Klaus Doldinger was born in Berlin on May 12, 1936. The family moved to Vienna when he was four, and his mother later took him and his brother to Schrobenhausen in Bavaria, where he first heard jazz as a child, played by American soldiers. The family was reunited in Düsseldorf, where he entered the conservatory in 1947 to study piano and switched to clarinet in 1952, the year he heard his first jazz concert, by the Lionel Hampton big band. After his Abitur in 1957 he studied musicology and Tonmeister (the German sound-engineering and production degree) at the same conservatory. Alongside his studies he played soprano saxophone in Düsseldorf bars and clarinet with a Dixieland band, the Feetwarmers, with whom he made his first recordings in 1955.

That same year he founded Oscar's Trio, named for and modeled on the group of Oscar Peterson. The trio won first prize, the Coup Sidney Bechet (named for Sidney Bechet, the clarinetist and soprano saxophonist whose recordings had steered Doldinger toward the clarinet), at the Brussels jazz festival, and its version of "Muss i' denn zum Städtele hinaus" brought an invitation to play in the United States in 1960. On that first American trip he was made an honorary citizen of New Orleans. Through the early 1960s he worked with American musicians then living in Europe, among them Kenny Clarke, Donald Byrd, Johnny Griffin, Benny Bailey, Idrees Sulieman and Don Ellis.

In 1962 he formed the Klaus Doldinger Quartet with the organist Ingfried Hoffmann, the bassist Helmut Kandlberger and the drummer Klaus Weiss. Their first album, Jazz Made in Germany (Philips, 1963), was produced by Siggi Loch and won the group an audience well beyond Germany, because it sounded like a working modern-jazz band rather than an imitation of American records. Live at Blue Note Berlin, recorded in the Berlin club the same year, followed in 1964. Doldinger played tenor saxophone, with soprano saxophone on some tracks. The quartet's lineup changed (the bassist Peter Trunk and the drummer Cees See came in by 1965), and the records moved through Latin and Brazilian material on Doldinger in Südamerika (1965, with the guitarist Attila Zoller), the organ-driven Doldinger Goes On (1967), and the Blues Happening and The Ambassador albums of 1969, which reached toward free jazz and African rhythms. He toured for the Goethe-Institut as an ambassador of German jazz, visiting some forty countries, and drew heavily on Moroccan and Brazilian music. In October 1965 he sat in the saxophone section of Rita Reys Meets Oliver Nelson (Philips, Netherlands), arranged and conducted by Oliver Nelson, with Lee Konitz and Art Farmer among the players.

By the end of the decade he was working in a second, commercial register. He released dance and rock records under the pseudonym Paul Nero, wrote advertising jingles (Nescafé, Fa, Pril), and formed Motherhood in 1969, a rock-and-soul band that made two albums for United Artists and Liberty. In 1971 he founded Passport, a fusion group whose first lineup included the drummer Udo Lindenberg, later a major German rock singer, and the bassist Lothar Meid. Passport recorded for Atlantic Records, reportedly the first German band signed to the label, and its second album, Second Passport (1972), was a chart success in Germany. The lineup that carried the band to international prominence from 1973 paired Doldinger with the drummer Curt Cress, the bassist and guitarist Wolfgang Schmid and the keyboardist Kristian Schultze. Their live Doldinger Jubilee Concert (1974) added the organist Brian Auger and the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, among others, and Cross-Collateral (1975) was released the same day in Germany and the United States, followed by a seven-week American tour. Passport was sometimes called the European Weather Report, a comparison to the American group Weather Report, and under that name Doldinger made more than thirty albums with changing lineups over the following decades. He won the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis for his Passport work in 1976 and again in 1981.

Far more people heard his music on television and in cinemas than on jazz records. In 1970 he wrote the theme for the crime series Tatort, with Lindenberg playing drums on the recording, and it has opened the show ever since. Themes for Ein Fall für zwei, Liebling Kreuzberg, Wolffs Revier and Alles außer Mord followed. His score for Wolfgang Petersen's submarine drama Das Boot (1981) made him known worldwide, and he also composed the score to Petersen's The NeverEnding Story (1984); for the version released outside Germany, Giorgio Moroder wrote the English theme song and rescored several scenes. He also scored Andrew Birkin's Salt on Our Skin (1993). Respected as a jazz musician, he was best known to the general public as a film and television composer.

He returned to acoustic jazz in New York twice. Doldinger in New York: Street of Dreams (WEA, 1994) paired him with the pianist Tommy Flanagan, the bassist Charnett Moffett and the drummer Victor Lewis, with the vibraphonist Roy Ayers and the percussionist Don Alias as guests, and Back in New York (also issued as Blind Date, 1999) brought in the pianist Kevin Hays, the guitarist Peter Bernstein, the bassist Ira Coleman and Lewis again, with the vibraphonist Stefon Harris as a guest. In 2005 he toured Morocco with Passport and the Gnawa musician Majid Bekkas, a collaboration documented on Passport to Morocco (2006). The compilation The First 50 Years of Passport appeared in 2021, and his autobiography, Made in Germany, in September 2022. His honors included the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1978), a lifetime-achievement Echo Jazz (1996), the Grimme Prize special honor (2005), the Goldene Kamera (2007), the Bavarian Order of Merit (2007) and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art (2023).

Doldinger married Inge Beck in 1960, and they had three children. From 1968 the family lived in Icking, south of Munich, where he later ran his own recording studio. He passed away at home in Icking on the evening of October 16, 2025, at the age of 89, after a period of poor health. Germany's president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, described him as a living jazz legend whose work had given improvised music new forms of expression for decades.

Doldinger's reputation rests on two different bodies of work, and both are part of the record. As a jazz player he was a tenor saxophonist of the hard-bop and soul-jazz school, working with organ rhythm sections in the 1960s, later adding soprano saxophone, flute and keyboards. His early models were Sidney Bechet and Oscar Peterson, and AllMusic lists his styles as film score, fusion, post-bop and jazz-funk. With Passport he built a durable fusion sound out of doubled saxophones and long melodic lines over a strong groove, borrowing Brazilian, Moroccan and Latin American rhythms and early synthesizers. The band stood between jazz complexity and rock directness, and it earned a place on the American jazz charts in the late 1970s. At the same time he was a working composer of advertising music, television themes and film scores, and for most listeners outside the jazz world those scores are the music they know him by.