Carlos Nathaniel Ward was born May 1, 1940, in Ancón, Panama, and grew up in Panama City hearing Dixieland, European classical music, and Panamanian calypso side by side. In 1953 his family moved to Seattle, Washington, where he took up the clarinet. The alto saxophone arrived almost by accident: a high-school friend, Marion Evans, gave up on the horn and left it at Ward's house. Ward kept it, played it in local rock and roll bands, and started listening hard to Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman.

He enlisted in the early 1960s and studied at the Navy School of Music, and it was his posting to Germany that turned him into a working jazz musician. He played with trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and with the young vibraphonist Karl Berger, and he met Eric Dolphy, who encouraged him to keep going. Shortly before he came home in 1965 he also met Don Cherry, who was then working with the South African pianist Dollar Brand, later known as Abdullah Ibrahim. Both meetings shaped the next thirty years of Ward's career.

Back in Seattle in September 1965, Ward sat in with John Coltrane's expanded group at the Penthouse. One of those nights, October 2, 1965, was taped by the local saxophonist and teacher Joe Brazil and sat unreleased for fifty-six years before Impulse! issued it in 2021 as A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle, with Ward on alto alongside Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Donald Garrett on basses, and Elvin Jones on drums. Coltrane brought him back that November for an engagement at New York's Village Gate, and on February 19, 1966, Ward played alto in Coltrane's enlarged group at the "Titans of the Tenor" concert at Philharmonic Hall, a lineup that also included Albert Ayler and his brother Donald, Alice Coltrane (then Alice McLeod) at the piano, Jimmy Garrison, and drummers Rashied Ali and J.C. Moses.

New York kept him busy for the rest of the decade. He worked with Sunny Murray's Swing Unit, with Marzette Watts, and with bassist Henry Grimes, who joins Ward and drummer Ed Blackwell on Karl Berger's ESP-Disk date From Now On, recorded in December 1966. Berger's Tune In followed on Milestone, cut July 30 and August 12, 1969, with Blackwell and Dave Holland. Ward's one recorded meeting with Rashied Ali came out of the same circle: he plays alto saxophone and flute on the Rashied Ali Quartet album New Directions in Modern Music, recorded live in 1971 at The East, a Black cultural center in Brooklyn, and released on Ali's own Survival Records (SR 104) in 1973, with Fred Simmons on piano and Stafford James on bass. Ward also became a regular in the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, playing on four of its records in three years: Don Cherry's Relativity Suite (recorded February 14, 1973), Roswell Rudd's Numatik Swing Band (1973), where Sirone and Charlie Haden share the bass chairs, Clifford Thornton's The Gardens of Harlem (April 4, 1974), and Grachan Moncur III's Echoes of Prayer (April 11, 1974).

The other half of his 1970s was funk. Ward joined the Brooklyn band B.T. Express as saxophonist, flutist, singer, and writer, and played on Do It ('Til You're Satisfied) (Scepter, 1974), the album whose title track became one of the decade's biggest dance records, then stayed through Non-Stop (1975), Energy to Burn (1976), Function at the Junction (1977), and Shout! (1978). He kept the jazz work running in parallel rather than trading one for the other, recording Paul Motian's ECM album Tribute in May 1974 with Charlie Haden, and joining the Carla Bley Band for Dinner Music (WATT, 1977) and Social Studies (WATT, 1981). It was the Bley band, effectively, that backed Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason on Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports, recorded in October 1979, where Ward's credit is for additional vocals rather than saxophone.

His longest partnership was with Abdullah Ibrahim. It began in Europe in November 1972, in a trio with Don Cherry documented twice within ten days: on November 3 at the Berliner Jazztage, later issued as Universal Silence, and on November 14 at Copenhagen's Café Montmartre, released in Japan in 1974 as The Third World-Underground. Ward then appeared on nearly a dozen Ibrahim records over the next seventeen years, among them the big-band African Space Program (Enja, recorded November 7, 1973), The Journey (1977), African Marketplace (Elektra, 1980), and Duke's Memories (Black & Blue). In 1983 he became a founding member of Ekaya, Ibrahim's seven-piece band, and its alto and flute voice on Ekaya (Home) (1983), Zimbabwe (1983), Water from an Ancient Well (recorded at Van Gelder's studio in October 1985), South Africa (1986), and The Mountain (1989). He and Ibrahim also recorded as a duo at Sweet Basil in New York on October 3, 1983, released as Live at Sweet Basil Vol. 1, and Ward played flute and saxophone on two Ekapa albums by the singer Sathima Bea Benjamin.

When Cecil Taylor's longtime altoist Jimmy Lyons died in 1986, Ward took the reeds chair in the Cecil Taylor Unit, touring Europe and recording Live in Bologna, Live in Vienna (November 7, 1987, in a band with violinist Leroy Jenkins and bassist William Parker), and Tzotzil/Mummers/Tzotzil (Paris, November 13, 1987) for Leo Records. The same period put him back with Don Cherry in Nu, the quintet with Ed Blackwell, Naná Vasconcelos, and Mark Helias whose Glasgow concert of October 24, 1987, surfaced much later as Live in Glasgow. Ward finally made his own leader debut at 48: Lito, recorded July 9, 1988, at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam with trumpeter Woody Shaw, bassist Walter Schmocker, and drummer Alex Deutsch, issued by Leo Records in 1989. All four pieces are his, and the record is often cited as one of the last substantial documents of Shaw, who died in 1989.

Ward's 1990s were split between other leaders' bands and his own small label. He was the alto voice in Don Pullen's African-Brazilian Connection across Kele Mou Bana (1992), Ode to Life (recorded February 1993), and Live... Again (1995), and played on Pullen's final Blue Note album Sacred Common Ground (recorded March 8 and 9, 1995). He was a member of the Ed Blackwell Project, whose two volumes, What It Is? and What It Be Like?, come from a single night at Yoshi's in Oakland on August 8, 1992, and include Ward compositions. He recorded with Frank Lowe's Saxemple on Inappropriate Choices (April 1991) and with Karl Berger again on Conversations (March 1994), a septet that also brought in James Blood Ulmer and Dave Holland. Under his own name he released three albums on his Peull Music imprint: Faces (1994), with Kirk Lightsey, Alex Blake, and Pheeroan akLaff; Live at the Bug & Other Sweets (1995), with William Parker and akLaff; and Set for 2 Don's Vol. 1 (1999), music written for Don Cherry and Don Pullen, both of whom had died in the intervening years.

Ward passed away on January 16, 2026, in Brooklyn, at 85.

Ward built his reputation on a singing, vocalized alto tone and a compositional habit of writing simple, folkloric melodies that could carry a lot of improvisational weight, an approach traceable to the calypso and Panamanian street music he grew up with as much as to the Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman records he found in Seattle. He was unusually mobile across idioms without sounding like a session player in any of them: the same musician anchored Cecil Taylor's densest free-jazz units, played the melodic lead in Abdullah Ibrahim's Cape Jazz band Ekaya, and cut a top-ten dance single with B.T. Express. His own tunes stayed in circulation long after he wrote them, several of them explicit dedications: "First Love" to Monk, "Pettiford Bridge" to bassist Oscar Pettiford, and the whole of Set for 2 Don's to Don Cherry and Don Pullen. As a leader he recorded sparingly, four commercially issued albums between 1989 and 1999, and the critical consensus around Lito (a four-and-a-half-star AllMusic review, and praise in The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings for his writing) suggests the leader catalog is thinner than his playing warranted.