Ben Sidran was born in Chicago on August 14, 1943 and grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. He was playing keyboards at fraternity parties in Madison while still a teenager, and in 1961 he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where he joined the Ardells, a party band led by Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. When Miller and Scaggs headed west, Sidran stayed to finish a degree in English literature, then left in 1966 for the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, where he took an M.A. in 1968 and a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1970. His doctoral thesis, on the oral and musical culture of Black America, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1971 as Black Talk and reissued by Da Capo in 1981 with a foreword by Archie Shepp.

England is also where his recording career began. When the Steve Miller Band came to London to record with the engineer Glyn Johns, Sidran played harpsichord on "Baby's Calling Me Home" on Children of the Future (1968). He then replaced Jim Peterman on keyboards for Brave New World (1969), which includes "Space Cowboy," the song he co-wrote with Miller, and he appears on Your Saving Grace (1969) and Number 5 (1970). Johns also brought him into session work at Olympic Studios and produced a 1969 demo tape that featured Charlie Watts and Peter Frampton. In 1972 Sidran produced the Steve Miller Band's Recall the Beginning...A Journey from Eden, and in 1988 he produced Miller's jazz-standards album Born 2B Blue.

He moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1970 and signed to Capitol Records through Johns. His debut, Feel Your Groove (Capitol ST-825, 1971), is a jazz and rock hybrid that features trumpeter Blue Mitchell, Scaggs and the drummer Jim Keltner. Capitol offered him a staff producer's job, but he returned to Madison in the summer of 1971 and has lived there for most of his life since. Three albums for Blue Thumb followed: I Lead a Life (BTS 40, 1972), Puttin' in Time on Planet Earth (BTS 55, 1973) and Don't Let Go (BTS 6012, 1974). In 1973 he also produced Tony Williams's Lifetime on The Old Bum's Rush (Polydor), hosted a weekly television series and taught a university course on the business of music. At Arista he made Free in America (1976), with Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker and Woody Shaw among the horns, The Doctor Is In (1977), with Blue Mitchell and Larry Carlton, A Little Kiss in the Night (1978) and the concert album Live at Montreux (1978), with both Breckers and Mainieri. The Cat and the Hat (Horizon, 1979) was arranged and conducted by Mike Mainieri, with Steve Gadd on drums and Lee Ritenour on guitar. As a producer he also made Jon Hendricks's Tell Me the Truth (Arista, 1975), on which he plays piano.

The 1980s moved him toward broadcasting. He hosted and was artistic director of NPR's Jazz Alive from 1981 to 1983, a series that won a Peabody Award in 1982, contributed to All Things Considered from 1983 to 1985, hosted and produced the NPR series Sidran on Record from 1985 to 1990, and hosted VH-1's New Visions from 1988 to 1991, which won an ACE Award for best cable music series in 1989. His television productions included programs with Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Johnny Griffin, Chico Hamilton, Jon Hendricks and Eddie Jefferson. The records continued alongside: Old Songs for the New Depression (1981, with Richie Cole, Marcus Miller and Bob Malach), Bop City (Antilles AN 1012, 1983, with Phil Woods, Eddie Gómez, Steve Khan and Peter Erskine), On the Cool Side (Magenta, 1985), On the Live Side (Magenta, 1986, with Woods and Miller) and Too Hot to Touch (Windham Hill Jazz, 1988). In the same decade he began producing Mose Allison for Blue Note, starting with Ever Since the World Ended (1987) and continuing with My Backyard (1990), The Earth Wants You (1994) and Gimcracks and Gewgaws (1998).

Around 1990 Sidran started his own label, Go Jazz, with partners in Japan. Its early releases, which he produced, included Georgie Fame's Cool Cat Blues (1991) and The Blues and Me (1992) and Phil Upchurch's Whatever Happened to the Blues (1992), with guests Mavis Staples and Chaka Khan; he also produced Gegè Telesforo's Gegè and the Boparazzi (1993). His own Go Jazz albums include Cool Paradise (1990), Life's a Lesson (1993), a set of Jewish liturgical and folk songs with Carole King, Mike Mainieri, Gil Goldstein and Jeremy Steig, Mr. P's Shuffle (1996), Live at the Celebrity Lounge (1998) and The Concert for García Lorca (1998), a live tribute recorded in the courtyard of the poet's family home and nominated for a Grammy. In 1996 he recorded Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison (Verve) in a single day with Van Morrison, Georgie Fame and Allison, playing piano, singing, co-producing with Morrison and Fame, and writing the liner notes. His other producing credits of the decade include the soundtrack to the documentary Hoop Dreams (1994).

In 2003 he and his son, Leo Sidran, founded the Nardis Music label, which issued Nick's Bump (2003), Bumpin' at the Sunside (2005, recorded in Paris), Cien Noches (2008, recorded in Madrid with his Hammond Quartet), Dylan Different (2009), Don't Cry for No Hipster (2012) and Blue Camus (2014). Picture Him Happy (2017) is built around the myth of Sisyphus, with Will Bernard, Will Lee and John Ellis. The three-CD retrospective Ben There, Done That: Ben Sidran Live Around the World (1975-2015) followed in 2018, then Who's the Old Guy Now? (EP, 2020), Swing State (2022), Rainmaker (2024) and the live album Are We There Yet (Live at the Sunside) (2025), recorded in Paris in June 2024. His books include Black Talk, Talking Jazz: An Oral History (1995), whose interviews with jazz musicians also became a 24-CD box set, the memoir A Life in the Music (2003), There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream (2012), The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma (2020) and, in 2026, Cool Cat Blues: The Life and Times of Georgie Fame.

When the American Jewish World profiled him in August 2026, ahead of his 83rd birthday, he was still touring. He had played European dates earlier that summer after shows in New York, and he was booked at the Dakota in Minneapolis on August 17 with the bassist Billy Peterson, the organist Ricky Peterson and Leo Sidran on drums. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Sidran is a pianist and singer whose delivery sits closer to talking than singing, in the storytelling tradition of Mose Allison, whom he later produced. His songs carry a running hipster commentary on jazz, money, politics and the music business, and a critic at The Times once called him the first existential jazz rapper. The rock, blues and spoken-word sides of his career are plain in the record. He came up in a Southern-style party band in Madison and then in the Steve Miller Band, his early Capitol and Blue Thumb albums are jazz and rock hybrids, much of his Go Jazz production work is blues-rooted (Georgie Fame, Phil Upchurch, Mose Allison), and he has recorded a full album of Bob Dylan songs as well as one of Alec Wilder's. He has also built a second career out of speech: radio and television interviews, an oral-history book and box set of jazz musicians in their own words, and a doctoral thesis on the sociology of Black music. He has said that his aim as a broadcaster was to take the mystery out of jazz and show that its musicians are ordinary people, only more so.