Chad Taylor was born March 19, 1973, in Tempe, Arizona, into a musical household — his father, an aspiring concert pianist, exposed him early to Duke Ellington, Bach, Thelonious Monk, and Mozart, and Taylor started guitar lessons at eight. At ten, following his parents' separation, he relocated with his mother and sister to Chicago, a move he has described as transformational: from a comparatively homogeneous community into the inner city and its African American culture and music. He began snare drum studies soon after arriving.

Taylor came up fast on Chicago's South and North Side scenes. He took ensemble classes at the Bloom School of Jazz starting in 1988, attended Lane Tech College Prep High School (graduating 1991), and was performing professionally around the city by sixteen, encouraged early on by bassist Dennis Carrol and playing with Lin Holiday, a young Rob Mazurek, Allen Batts, and John Brumbach. Out of high school he won a full scholarship to Millikin University to study classical guitar, but the fit didn't last: hearing Henry Threadgill's group Air was a turning point, and after a year of classical-guitar performance anxiety he pivoted decisively toward jazz drumming. He transferred to the School of Jazz at The New School in New York City, where — among classmates who reportedly included a young Avishai Cohen, Brad Mehldau, and Roy Hargrove — he studied privately with drummers Horace Arnold, Chico Hamilton, whose own long career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, Joe Chambers, Lewis Nash, and Pheeroan akLaff.

Taylor moved back to Chicago in the mid-1990s and shared an apartment with bassist Joshua Abrams, who introduced him to saxophonist Fred Anderson and multi-instrumentalist David Boykin; Taylor became a Velvet Lounge regular in Anderson's working groups through the 2000s and has cited Anderson as a mentor figure. He co-founded the Sticks and Stones collective with Abrams and violinist/saxophonist Matana Roberts, running weekly jam sessions, and reconnected with Mazurek, who had begun inviting players to weekly composers' workshops at the Chicago club The Green Mill under the banner "Chicago Underground." With guitarist Jeff Parker also in the fold, that workshop grew into a genuine institution: the Chicago Underground Orchestra's 1998 debut Playground (Delmark) gave way to a rotating cast of Duo, Trio, Quartet, and Orchestra configurations co-led by Taylor and Mazurek that has now run close to three decades, across labels including Thrill Jockey, Delmark, Northern Spy, and Clean Feed — 12° Of Freedom (1998), Possible Cube (1999), Flamethrower (2000), Chicago Underground Quartet (2001), In Praise Of Shadows (2006), Chronicle (2007), Boca Negra (2010), Age Of Energy (2012), Locus (2014), and 2025's Hyperglyph among the results. Taylor is, by any reasonable account, best known as Mazurek's co-founding partner in that project.

He relocated to New York around 2001, where bassist Tom Abbs introduced him to pianist and homemade-instrument builder Cooper-Moore, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — a relationship Taylor has called something close to a finishing school for improvisation. The two formed the trio Triptych Myth with Abbs (self-titled, 2004, Hopscotch Records; The Beautiful, 2005, AUM Fidelity, with liner notes from William Parker) and, separately, Digital Primitives with saxophonist/bass clarinetist Assif Tsahar (self-titled, 2007; Hum Crackle & Pop, 2009, both Hopscotch Records). New York also opened up a wide sideman career that has rarely slowed since: guitarist Marc Ribot's Albert Ayler tribute project Spiritual Unity (2005, Pi Recordings, with Henry Grimes and trumpeter Roy Campbell), Jeff Parker's own dates (Like-coping, 2003; The Relatives, 2005; Slight Freedom, 2016), bassist Eric Revis's quartet across four albums between 2014 and 2020, saxophonist Avram Fefer's groups, indie-rock crossovers with Stereolab (Sound-Dust, 2001), Tortoise (A Lazarus Taxon, 2006), Sam Prekop, and Iron & Wine (touring 2009–2012; drums on 2011's Kiss Each Other Clean), and, in the 2010s and 2020s, an especially close partnership with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis both as a duo and inside Lewis's Quartet and Red Lily Quintet, plus late-career work with trumpeter Jaimie Branch's Fly or Die band from its 2017 International Anthem debut.

