Michael "Spike" Wilner was born in 1966 in Manhattan, the son of a professor of hematology and a clinical social worker, and grew up in a household where his grandmother Marie Wilner painted in the Abstract Expressionist style. Her canvases would later end up on two of his own album sleeves. A television docudrama about Scott Joplin sent him to the piano as a boy, and he came to jazz through ragtime rather than through bebop: at fourteen he played "Maple Leaf Rag" at the St. Louis Ragtime Festival, which he counts as the start of his professional life. A high-school music program introduced him to the pianist Peter Martin, who pushed him toward the modern repertoire.

In 1986 Wilner enrolled in the first class of the New School for Social Research's Jazz and Contemporary Music program, then run by saxophonist Arnie Lawrence as a deliberately unstructured room where students were left to work things out with visiting masters. He studied there with Jaki Byard, Walter Davis Jr., Barry Harris and Kenny Werner, and shared the building with a cohort that included Peter Bernstein, Brad Mehldau, Roy Hargrove and Chris Potter. Byard was the decisive teacher: he told Wilner to keep playing ragtime in public rather than treat it as a childhood embarrassment, advice Wilner has said he took for the rest of his career. He later returned to school and took a Master's in piano performance from SUNY Purchase in 2007.

Wilner worked his way up through New York rooms that have mostly since closed, including the Village Gate, Visiones and the Angry Squire, and from 1995 he held a Sunday-night residency at Smalls with a co-operative band called Planet Jazz, whose personnel over the years took in Joe Magnarelli, Grant Stewart, Peter Bernstein, Neal Miner and Joe Strasser. He also toured Europe with the Artie Shaw Orchestra, the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Maynard Ferguson's Big Bop Nouveau band, and worked with Wynton Marsalis and with Duke Ellington's former vocalist Milt Grayson. His first records came out under his own name at the turn of the century: Portraits on New Jazz Renaissance, then two Spike Wilner Ensemble dates for the Barcelona label Fresh Sound New Talent, A Blues Of Many Colors (recorded February 2, 2000) and Late Night: Live At Smalls, drawn from November 2002 and January 2003 sets at the club.

The club itself is the other half of the story. Smalls had opened in 1994 as Mitch Borden's basement room at 183 West 10th Street, a no-liquor, ten-dollar space that ran until dawn and served as a proving ground for players like Kurt Rosenwinkel and Ari Hoenig, with Frank Hewitt as house pianist. Post-9/11 economics closed it in 2003. In February 2007 Wilner and his friend Lee Kostrinsky came in as Borden's partners and reopened the room with a bar, a proper sound system and two or three sets a night. Kostrinsky sold his share in 2011 and Borden retired in 2019, leaving Wilner as managing partner. In September 2014 he opened Mezzrow, a piano-led listening room a minute's walk away across Seventh Avenue, named for the clarinettist and memoirist Mezz Mezzrow. In March 2026 he opened a third venue, Jazzcultural, at 349 West 46th Street in the old Swing 46 space, with a cafe out front and a ninety-seat performance studio behind it; the name is an homage to Barry Harris's Jazz Cultural Theater of the 1980s.

Out of the clubs came a record label. Wilner founded SmallsLIVE in 2010 to issue sets taped at the club, and has produced or executive-produced roughly sixty releases in the series, among them David Kikoski's trio date from November 2008, Kevin Hays's trio, Ari Hoenig's Punkbop, Johnny O'Neal's comeback set of June 16, 2013, Duane Eubanks's quintet, and, after the label moved into partnership with Cory Weeds's Cellar Music, George Coleman and Ken Peplowski. He also runs the club's audio archive, which reaches back to 2007 and has streamed performances nightly since 2013. On April 8, 2020, with both rooms shut by the pandemic, he announced the SmallsLIVE Foundation for Jazz Art and Education, a nonprofit built to pay musicians for livestreamed sets, and Smalls became the first New York club to put live music back on a stage, with the audience at home.

His own playing kept pace with the administration. Posi-Tone put out three leader dates, 3 To Go (recorded June 4, 2007, with Ryan Kisor and Joel Frahm), the trio record La Tendresse (October 14, 2011) and Koan (September 30, 2015). SmallsLIVE issued his solo recital Solo Piano: Live At Smalls in 2010, the guitar-trio set Live At Smalls with Yotam Silberstein and Paul Gill in 2015, and the quintet date A Set Of Originals in 2017. Since 2017 his trio has recorded for Cellar: Odalisque, Aliens & Wizards (cut in Astoria in August 2020 during the shutdown), Plays Monk & Ellington with Peter Washington and Joe Farnsworth, Contrafactus and, with George Garzone guesting, The Children & The Warlock in 2025.

Wilner is that comparatively rare modern New York pianist whose line runs back through bebop to stride and ragtime rather than stopping at Bud Powell. His records mix his own writing with Joplin ("Magnetic Rag," "Elite Syncopations," "Solace"), Willie "The Lion" Smith's "Echoes Of Spring" and James P. Johnson's "Snowy Morning Blues" alongside Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, and he has arranged Bach and Beethoven for the same trio programs. Jaki Byard, himself a pianist who refused to choose a decade, is the obvious model for that range. Wilner argues the point in plain terms: jazz, as he puts it, is really quite simple, and it runs on feeling rather than on years of schooling. His originals lean on titles borrowed from Buddhist practice and from Iceberg Slim's novels ("Upasaka," "Koan," "Trick Baby," "Bodhisattva Blues"), and his touch is closer to a working club pianist's than to a conservatory soloist's: springy left hand, tunes taken at conversational tempos, a willingness to let a rag sit next to a blues in the same set.