussels Jazz Festival. He continues to live and work in Brooklyn, and his most recent release is guitarist Alex Goodman's Trio, After All (2026), a program of Brazilian songs, Brahms and standards with Rosato and drummer Mark Ferber.

Rosato is valued first as a foundation player: a big, dry, centered sound, a walking line with real forward pull, and the willingness to stay out of the way of dense music. That is why he keeps turning up in bands that are otherwise crowded, from Joel Ross's octet to Immanuel Wilkins's vocal-driven Blues Blood, where reviewers singled out the core trio of Micah Thomas, Rosato and Kweku Sumbry as playing at its best while the singers carried the identity of the record. Reviews of the Stranahan/Zaleski/Rosato trio describe him locking with Colin Stranahan under Glenn Zaleski's writing in "a flurry" of time displacement and metric modulation, and he is a working composer inside that group rather than only its bassist. What separates him from a generation of similarly capable New York bass players is Homage, which reframed his whole approach around the blues. Textura credited the record's "advanced facility" while noting that Rosato consistently subordinates technique to the song, and Rosato himself has argued that blues awareness sits underneath any real improviser regardless of the repertoire in front of them. The two players he names as his teachers, Larry Grenadier and Ari Hoenig, point at the two halves of what he does: Grenadier is the bassist whose solo work established that the instrument can carry a program alone, and Hoenig is a drummer built around rhythmic displacement, which is the language the Stranahan/Zaleski/Rosato trio works in.