Taylor's own catalog as a named leader is smaller than the sheer volume of his sideman and collective work would suggest — by his own account, and confirmed by Discogs and Spotify data, he has favored co-led and collective billing over solo leader credits for most of his career. His recorded debut, Titration (2003, Delmark), was billed to the collective Active Ingredients (with saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc, trombonist Steve Swell, and bassist Tom Abbs), recorded in July 2002. Circle Down (2009, 482 Music), a trio with pianist Angelica Sanchez and bassist Chris Lightcap recorded at Systems Two in Brooklyn, was reviewed by AllMusic's Michael G. Nastos as "a beautiful statement of modern jazz music... one for the ages." In 2018 he released a rare true-solo record, Myths and Morals (ears&eyes Records), built from drums, mbira, and looped electronics — a technique Taylor has developed since studying mbira with Zimbabwean master Garikayi Tirikoti beginning in 2010, and one that now runs through much of his own writing. The James Brandon Lewis duo produced two studio-adjacent statements, Radiant Imprints (2018) and Live in Willisau (2020, Intakt), and 2019 saw the formation of the Chad Taylor Trio with tenor saxophonist Brian Settles and pianist Neil Podgurski, whose debut The Daily Biological (2020, Cuneiform) was selected in NPR's 2020 jazz critics poll and named Record of the Year by critic Neil Tesser; the trio followed it with The Reel (2022, Astral Spirits). Taylor also recorded duo projects with guitarist Chris Schlarb (Time No Changes, 2021) and visual artist Rosa Barba (In A Perpetual Now Of Instantaneous Visibility, 2021, recorded live at the Park Avenue Armory by invitation of Jason Moran), a trio with pianist John Blum and saxophonist David Murray (The Recursive Tree, 2023, Relative Pitch), a second duo album with Angelica Sanchez (A Monster Is Just An Animal You Haven't Met Yet, 2024, Intakt), and, in 2025, his first quintet record, Smoke Shifter (Otherly Love Records), with trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson and vibraphonist Victor Vieira-Branco.

Alongside performing, Taylor built out a scholarly career: an MFA in Jazz History and Research from Rutgers University (2011–2015), where his thesis, directed by Lewis Porter, examined form and process in Henry Threadgill's Zooid, followed by adjunct teaching in music theory, jazz history, and music appreciation, including at Berkeley College in New York. He moved to Philadelphia in 2016. His playing and writing have drawn sustained critical recognition in the 2020s: a Rising Star nod for percussion in DownBeat's 2020 Critics Poll (repeated in 2021), first place in El Intruso's 2020 international critics' poll for percussion, and a tie with Christian McBride for Straight No Chaser magazine's 2020 Player of the Year. In 2024, he was selected to lead the University of Pittsburgh's Jazz Studies Program, holding the university's William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies — a position previously held by Nathan Davis, Geri Allen, and Nicole Mitchell.

Taylor names Ed Blackwell and Steve McCall among his foundational drumming influences, and his own account of his playing rejects the repetitive vamps common to much free-jazz drumming in favor of constant development — textures and colors that build and recede rather than a fixed pulse played harder or softer. His classical guitar training, which he has described as full of liberties he wasn't allowed to take, seems to have sharpened rather than dulled his appetite for the freedom of improvised music once he crossed over. Mbira playing, taken up in 2010 under Zimbabwean teacher Garikayi Tirikoti, has become a signature extension of his kit work, often paired with delayed electronic looping to build one-man ensembles on records like Myths and Morals and to color duo and trio dates from Radiant Imprints through Deep In The Earth High In The Sky. Cooper-Moore's influence runs in a different direction: Taylor has called their partnership close to a finishing school for group improvisation, and the deep, unhurried interplay of Triptych Myth and Digital Primitives shows it. Reviewers of his 2018 solo record praised his ability to "make the kit sing" with a compositional, rather than purely technical, sensibility — a fair summary of an approach shaped as much by three decades inside the Chicago Underground partnership with Rob Mazurek as by any individual teacher.