Charles Lloyd was born on March 15, 1938, in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up among the blues, gospel and jazz of his home city. He was given his first saxophone at the age of nine and listened closely to 1940s radio broadcasts of Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. His early teachers included the pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. and the saxophonist Irvin Reason, and his closest childhood friend was the trumpeter Booker Little. As a teenager he played jazz with the saxophonist George Coleman, the pianist Harold Mabern and the saxophonist Frank Strozier, and worked as a sideman for blues artists including Bobby "Blue" Bland, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King.

In 1956 Lloyd left Memphis for Los Angeles to study music at the University of Southern California, where his teachers included the Bartók specialist Halsey Stevens. At night he played the city's jazz clubs with Ornette Coleman, Billy Higgins, Scott LaFaro, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Eric Dolphy, Bobby Hutcherson and others, and he joined Gerald Wilson's big band. In 1960 he became music director of Chico Hamilton's group, taking the place of Dolphy, who had left to join Charles Mingus. The guitarist Gábor Szabó, the bassist Albert Stinson and the trombonist George Bohanon soon joined, and Hamilton's Impulse! albums Passin' Thru and Man from Two Worlds carried music that Lloyd wrote almost entirely. In 1964 he joined the sextet of Cannonball Adderley, working alongside Nat Adderley, Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes, and he credits Adderley with shaping his development as a leader. That year he also signed with Columbia and began recording under his own name: Discovery! (1964), with pianist Don Friedman and, on half the tracks, drummer Roy Haynes, and Of Course, Of Course (1965), with Szabó, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. The two albums led DownBeat's critics to name him a New Star.

In New York in 1966 Lloyd formed the quartet that made him famous, with the pianist Keith Jarrett, the bassist Cecil McBee and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. It recorded Dream Weaver in March 1966, and its live set from the Monterey Jazz Festival that September, Forest Flower, became one of the most successful jazz albums of the mid-1960s and drew a rock audience as well as a jazz one. The group played San Francisco rock venues such as the Fillmore Auditorium on bills with Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Grateful Dead, toured the United States and Europe, and in 1967 played the Tallinn Jazz Festival in Soviet Estonia and then performed in Leningrad. DownBeat voted him Jazz Artist of the Year that year. Ron McClure later took over the bass chair, and the band's other Atlantic records of 1967 to 1969 include Love-In, Journey Within, Charles Lloyd in Europe and Soundtrack.

In the 1970s Lloyd largely withdrew from the jazz world, settling in Big Sur, California, where he took up meditation and pursued what he described as an inner spiritual journey. He still recorded, among them Moon Man (1970), Warm Waters (1971), Waves (1972) and Geeta (1973), the last made with Indian and funk players, and in those years he played on records by the Beach Boys and toured with the group. Warm Waters includes tracks recorded at Brian Wilson's home studio. He also joined Celebration, a band built from the Beach Boys' touring musicians together with Mike Love and Al Jardine. In 1981 he met the French pianist Michel Petrucciani and toured with him for the next two years, leaving the live albums Montreux 82 and A Night in Copenhagen (the second with Bobby McFerrin as a guest), before again retreating to Big Sur. A nearly fatal illness in 1986 sent him back to music, and in 1988 he formed a new quartet with the Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson.

Lloyd made his first recording for ECM in 1989, Fish Out of Water, with Stenson, bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen; the label's founder, Manfred Eicher, compared the record's spare sound to a Giacometti sculpture. A run of ECM albums followed: Notes from Big Sur (1992), The Call (1993), All My Relations (1995) and Canto (1997), the last three with drummer Billy Hart, and Voice in the Night (1999), with guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Billy Higgins. The Water Is Wide (2000) added pianist Brad Mehldau, Abercrombie, bassist Larry Grenadier and Higgins, his longtime friend, whose death in May 2001 gave weight to Hyperion with Higgins and the duo set Which Way Is East (2004), his final recordings. Lift Every Voice (2002) answered the September 11 attacks with a quintet including pianist Geri Allen, Abercrombie, bassists Marc Johnson and Grenadier, and Hart. In 2004 he began a trio with the tabla master Zakir Hussain and the drummer Eric Harland, heard on Sangam (2006). From 2007 his main group was a quartet with the pianist Jason Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers and Harland, documented on Rabo de Nube (2008, live in Basel), Mirror (2010) and the live Athens Concert (2011), co-led with the Greek singer Maria Farantouri. He and Moran also recorded the duo album Hagar's Song (recorded 2012, released 2013). He celebrated his 75th birthday in 2013 with concerts at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Kennedy Center.

Lloyd returned to Blue Note, which had released A Night in Copenhagen, in January 2015, and put out Wild Man Dance that April, a suite commissioned by the Jazztopad Festival in Wrocław, Poland, and recorded live there in 2013 with pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Gerald Cleaver. He was named an NEA Jazz Master that year, was given an honorary doctorate by the Berklee College of Music in July 2015, and was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2016. His next bands included the Marvels, with guitarists Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz, which made I Long to See You (2016), Vanished Gardens (2018, with Lucinda Williams) and Tone Poem (2021), and a quintet recorded at his 80th birthday concert on March 15, 2018, at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, released as 8: Kindred Spirits with Clayton, guitarist Julian Lage, Rogers and Harland. In 2022 he issued three Trios albums, Chapel (with Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan), Ocean (with Clayton and guitarist Anthony Wilson) and Sacred Thread (with Hussain and Lage). The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (2024), with Moran, Grenadier and drummer Brian Blade, was named DownBeat critics' album of the year, and the same poll made him Artist of the Year (he had also won that award in 2023) and elected him to DownBeat's Jazz Hall of Fame. Figure in Blue (October 2025) is a double album by a trio with Moran and the guitarist Marvin Sewell that debuted at the Lobero Theatre in March 2025, and Sangam & Friends (July 24, 2026) is built from sessions he, Hussain and Harland recorded in Mumbai in 2009, released as a tribute to Hussain, who died in 2024. Lloyd performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival on July 17, 2026. He lives in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, California, where he has been based for more than three decades according to 2023 reporting, with his wife, Dorothy Darr, who produces his records and made the films Arrows Into Infinity and Love Longing Loss.

Lloyd's tenor saxophone has a warm, accessible sound, and his flute and the Hungarian tárogató he plays occasionally widen the palette. AllMusic describes him as a free-spirited visionary who cross-pollinated jazz with folk, rock and non-Western traditions, and Wikipedia credits him with anticipating world music in compositions from the late 1950s. His own early listening was to Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington on 1940s radio, and he names Cannonball Adderley as the bandleader who helped him become one. The 1966 quartet mixed his interest in Eastern music with modal and avant-garde jazz, which suited the late-1960s audience that also heard it at rock venues, and it gave Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, then in their twenties, their first wide exposure. From the late 1980s his ECM albums pursued the opposite pole: sparse, chamber-scaled records in which, as Manfred Eicher put it, only the bones remain. His later work kept widening the circle, from the tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain and the Greek singer Maria Farantouri to the guitarist Bill Frisell and, in the 2000s, the Jason Moran quartet. DownBeat's critics named him Artist of the Year in 2023 and again in 2024, when they also inducted him into its Hall of Fame.