Savannah Harris grew up in Oakland, California, in a house where both parents worked in music. Her father, the drummer Fred Harris, and her stepfather, the trumpeter Khalil Shaheed, were her first teachers. Shaheed had founded Oaktown Jazz Workshops in 1994, an after-school program built to replace the music classes the Oakland public schools had cut, and Harris came up inside it: a San Francisco Chronicle photographer caught her at sixteen playing drums at an Oaktown rehearsal on April 7, 2010. She had started on the kit at two. The Bay Area of the 1990s and early 2000s gave her funk, blues, Afro-Cuban and West African music alongside the jazz, and the shared rhythmic language between those idioms is the thing she has said she was drawn to as a child. The records that ran constantly at home were Donny Hathaway, Buddy Miles, John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Ornette Coleman, Baaba Maal, Youssou N'Dour, Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, Dexter Gordon and Lee Morgan.

She quit the drums at around seventeen and spent two years expecting a different career. What brought her back was Washington, DC. Harris enrolled at Howard University to study journalism, joined the Howard University Jazz Ensemble, and was pulled into the city's jazz scene, which she credits with restoring her appetite for the instrument. She wrote the Hilltop's "Femiknowledge" column and contributed features, interviews and live reviews to CapitalBop through 2015, including a long conversation with Jack DeJohnette and a profile of the Washington drummer Nasar Abadey. In 2014 she joined the faculty of NJPAC's All-Female Jazz Residency. She also performed during those years with Geri Allen and Marcus Belgrave, and her first New York gig came through Allen, in a band with Linda May Han Oh and Tia Fuller at The Stone.

Harris moved to New York as soon as the journalism degree was finished, into a community of drummers who put her on bandstands: Justin Brown, Kendrick Scott, Justin Tyson and Jeff "Tain" Watts all called her out to gigs in those first years. She took a master's in jazz performance at the Manhattan School of Music, was a mentee of the bassist Harish Raghavan in The Jazz Gallery's Mentoring Series, and won the Harlem Stage Emerging Artist Award in 2019. Modern Drummer put her in its January 2021 issue twice, once as a featured artist and once as a contributing writer. In October 2021 she premiered a commissioned solo piece, "With Inner Sound, Truth," at Issue Project Room, written as a tribute to the composer Ruth Anderson.

Her recorded work runs across a much wider field than a straight-ahead jazz drummer's normally does. She is on the trombonist Shannon Gunn's What It Takes (2017), the Samora Pinderhughes soundtrack single Concussion Protocol (2018), one track of Kate Davis's Trophy (2020) and three sides of Standing On The Corner's G-E-T-O-U-T!! The Ghetto (2020). She is the drummer on the first album by Peter Evans's quartet Being & Becoming (2020), alongside Joel Ross and Nick Jozwiak, and on Maria Grand's Reciprocity (2021). Roberto Carlos Lange kept calling her back for the Helado Negro albums Far In (2021) and Phasor (2024). With the Swedish bassist Petter Eldh she has cut the single Bergman Ll (2022) and appeared on both volumes of his Projekt Drums, a series that hands each track to a different drummer, sharing the 2025 volume with Eric Harland, James Maddren and Richard Spaven. She plays drums and sings on Mali Obomsawin's Sweet Tooth (2022).

Two of those threads became long-running bands. Harris has been the drummer in the bassist Or Bareket's quartet since Sahar (Enja, May 6, 2022), where she is credited on drums and percussion with no restriction to particular tracks, and she is on Yōm (Enja, October 23, 2024), recorded at Firehouse 12 in New Haven on September 20 and 21, 2024 and billed on Discogs to the Or Bareket Quartet rather than to Bareket alone. Both records were produced by Joel Ross; Ross also shares the arranging credit on Yōm with Harris, Bareket, Godwin Louis and Jeremy Corren, the four of them credited together rather than as individual arrangers. The other thread is ØKSE, the collective quartet she formed with the Danish saxophonist Mette Rasmussen after the two met in 2022, expanded with Petter Eldh and the Haitian turntablist and sound designer Val Jeanty. Its self-titled debut came out on the hip hop label Backwoodz Studioz in 2024, with the rappers ELUCID, billy woods, Maassai and Cavalier on four of its eight tracks, and it won Album of the Year, international, at the Deutscher Jazzpreis on June 13, 2025.

Harris has two co-billed trio records on Intakt: Beyond Dragons (2023) with the alto saxophonist Angelika Niescier and the cellist Tomeka Reid, cut in a single day at Kingsize Sound Labs in Chicago on March 17, 2023, and Perpetual Void (2024), the pianist Marta Sánchez's trio with Chris Tordini on bass. She led her own quartet at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem in November 2022, with Bareket on bass, Mike King on piano and Nick Pennington on guitar, on a bill curated by Joel Ross as one of the museum's first Jazz Is: Now Curatorial Fellows. Her first release billed to her name alone was "CHILD" (SIRENA, June 6, 2024), an original written for an Apple Music Juneteenth commission. She now tours and records with Christian McBride's band Ursa Major, works with Cécile McLorin Salvant and Kenny Barron, and serves as music director for the rapper MIKE. All Together Now, a duo album with the alto saxophonist Nicole McCabe recorded across Los Angeles and Brooklyn over two months in the summer of 2025, is due from Sudden Quarterly on September 18, 2026.

Harris describes what she plays for as the grease, the thing that lets a band's centre hold, and the description fits: she is a groove drummer first, with a heavy backbeat feel carried into contexts that do not obviously ask for one, and a bebop vocabulary underneath it that surfaces in her phrasing rather than in her time. The Oakland upbringing is audible in the way she treats funk, Afro-Cuban and West African rhythm as one continuous language rather than as separate styles to be quoted, and it is what makes her equally plausible behind Kenny Barron and behind a rapper. Elvin Jones and Tony Williams were the drummers on the records her parents played; the pieces she names as the ones that reshaped her are Duke Ellington's "Single Petal of a Rose," John Coltrane's "Acknowledgement," and the "Body and Soul" from the Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders Live in Seattle recording. Critics writing about the Intakt trio dates have picked out the same quality her bandleaders hire her for, an ability to hold a free or through-composed structure together without flattening it into time-keeping. Terri Lyne Carrington has been among the musicians recommending her to other bandleaders.