Chuck Redd was born on September 10, 1958 and grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, just over the District line from Washington. Neither of his parents played, but both loved music and the house was full of it, and both came from Virginia, where a set of his father's cousins lived in the same small town Charlie Byrd came from. Byrd's records were part of the furniture. Redd heard Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich as a boy and settled the question of what he wanted to do; he began snare drum lessons at about ten with John Richardson at Dale Music. The second instrument arrived by accident. At Montgomery Blair High School, when he was sixteen or seventeen, a teacher named Deborah Lowry played a Milt Jackson record in a social studies class. Redd has described the reaction as visceral and immediate: he had to get to the band room and play the vibes. He had already heard Gary Burton and Lionel Hampton, but it was Jackson who changed the direction of his life. His younger brother Robert became a pianist, later a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and the two have recorded together repeatedly.

A short stretch at Montgomery College put him in front of the pianist, composer and arranger Bill Potts, who became his mentor and, in effect, his agent. Potts introduced him to Ira Sabin, the founder of Jazz Times, and to the whole Washington jazz community, and took him on his first trip to New York to hear the music at first hand. At eighteen, in 1976, Redd sat in with Al Cohn at the Manassas Jazz Festival as the youngest musician on that year's bill. Meanwhile a club called the New Showboat had opened in the basement of the Villa Rosa restaurant in Silver Spring, a few minutes from his house. Buddy Rich played the opening and Redd bought ticket number 001. For the two years it lasted, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, the Woody Herman band, Joao Gilberto and the Basie band all came through, and the owners kept a front table and an orange soda for the teenager who never missed a night. Byrd played there too, and on Potts's recommendation began asking Redd to sit in on drums.

About eighteen months later Byrd asked him to sub for one night at the Maryland Inn in Annapolis. Three or four months after that, with Byrd's regular drummer gone, he asked him to join the trio outright. Redd was twenty-one; the year was 1980, and the first road trip was to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, followed by Australia. He stayed in the Charlie Byrd Trio for nineteen years, until Byrd's death in December 1999. The same year he joined, Byrd brought him into the Great Guitars, the three-guitar front line Byrd shared with Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis, which put a twenty-one-year-old behind three of the most experienced guitarists in the music. Kessel became the second of his mentors and hired him for a recital at the White House during a state dinner in the East Room in early 1980, in the last weeks of Jimmy Carter's presidency. The paper trail starts almost at once: Brazilville with Byrd in 1981, Latin Odyssey with Laurindo Almeida cut at Coast Recorders in San Francisco in December 1982, and the Great Guitars taped live at Charlie's Georgetown in August 1982.

Byrd also handed him the Brazilian repertoire. When Redd said he wanted to learn bossa nova and would buy all of Byrd's records, Byrd told him not to bother with those and turned up the next night with an armful of albums brought back from Brazil: Hermeto Pascoal, Airto Moreira, Tania Maria. Redd put them all on cassette. The Concord Picante dates with Almeida and Byrd through the 1980s came out of that education, and so did a friendship with the Brazilian drummer Duduka da Fonseca, whom he met while playing opposite him at the Blue Note with Monty Alexander. Thirty years later he was still working the same seam, playing drums on Nate Najar's Byrd tributes Blues for Night People (2012) and Jazz Samba Pra Sempre (2022).

The Byrd job kept generating others. Redd was the one who suggested Ken Peplowski when Byrd wanted a horn for a bossa nova record, which produced The Bossa Nova Years in 1991 and began a partnership that has run for more than thirty years across Concord, Arbors and the Peplowski big band. Peplowski returned the favour by recommending him to Mel Tormé, and from 1991 to 1996 Redd was the featured vibraphonist in the Mel Tormé All-Star Jazz Quintet, including concerts at Carnegie Hall. Herb Ellis introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie, who met him at a hotel in Geneva and started teaching him "Salt Peanuts" on the spot, then hired him to sub in the quintet on a trip to Africa for the Namibian independence celebration. In the summer of 1986 Monty Alexander put him in a band with Ray Brown and Ellis for two concerts, which Redd, then twenty-seven, calls a life-changing two days. Gunther Schuller brought him into the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, where he stayed for fifteen years, and he was artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian Jazz Café in Washington from 2004 to 2008. Twenty-five European tours and six tours of Japan followed, with the Barney Kessel Trio, Peplowski, Terry Gibbs and Conte Candoli.

