Arnold Lawrence Finkelstein was born July 10, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York. He started on clarinet before switching to saxophone, and by twelve he was already playing professionally in the Catskills. At seventeen he was sitting in on Birdland's "Jazz Unlimited" series, on at least one bill that also featured John Coltrane. Through the 1960s he built a working New York career as a leader and first-call sideman, recording his first albums as a leader for producer Enoch Light's Project 3 label: You're Gonna Hear From Me (1967) and Look Toward A Dream (1968), the latter with guitarist Larry Coryell, drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Richard Davis. He made his first recordings with drummer Chico Hamilton in 1966, and in 1970 he appeared on Inside An Hour Glass, a collective session on Herbie Mann's Embryo label that also featured his son, saxophonist Erik Lawrence, then a teenager.

Lawrence spent five years, 1967 to 1972, as a featured soloist on The Tonight Show's band under Doc Severinsen, putting his sound in front of a nightly national television audience. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s he kept a wide-ranging sideman book: reeds in the section of Clark Terry's Big Bad Band, documented live at the 1974 Wichita Jazz Festival alongside Jimmy Heath and Phil Woods in the same reed section; a stint with Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1974; saxophone and flute on singer Cissy Houston's 1977 self-titled Private Stock album; a 1978-79 touring stretch backing Liza Minnelli; and session work with bandleader Louie Bellson in the early 1980s. His own leader dates from the period include Renewal (1982, Palo Alto), a quartet record with drummers Billy Hart and Chico Hamilton and pianist Hilton Ruiz, and Arnie Lawrence and Treasure Island (1983, Doctor Jazz), a genre-crossing session with Tom Harrell on trumpet, tabla player Badal Roy, and liner notes by critic Leonard Feather.

In 1986 Lawrence largely set aside touring and recording to co-found the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in Manhattan, pairing working musicians with students in a conservatory built around the music's own practice rather than a conventional academic model. Over the next decade his students there included Roy Hargrove, Brad Mehldau, Peter Bernstein, organist Larry Goldings, saxophonist Jay Rodriguez, and harmonica player John Popper, who went on to front the jam band Blues Traveler. Lawrence stayed close to that circle after Popper's band broke through: he guests on soprano saxophone, credited under the tongue-in-cheek name "Master Arnie Lawrence D.M.F.," on track four of Blues Traveler's 1990 self-titled debut album for A&M.

In 1997 Lawrence relocated to Jerusalem and, with a building offered by the city's Department of Culture, founded the International Center for Creative Music, a school that deliberately brought together Jewish and Arab students around jazz. He also opened a small club, Arnie's Jazz Underground. Among the young Israeli musicians he found and encouraged there was a teenage saxophonist named Shauli Einav, whom Lawrence discovered playing in 1998, roughly three years into Einav's time on the horn; Einav went on to a recording career of his own, profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com. Lawrence remained in Jerusalem, teaching, until he passed away there of lung and liver cancer on April 22, 2005, at age 66.

Lawrence came up through bebop and spent his career moving fluidly between big-band section work, small-group jazz, and the kind of high-volume studio and touring sideman work that put him behind Doc Severinsen, Cissy Houston, and Liza Minnelli as easily as behind Clark Terry or his own quartet. That range, rather than a single signature style, is what defined his playing life. His most consequential legacy is institutional rather than recorded: as a co-founder of the New School's jazz program he helped build a teaching model organized around bandstand practice, and he carried that same instinct to Jerusalem, where the International Center for Creative Music used jazz specifically as a point of contact between Jewish and Arab students during a tense period in the city's history.