Craig Mitchell Handy was born in Oakland, California on September 25, 1962, into a household where jazz was already playing. He tried guitar, trombone and piano before the saxophone caught him, and what caught him was a broadcast: Dexter Gordon playing "Body And Soul" on the radio when Handy was eleven, a sound he has described ever since in physical terms, as something that went into his chest rather than his ears. He heard live music early too, at Keystone Korner in San Francisco, where he saw Jimmy Smith play with Kenny Clarke and Eddie Harris. He then went through the Berkeley High School jazz programme, which in roughly his decade also turned out David Murray, Peter Apfelbaum, Benny Green and Joshua Redman. A Charlie Parker Scholarship took him to North Texas State University in Denton, where he majored in psychology and played in the school's One O'Clock Lab Band. His first recordings come from those years and from the professional band next door: he is on the lab band's Lab 84 and on two Dallas Jazz Orchestra records, one of them cut at Montreux in 1985.

He moved to New York in 1986, at twenty-three, and the first group he worked in steadily was Roy Haynes's quartet, which he has since called starting at the top. Mingus Dynasty followed, and it turned out to be the association that shaped the next thirty years. For two and a half years the front line was Handy, George Adams and Jack Walrath, with Roland Hanna at the piano, Jimmy Knepper on trombone, Dannie Richmond on drums and the flutist James Newton beside him; Handy credits Adams above anyone else with teaching him what the tradition actually transmits, on the bandstand rather than off a record. The band's Mingus' Sounds Of Love, made in Milan for Soul Note in 1987, is the first document of him in it. Around that he worked with Abdullah Ibrahim, whose thematic writing he studied like architecture, and with Betty Carter, who told him he had the tone to play a ballad and not only the technique to burn one. He spent 1989 in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He also played in Haitian and salsa bands during these years, deliberately, because he had decided in New York that his own rhythmic conception was too smooth next to players like Murray and Adams.

One New York night at the Bottom Line during a Mingus Dynasty set, Bill Cosby came up and introduced himself. Handy assumed nothing would come of it. What came of it was the tenor saxophone on the opening theme of The Cosby Show for its sixth and seventh seasons, 1989 to 1991, and later the job of scoring, producing and performing the music for the 1994-95 season of The Cosby Mysteries. It made his sound familiar to an audience that had never heard his name, which he has always found a slightly funny result, since he considers the playing there well short of what he could do.

His first album as a leader, Split Second Timing, came out on Arabesque in 1992 and was recorded in June 1991 with Ray Drummond, Ralph Peterson, Edward Simon and Robin Eubanks as a guest. The title is Blakey's, lifted from the announcement he made from the drums every night about music travelling from the creator to the artist to the audience with split-second timing. Introducing Three For All + One followed in 1993, mostly a tenor trio with Charles Fambrough and Peterson, with David Kikoski added on four of the twelve pieces. By then he was also in the Mingus Big Band from its founding, holding the lead reed chair on Monday nights at the Time Cafe while George Adams held the blues chair, and he is on its first two records, Nostalgia In Times Square (1993) and Gunslinging Birds (1995), the pair that carried the band into the polls.

The mid-1990s made him one of the most heavily recorded saxophonists of his generation without ever quite making him a headliner. He was on three all-star dates in three years: Acoustic Masters II with Bobby Hutcherson, Mulgrew Miller, Ron Carter and Lenny White, Primal Blue with Kenny Burrell and Cedar Walton, and Tenor Conclave, a two-tenor Hank Mobley tribute shared with Ravi Coltrane. He co-founded Chartbusters!, a co-operative with Dr. Lonnie Smith that made Volume 1 for NYC Records in January 1995 with John Scofield on three of its tracks, and Mating Call for Prestige the following year with Donald Harrison, Randy Brecker and Idris Muhammad. In 1996 he appeared on screen in Robert Altman's Kansas City, playing the part of Coleman Hawkins in the film's on-camera band and on both of its Verve soundtrack albums. That same year Herbie Hancock hired him to replace Michael Brecker in the quartet touring The New Standard, alongside Gene Jackson and, in turn, Dave Holland and Kenny Davis. He stayed three and a half years, his longest absence from the Mingus bands, and never made a studio record with Hancock; the only circulating document of that group is an unofficial issue of a 1998 Barbican broadcast.