His own records started late and stayed few. Stomp, Look & Listen, cut at the Power Station in New York on February 26 and 27, 1996, was the first, and he plays only vibes on it, with Byrd, Tommy Flanagan, Peplowski and his brother Robert. All This and Heaven Too (Arbors, 2002) is a quartet with no piano and no drums at all, just vibes, George Mraz, Gene Bertoncini and Peplowski. Chuck Redd Remembers Barney Kessel: Happy All the Time (Arbors, 2006), recorded a year after Kessel's death, brought in Monty Alexander and Jeff Hamilton. When Redd Is Blue (2007) is the record with his brother, with Harry Allen on tenor. The Common Thread (Arbors, 2010) put Houston Person, Rossano Sportiello, Bob Cranshaw and Mickey Roker around him. Groove City (Dalphine, 2019), with John Di Martino, Nicki Parrott, Lewis Nash and Jerry Weldon, was a deliberate stretch: an Ornette Coleman tune, a Thelonious Monk tune and two originals alongside the standards, made by a man tired of being told what a mainstream player is allowed to do. Painting With Blue (Dalphine, 2026), recorded at Sear Sound on March 13 and 14, 2026 with Mike LeDonne, Peter Bernstein, Peter Washington and Aaron Seeber, is the most recent. He has never moved to New York, working instead, in his own phrase, as if Washington were a suburb of it, and teaches on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Music. Hot House magazine's readers voted him best vibraphonist in New York in 2015 and again in 2016.

In December 2025 he became national news for something other than playing. Redd had hosted the Kennedy Center's free Christmas Eve Jazz Jam since 2006. On December 19, days after the board of trustees voted to add Donald Trump's name to the building and the new name went up on the facade, he cancelled. The Kennedy Center's president, Richard Grenell, sent him a letter calling it a political stunt and giving notice that the institution would seek one million dollars in damages, and the suit was filed on March 6, 2026. In June 2026, Judge Tanya M. Jones Bosier of the D.C. Superior Court dismissed it under the District's anti-SLAPP statute, finding no signed contract, no damages and a claim brought in response to protected speech. On August 11, 2026 the same judge ordered the Kennedy Center to pay Redd $252,479.70 in attorneys' fees and costs. The Center said it intended to appeal. His attorney, Lisa J. Banks, said no citizen should have to spend time and money fending off baseless lawsuits.

Redd is one of a small number of players who genuinely work at professional level on two instruments, and he is candid that it nearly did not happen: he had been a drummer since he was ten, he came to vibes late, and in his early thirties he considered giving the mallets up because he felt he would never be more than adequate. Byrd told him to keep playing and that one day the two instruments would help each other, which Redd says happened at about forty, after which he could carry rhythmic ideas from the kit to the vibraphone and melodic ideas back the other way. Vibraphone is now the primary instrument, and he still takes drum chairs, sometimes mid-gig on someone else's set. Milt Jackson is the source of the vibes conception; behind the kit his named models are Jake Hanna, Shelly Manne, Grady Tate and Mel Lewis, all four chosen for taste, time and restraint rather than display, and he quotes Hanna's line that taste is something you learn. He puts the music first and the drumming second, and he tells students that nobody actually needs a vibraphone player, so the job is to work out what to contribute. Singers matter more to his phrasing than most instrumentalists do: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Shirley Horn, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and the arrangement of "All or Nothing at All" on Groove City is modelled on Sinatra's phrasing on the Nelson Riddle chart. Critics have consistently praised the singing quality of his mallet work: Ira Gitler in Jazz Times, writing about the Tormé quintet in New York, called his vibes notable for vigour and melodiousness, and the Washington Post has described his playing as having melodic sparkle.