Cindy Blackman Santana was born Cindy Blackman on November 18, 1959, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her mother and grandmother were classical musicians and an uncle played vibraphone. She started on drums at seven, moved at eleven to Bristol, Connecticut, and studied at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford. As a young teenager she was drawn to jazz through records by drummers including Max Roach, Ed Blackwell, Billy Higgins and Louis Hayes, and she got her first professional drum set at 14. As a teenager she also saw Tony Williams play, and he became her main model. Her records from the 1980s through Another Lifetime (2010) carry the name Cindy Blackman. After her marriage to the guitarist Carlos Santana in December 2010 she began working as Cindy Blackman Santana, the name on her 2020 album Give the Drummer Some and on her current releases.

She attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied with Alan Dawson, one of Tony Williams's teachers, and left after three semesters for a job with the Drifters. In 1982 she moved to New York City, where she played on the street for a time and learned from watching drummers in the clubs, among them Al Foster, Billy Hart, Jack DeJohnette and Art Blakey, who became a mentor and close friend. In 1984 the trumpeter Ted Curson featured her on his "Jazz Stars of the Future" program on WKCR-FM. Her first compositions to be recorded, "Float" and "Topaz," appeared on Wallace Roney's Verses (1987), and she joined his band, playing on his Intuition (1988), The Standard Bearer (1990) and Obsession (1991).

Her leader debut, Arcane (Muse, 1988), was recorded on August 8 and December 23, 1987, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with Roney, Kenny Garrett, the bassists Buster Williams and Clarence Seay, the pianist Larry Willis, and Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone for two tracks. Code Red (1992), recorded October 19, 1990, and dedicated to Art Blakey, added Steve Coleman and Kenny Barron. Trio + Two (Free Lance, 1991) paired her with the bassist Santi Debriano and the guitarist David Fiuczynski, with Greg Osby and Jerry Gonzalez as guests, and a 1989 trio album of standards, Autumn Leaves, with the bassist Charnett Moffett and the pianist Marc Cohen, was issued in Japan. Telepathy (Muse, 1994) featured Antoine Roney, Jacky Terrasson and Clarence Seay, and she wrote eight of its eleven pieces. The Oracle (1996) brought in Gary Bartz, Ron Carter and Barron. Around the same time she recorded with the collective Grand Central, led by Ravi Coltrane, including Sax Storm (1993) and Tenor Conclave (1995), the latter with Craig Handy.

Her other career began in 1993, when she spoke by phone from New York with Lenny Kravitz in Los Angeles and played drums while he listened; he asked her to fly out, and she stayed for weeks, appeared in the video for "Are You Gonna Go My Way," and joined his touring band. She remained his touring drummer for many years, with a break from the road in 2004 to concentrate on her own music, and her rock credits include a drum part on one track of his album 5 (1998), drums on a Deep Purple tribute album recorded by New York players, and six tracks of Joss Stone's The Soul Sessions (2003). Through those years she kept recording jazz. In the Now (HighNote, 1998, recorded November 18, 1997) used Carter, Coltrane and Terrasson as her sidemen; Works on Canvas (2000) and Someday... (2001) featured the tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen, the pianist Carlton Holmes and the bassist George Mitchell; and she played on Sonny Simmons's American Jungle (1997), Russell Gunn's Love Requiem (1999) and Eddie Allen's Summer Days (2000). Her Electric Group, with bassist Matthew Garrison and guitarist David Gilmore, recorded Live in Europe in October 2002 and sold it on its 2003 European tour, and she issued the two-disc Music for the New Millennium on her own Sacred Sound label in 2004.

Another Lifetime (4Q, 2010), a tribute to Tony Williams's group Lifetime, used the organist Doug Carn and the guitarist Mike Stern, with Joe Lovano, Patrice Rushen and Vernon Reid as guests. In 2012 she, Jack Bruce, Reid and John Medeski released Spectrum Road (Palmetto), a second Williams tribute on which she also sings. Carlos Santana proposed to her from the stage at Tinley Park, Illinois, on July 9, 2010, and they were married in Maui on December 19, 2010. By her own account she first played with his band in spring 2010, when Dennis Chambers was unavailable, and has been its full-time drummer since 2016. She is on the Santana albums Corazón (2014), Power of Peace with the Isley Brothers (2017), Africa Speaks (2019), In Search of Mona Lisa (2019), Blessings and Miracles (2021) and Sentient (2025), and in 2011 she played behind Santana and John McLaughlin at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Her 2020 album Give the Drummer Some, made with the producer Narada Michael Walden, runs to 17 tracks, with her singing on 11, and its guests include McLaughlin, Matthew Garrison, Vernon Reid and Kirk Hammett. Coherence, released on Mack Avenue on July 31, 2026, has her touring band (the saxophonist Emilio Modeste, the guitarist Aurelien Budynek, the keyboardist Zaccai Curtis and the bassist Felix Pastorius) with Carlos Santana and McLaughlin as guests.

Blackman Santana's model is Tony Williams, whose use of all four limbs and ability to keep time and solo at once she has cited, and she studied with one of his teachers; Art Blakey was her other formative influence. Her leader records move between acoustic post-bop with established jazz veterans (Ron Carter, Kenny Barron, Buster Williams), and an electric, funk and rock-inflected band sound, which is where Tony Williams's Lifetime repertoire on Another Lifetime and Spectrum Road sits. She writes much of her own material, and Another Lifetime, Spectrum Road and Give the Drummer Some include her own singing. Her best-known work to a broad audience is with the rock musicians Lenny Kravitz and Carlos Santana, and she is open about moving between those stages and jazz clubs: she has described jazz as the highest form of music because of what it asks of the player, and reference works describe her as a jazz and rock drummer. She has said that as a woman with an Afro leading a band she met conservative resistance early on, and she remains a rarity among female jazz drummers who lead their own groups.