Russ Freeman was born in Nashville on February 11, 1960, and took up the guitar at ten. His first teacher was a Nashville session player who knew his father, and the boy followed him from studio to studio. After about six years of that apprenticeship he was working sessions himself, and two years later he moved to Los Angeles, where the jobs were commercials and accompaniment for vocalists including Engelbert Humperdinck and Anne Murray. He spent a year at the California Institute of the Arts. He names George Benson and Larry Carlton as the guitarists who shaped him. He is not the Chicago-born West Coast pianist of the same name who recorded with Chet Baker and Shelly Manne in the 1950s; the guitarist belongs to the smooth jazz era that began three decades later.

His first record under his own name was Nocturnal Playground (Brainchild in the United States, Alfa in Japan), released on April 10, 1986, with Brandon Fields on alto saxophone and Steve Reid on percussion. Freeman played guitars, keyboards and programming himself, a method he kept for the rest of his career: write everything, play most of it, and bring in soloists. The record reached No. 10 on Billboard's jazz albums chart. He had already conceived a band as a vehicle for recording with a changing cast of contemporary jazz players, and he named it the Rippingtons. The first lineup drew on David Benoit, Gregg Karukas, Brandon Fields, Kenny G and Dave Koz. Their debut, Moonlighting (1986, Passport Jazz and GRP; issued in Japan as Moon Riding under the name Cruise Control), was written entirely by Freeman, features Kenny G's soprano saxophone on "She Likes to Watch," and reached No. 5 on Billboard's jazz chart. It was also the first record to carry the grinning jazz cat that has appeared on every Rippingtons cover since.

The band's records through the late 1980s were Kilimanjaro (1988) and Tourist in Paradise (1989), the latter followed by a first visit to Japan with Benoit for a summer concert series in Tokyo produced by Sadao Watanabe. At GRP, the label built by Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen, the Rippingtons became one of its best-selling acts. Welcome to the St. James' Club (August 1990) was the first of their records to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard jazz chart. Freeman produced, arranged, engineered and mixed it, playing keyboards, bass, drums and several kinds of guitar, with guests including saxophonist Kirk Whalum, pianist Joe Sample, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and vocalists Carl Anderson and Patti Austin. Bassist Kim Stone joined that year. In 1991 Freeman moved to Colorado and opened his own studio there, which shaped the Africa, Brazil and Colorado ski-country themes of Curves Ahead (1991). Weekend in Monaco (1992) became one of the group's best sellers, and the first European tour followed in June 1993; the American leg was recorded as Live in L.A. at the Greek Theatre on September 26, 1992. Sahara (1994) was followed by tours across East and Southeast Asia.

Producing for others ran alongside the band. For GRP he produced Carl Anderson's Pieces of a Heart (1990) and Fantasy Hotel (1992), Nelson Rangell's In Every Moment (1992) and Phil Perry's Pure Pleasure (1994). In 1994 he reunited with Benoit for The Benoit/Freeman Project (GRP), a guitar and piano record that reached No. 2 on Billboard's jazz chart, with Nathan East on bass, Kenny Loggins singing on one track and a sequel, The Benoit/Freeman Project 2, following on Peak in 2004. That same year, 1994, he and his manager Andi Howard founded Peak Records inside GRP. Its first releases were Mark Williamson's Time Slipping By and Sahara; the label moved to Windham Hill in 1997 and to Concord in 2000, and signed saxophonists Eric Marienthal and Paul Taylor, singer Regina Belle and Phil Perry, then Benoit in 2004, Lee Ritenour in 2005, Gerald Albright in 2006 and Norman Brown in 2007. Peak also issued Gato Barbieri's The Shadow of the Cat.

His second solo album, Holiday, came out on GRP in 1995, and a third, Drive, on Peak in 2002. Between them the Rippingtons moved toward a more urban sound on Brave New World (1996), whose covers included "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," then reached No. 1 with Black Diamond (1997) and brought in Native American flute for Topaz (1999). In 1998 he recorded From the Redwoods to the Rockies with guitarist Craig Chaquico of Starship. Freeman moved to South Florida in 2000, and Life in the Tropics that year was the group's first fully digital recording. Live Across America (2002), Let It Ripp (2003), Wild Card (2005, with a Latin slant) and the two-disc 20th Anniversary (2006) followed. Modern Art, released March 10, 2009 as a deliberately smaller band record with no hand percussionist, earned the Rippingtons a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Album at the 2010 ceremony, the only Grammy nomination listed for the group. Later albums were Côte d'Azur (2011), Built to Last (August 28, 2012, with guitarist Zakk Wylde and a full orchestra), Fountain of Youth (2014), True Stories (2016, marking thirty years) and Open Road (2019). In 2014 he was among the guests on Brian Culbertson's Another Long Night Out. His wife, Yaredt Leon, has co-written tunes for the band.

English Wikipedia describes him as retired, and lists his years of activity as 1985 to 2020. Open Road is the most recent Rippingtons studio album, and the band's official website says no tours are planned. Freeman was the group's only constant member across more than three decades of revolving personnel, and his music became a fixture of The Weather Channel's Local on the 8s forecast segments.

Freeman is a studio-built guitarist: tuneful, melodic lines, often on guitar synthesizer or nylon-string classical guitar, over layers of keyboards and programmed rhythm that he usually plays and arranges himself. The Rippingtons are a smooth jazz band by genre and by radio format, and the profile is better read that way than as a straight-ahead jazz career. AllMusic files him under contemporary jazz, crossover jazz, fusion, jazz-pop and smooth jazz, and Wikipedia lists smooth jazz and jazz fusion. What gives the work a jazz footing is the company and the label: GRP and Peak records, Billboard's jazz charts, and a rotating cast of jazz instrumentalists (Benoit, Fields, Kenny G, Koz, Whalum, Sample, Marienthal, Taylor, Kashiwa) who soloed over his arrangements.

His stated guitar models are George Benson and Larry Carlton. The albums are often built around a place or journey, such as Africa, Brazil and the Rockies on Curves Ahead, Latin rhythms on Wild Card and the French coast on Côte d'Azur. A Chicago Tribune review compared the Rippingtons to jazz as pop is to rock: upbeat, modern and commercially strong. As a producer and label owner he shaped other smooth jazz careers well beyond his own records.