Two more leader albums came at the turn of the century, both for the small British label Sirocco and both cut at Systems Two in Brooklyn: Reflections In Change (1999), a quartet with Geri Allen, Rodney Whitaker and Ali Jackson plus two pieces scored for a small ensemble by Charles Mingus's own arranger Sy Johnson, and Flow (2000), with Xavier Davis in the piano chair and five Handy originals. After that his name largely disappeared from record spines for thirteen years while the work went on without pause. He became a fixture in trumpeter David Weiss's circle, on Freddie Hubbard's New Colors and the trumpeter's last studio album On The Real Side, on two New Jazz Composers Octet records, and from 2010 in The Cookers, where he took over the alto and flute chair from James Spaulding alongside Billy Harper, Eddie Henderson, George Cables, Cecil McBee and Billy Hart. He served on and off as musical director of the Mingus Big Band, Dynasty and Orchestra for the better part of two decades, was moved by Sue Mingus from tenor to lead alto in the mid-2000s, and handed the direction of the band to the bassist Boris Kozlov around 2009. In December 2002 the John Scofield Band recorded Up All Night in Massachusetts, and the following January four horn players overdubbed a section at The Hit Factory in New York to Scofield's own arrangements: Handy on tenor, flute and bass clarinet, Gary Smulyan on baritone, Jim Pugh on trombone and Earl Gardner on trumpet, playing on six of the album's eleven tracks over a rhythm section of Scofield, Avi Bortnick, Andy Hess and Adam Deitch. The horns were never in the room with the band.

He returned as a bandleader in 2013 with Craig Handy & 2nd Line Smith on the revived OKeh label, a band built out of his own neighbourhood in Weehawken, New Jersey around organist Kyle Koehler, guitarist Matt Chertkoff and sousaphonist Clark Gayton, with Herlin Riley, Ali Jackson and Jason Marsalis rotating on drums and cameos from Dee Dee Bridgewater and Wynton Marsalis. The idea behind it is a genuine musical argument rather than a marketing one: Handy noticed that the drum patterns on the hits he wanted to play, "High Heel Sneakers" among them, were modified second-line rhythms, so he put the Jimmy Smith organ book over a New Orleans street beat and let the two halves explain each other. Since then he has been the reed voice in Conrad Herwig's Latin Side band, taking the chair Mario Rivera held, on Herwig's Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver and Mingus programmes; a regular with the pianist Bill O'Connell's Afro-Caribbean groups; and a member of Ralph Peterson's Messenger Legacy, the Blakey alumni band, on its 2020 album. He has toured with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, plays leader nights and sideman weeks at Smalls in Greenwich Village, and in 2025 released First Encounter with the German organ band BAM, whose line-up of organ, guitar, sousaphone and drums is 2nd Line Smith's exactly.

Handy is a big-toned tenor player with a bebop player's appetite for speed and a balladeer's instincts underneath, and the two sides have been noticed separately for thirty years. His own account starts with Dexter Gordon's sound and directness, and All About Jazz has heard the Coltrane and Wayne Shorter line in his vocabulary along with touches of Frank Wess, George Adams, Gene Ammons and Ben Webster. What he adds to that inheritance is rhythmic rather than harmonic. He decided early in New York that his time was too smooth beside players like David Murray and George Adams, and went looking for the fix in Cuban and Haitian bands, seeking out Irakere's Orlando "Maraca" Valle when the band came through town and touring with him in 2006 and 2008; that study is audible in the Latin work he has done since with Conrad Herwig and Eddie Palmieri, and it is why the second-line project sounds like an idea rather than a costume. Ballads, by his own description, are where he lives, the easy part rather than the hard part, and Betty Carter told him as much when he was in her band. He is also unusually complete as a doubler for a player of his generation: tenor, alto and soprano saxophone, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and, on two records, baritone, with Charles Tolliver's big band using five of them on one album. The flute is its own story. He plays it on five of the eight pieces of Kirk Lightsey's Lightsey To Gladden, cut in 1990 when he was twenty-seven, then got disgusted with his own playing and put the instrument down for ten years before picking it up again around thirty-seven. Critics have consistently described the same balance in him: an improviser who takes the risks a solo demands, builds toward genuine climaxes, and pulls back before the line loses its shape. Reviewing his work with Dee Dee Bridgewater in 2010, the New York Times described a telepathic connection between them and a willingness to push the timbral edges of flute and saxophone the way she pushes her voice. Handy's own summary of the profession is drier: it is, he says, "a great way to almost make a living."