Rufus L. Reid was born on February 10, 1944 in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in Sacramento, California. His first instrument was the trumpet, which he played through junior high and at Sacramento High School, and it was as a trumpeter that he entered the United States Air Force after graduating. The double bass took hold during his service, and by the time he was discharged he had decided to change instruments entirely. He studied first in Seattle with James Harnett of the Seattle Symphony, then enrolled at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where his teachers were Warren Benfield and Joseph Guastefeste, both members of the Chicago Symphony. He graduated in 1971 with a bachelor of music degree, a performance major on double bass. That classical grounding, taken up in his twenties rather than in childhood, is the reason the bass literature became a lifelong preoccupation for him rather than a background skill.

He was working professionally in Chicago before he finished the degree. Between roughly 1970 and 1976 he played behind Kenny Dorham, Sonny Stitt, James Moody, Milt Jackson, Curtis Fuller and Dizzy Gillespie as they passed through the city. His earliest widely circulated recording comes from that period: a live tenor battle at the North Park Hotel on July 26, 1970, issued by Prestige in 1971 as The Chase! under the joint names of Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon, on which Reid plays two of the four tracks. He then spent five years in Eddie Harris's band, recording a string of Atlantic albums including Instant Death (1972), Excursions (1973), Is It In (1974) and That Is Why You're Overweight (1976). It was also in Chicago, at thirty, that he wrote and published the book that made his name outside the bandstand: The Evolving Bassist (Myriad Limited, 1974), which has been in print for more than fifty years and is still the standard method text for jazz double bass.

Reid moved to New York in 1976, and the next three years put him at the center of the city's rhythm sections. Dexter Gordon, returning to the United States after fourteen years in Denmark, picked Reid as his bassist, and Reid played the whole of that comeback: Sophisticated Giant (Columbia, 1977), an eleven-piece date arranged by Slide Hampton with Woody Shaw, Frank Wess and Bobby Hutcherson in the band; Manhattan Symphonie (1978); Great Encounters (1979); and the Keystone Korner tapes from 1978 and 1979 that Blue Note later issued as Nights At The Keystone. In the same stretch he took the bass chair in the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Orchestra, and appeared on the small-group offshoot record The Thad Jones Mel Lewis Quartet (Artists House, 1978) with Harold Danko at the piano. He stayed with the band after Thad Jones left it, playing on Bob Brookmeyer: Composer & Arranger (Gryphon, 1980), by then billed as Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra.

Through the 1980s and 1990s he was one of the most frequently called bassists in American jazz, and the range of the work is the striking part. He recorded two albums with Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition for ECM, Inflation Blues (1983) and Album Album (1984), the latter one of the few dates where he is credited on electric bass alongside acoustic. He made two Soul Note and Blue Note records with Andrew Hill, Shades (1987) and Eternal Spirit (1989), the second cut direct to two-track at Van Gelder's studio with Greg Osby and Bobby Hutcherson. He was in Stan Getz's late quartet with Kenny Barron and Victor Lewis, documented on the Café Montmartre tapes from July 1987 that became Anniversary! (1989) and Serenity (1991). He played duo with Kenny Burrell on A La Carte, recorded live at Village West in 1983 with no rhythm section at all, and trio with Burrell and Ben Riley on Listen To The Dawn. He also worked with Lee Konitz, Art Farmer, J.J. Johnson, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Jimmy Heath, Frank Foster, Toots Thielemans, Steve Turre and Nancy Wilson. Alongside all of it he built his own catalog, beginning with Perpetual Stroll (Theresa) in 1981 and continuing with Seven Minds (1985) and Corridor To The Limits (1989) for Sunnyside, and from 1991 to 1998 he co-led the quintet TanaReid with drummer Akira Tana across five albums for Concord, Paddle Wheel and Evidence.

Teaching ran in parallel with the playing for the whole of that period, and it is the half of his career that reshaped the field. With Dr. Martin Krivin, Reid built the Jazz Studies and Performance program at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey, which offered the first academically accredited bachelor of music in jazz studies in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area. He directed it for twenty years, stepping down in 1999, and is now Professor Emeritus there. Two of his own albums, Seven Minds and Corridor To The Limits, were recorded in the college's hall. He has also taught at the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshops and the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and served on the faculty of the Milt Hinton Institute for Studio Bass and at the Richard Davis Foundation's annual bass conference. Recognition for that side of the work arrived steadily: the International Association for Jazz Education's Humanitarian Award in 1997, Bass Player magazine's Jazz Educator Achievement Award in 1998, and the International Society of Bassists' Distinguished Achievement Award in 2001.

Leaving the directorship freed him to compose, and the second half of his catalog is the result. The Out Front trio, with pianist Steve Allee and the Brazilian drummer Duduka Da Fonseca, took its name from the 2010 Motéma album and expanded to a sextet for Hues Of A Different Blue the following year. Then came the piece he is likeliest to be remembered for as a writer. Quiet Pride: The Elizabeth Catlett Project, recorded in September 2012 and released by Motéma in 2014, is a five-movement suite for a twenty-piece ensemble, each movement written to a specific sculpture by the American artist Elizabeth Catlett, with Dennis Mackrel conducting and Charenee Wade singing. It drew two nominations at the 57th Grammy Awards in 2015, for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album and, for the opening movement "Recognition," Best Instrumental Composition. The composing awards had accumulated around it: a Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in 2005, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Composition Competition award and an ASCAP and IAJE Billy Strayhorn commission in 2006, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in music composition in 2008, a MacDowell residency, and the Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Award for "Skies Over Emilia." His recent records have moved between chamber settings and duo: Terrestrial Dance (2017) with the Sirius String Quartet and Always In The Moment (2020) with pianist Sullivan Fortner, both vinyl-only releases for the subscription label Newvelle, which Sunnyside later remastered and expanded as Celebration (2022) and It's The Nights I Like (2024). Reid lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, and plays a Josef Rieger double bass built around 1805.

Reid's reputation rests on time, tone and the quality of his note choices rather than on virtuoso display, which is what made him the first call for bandleaders who needed a bass line to hold an entire ensemble in place: Dexter Gordon on his return from Europe, Stan Getz in his last quartet, the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Orchestra, Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition, Andrew Hill. The classical training he came to as an adult, with two Chicago Symphony bassists and a Seattle Symphony principal, gave him an arco technique and an intonation standard that were not universal among his hard-bop contemporaries, and he applies both to jazz repertoire without treating them as a separate discipline. That analytical bent is also what produced The Evolving Bassist, a book that arguably shaped more American bassists than any single record he played on, and which set the template for the jazz pedagogy that his William Paterson program then institutionalized. His writing has grown more ambitious as the playing career lengthened: Quiet Pride is a large-ensemble suite built on the sculptures of Elizabeth Catlett, and the Newvelle records place his trio alongside a string quartet, both far from the postbop quartet vocabulary he spent the 1970s and 1980s perfecting.