David Darling was born on March 4, 1941, in Elkhart, Indiana. He started piano at four, cello at ten and string bass in high school, and he studied classical cello at Indiana State University, where he stayed on as a teacher for four years after graduating. In 1970 he moved to Nashville, working as a studio musician and playing in the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and joined the Paul Winter Consort, a group known for crossing genre boundaries. He remained its cellist through the 1970s. The Consort's alumni of those years included Ralph Towner, Glen Moore, Collin Walcott and Paul McCandless, who went on to form Oregon, and Darling's first ECM Records credit came from that circle.

That credit was on Ralph Towner's Old Friends, New Friends, recorded in July 1979 at Talent Studio in Oslo with Kenny Wheeler, Eddie Gómez and drummer Michael DiPasqua. Three months later, in October 1979 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, he recorded his first solo album, Journal October (ECM 1161, released 1980), playing cello and the eight-string solid-body electric cello and adding bells, gong, timpani and voice. Around it he took sideman dates: cello on Glen Moore's Introducing for Elektra (1979), two tracks of Spyro Gyra's Carnaval (1980) and the closing "Elegy for Trane" on their Freetime (1981), hornist John Clark's Faces (ECM, 1981), for which he also wrote three pieces, and Gallery (ECM, recorded in May 1981 in New York), the album of a chamber-jazz group with McCandless, vibraphonist Dave Samuels, bassist Ratzo B. Harris and DiPasqua. Cycles, recorded in November 1981 in Oslo and issued in 1982, was his own ensemble date, with Jan Garbarek, pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist Arild Andersen, Walcott on sitar and tabla, and guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves.

Norway became his second base. Eos (recorded May 1983, released 1984) paired him with Terje Rypdal as a duo of eight-string electric cello and electronic guitar. In September 1994 he joined Rypdal, drummer Jon Christensen and pianist Ketil Bjørnstad for The Sea (ECM 1545, 1995), improvising on Bjørnstad's themes, and the quartet made a second album, The Sea II (recorded December 1996), and toured. With Bjørnstad alone he recorded The River (recorded June 1996) and Epigraphs (recorded September 1998), which sets free arrangements of William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and Guillaume Dufay beside original pieces. He also played on Rypdal's Skywards (recorded February 1996), Sidsel Endresen's Exile (ECM 1524) and Pierre Favre's Window Steps (ECM 1584, with Steve Swallow, Kenny Wheeler and the saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano). His own solo albums for the label followed: Cello (recorded November 1991 and January 1992, ECM 1464, dedicated to Collin Walcott) and Dark Wood (recorded July 1993, released 1995, ECM 1519). Jean-Luc Godard used his cello in several films, including Nouvelle Vague (1990), whose soundtrack ECM released in 1997. English Wikipedia counts fifteen ECM recordings in all.

Outside ECM he built a second career in what record stores filed as new age. Eight String Religion (1993), named for the instrument he plays on it alongside acoustic cello, a 4-string solid-body cello, piano, voice and log drum, was recorded between 1982 and 1993 and mixed in Boulder, Colorado. The Tao of Cello (1993) and Open Window (2003) came out on The Relaxation Company, and Cello Blue (Hearts of Space, 2001) brought a Grammy nomination. In 2000 he recorded a collaboration with the Wulu Bunun, a group of Indigenous Taiwanese musicians, issued as Mihumisa(n)g. In 1986 he joined the school program Young Audiences and helped found Music for People, a nonprofit that teaches improvisation as self-expression to musicians and non-musicians alike; his methods are the subject of the book Return to Child (2008). Prayer for Compassion, released in 2009, won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album at the ceremony of January 31, 2010. Later albums included Gratitude (2016), Parallel Universe (2018) and Homage to Kindness (2019).

David Darling passed away at his home in Goshen, Connecticut, on January 8, 2021, at the age of 79. Reverence (2022) and Ocean Dreaming Ocean (2023, with Hans Christian) were released after his death.

Darling is a jazz-adjacent figure, and his record is split down the middle. His ECM work is improvised chamber music in which jazz players, a classical cellist and electronics meet; the German, Italian, French and Spanish Wikipedias all file him as a jazz cellist, and AllMusic lists chamber jazz first among his styles. The same AllMusic page also lists classical and new age among his genres, and its reviewer called Journal October not strictly a jazz album and said that on Cello Darling was not mainly a jazz player but a real improviser. His Grammy came in the new age category, and a large share of his later catalogue (the Relaxation Company, Hearts of Space and Curve Blue releases) was made for meditation and relaxation listeners. His playing draws on classical, jazz, Brazilian, African and Indian music, and a published biography notes his use of a solid-body eight-string electric cello with digital delay and other processing. The tradition behind him runs through the Paul Winter Consort's world-music experiments; his closest musical partners, Terje Rypdal, Ralph Towner and Ketil Bjørnstad, worked in the same open space between composed and improvised music.