Cedar Anthony Walton Jr. was born January 17, 1934, in Dallas, Texas. His mother, Ruth, a concert pianist, gave him his first lessons and took him to hear touring jazz musicians around the city; he later named Nat King Cole, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum as his primary pianistic models. He briefly attended Dillard University in New Orleans before transferring to the University of Denver as a composition major, where his coursework in arranging for other instruments shaped the writing he would do throughout his career. Late-night sessions around Denver put him in the same rooms as John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, and in 1955 he moved to New York City, where Birdland's manager Johnny Garry took an early interest in him. A stretch of U.S. Army service in Germany interrupted his rise, though it kept him playing, alongside Leo Wright, Don Ellis and Eddie Harris.

Back in New York, Walton made his recording debut in 1958 on Kenny Dorham's This Is the Moment! and spent the same period as the house pianist for the Jazztet, the group Benny Golson and Art Farmer co-led from 1959 to 1962. With that band he sat in on the April 1959 session that produced an alternate take of Coltrane's "Giant Steps," though he does not solo on it. His own leader debut, Cedar!, followed in 1967 on Prestige, a trio, quartet and quintet date built around Kenny Dorham and Junior Cook with Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, produced by Don Schlitten.

Walton joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in the early 1960s, arriving the same day as trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, and stayed roughly three years as the group's pianist and staff arranger. His compositions from that tenure became two of the band's signature titles: "Mosaic," recorded on Blakey's 1961 Blue Note album of the same name, and "Ugetsu," recorded on the 1963 Riverside live album Ugetsu (his original title for the tune was "Fantasy in D"; Hubbard later recorded the same piece under a third name, "Polar AC"). Through the mid and late 1960s Walton became one of Prestige's house rhythm-section pianists, recording behind Sonny Criss, Pat Martino, Eric Kloss and Charles McPherson, spending a year accompanying Abbey Lincoln, and working regularly with Lee Morgan from 1966 to 1968. He also appears on Joe Henderson's 1966 Blue Note album Mode for Joe, and on a 1972 pair of Prestige sessions with Dexter Gordon issued as two separate albums, Generation (1973) and Tangerine (1975); he also appears alongside Gordon, Percy Heath and Art Blakey on the 1980 Columbia album Gotham City.

In 1975, Walton co-founded the collective Eastern Rebellion with bassist Sam Jones and drummer Billy Higgins, a piano trio that regularly expanded into a quartet behind a rotating cast of saxophonists including George Coleman, Bob Berg and Ralph Moore, along with trombonist Curtis Fuller and, on later editions, trumpeter Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros. The group's self-titled debut appeared on Timeless in 1976, and it went on to release albums into the 1990s, becoming one of the most durable working units of Walton's career. In the same period he led the funk-oriented group Mobius, documented on the 1975 RCA album of the same name, showing a side of his writing that moved well outside hard bop. From the mid-1990s he arranged and recorded for Etta James, contributing to her 1994 album Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday, which won a Grammy Award.

Walton continued recording prolifically as a leader into his final decade, with albums including Cedar Walton at Maybeck (1992, a solo entry in Concord's Maybeck Recital Hall series), St. Thomas (1996, Astor Place, with Ron Carter and Billy Higgins as the Sweet Basil Trio), The Promise Land (2001, HighNote, with Kenny Washington on drums) and Seasoned Wood (2008, HighNote, with Jeremy Pelt on trumpet, Peter Washington on bass and Al Foster on drums). In January 2010 he was named an NEA Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, the country's highest honor in the field. Cedar Walton passed away August 19, 2013, in Brooklyn, at age 79.

Walton's playing fused Bud Powell's and Thelonious Monk's bebop vocabulary with the harmonic depth he drew from Art Tatum, producing a percussive, blues-rooted touch that made him one of the most reliable and heavily recorded pianists of the hard bop and post-bop eras. As a composer he left an unusually durable mark on the jazz repertoire: "Bolivia," "Mosaic," "Holy Land," "Mode for Joe," "Firm Roots" and "Cedar's Blues" have all become standards recorded across generations of players. He moved comfortably between settings that many pianists of his generation treated as separate worlds, from the driving big-band framework of the Jazz Messengers to the stripped-down interplay of the Eastern Rebellion trio and quartet to the electric funk of Mobius, without losing the identifiable touch and voicings that made his comping instantly recognizable behind dozens of different leaders.