Daniel Freedman is a lifelong New Yorker who grew up in a musical family and attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. While still in high school he studied with two of the instrument's towering figures, Max Roach, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, and Billy Higgins, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, alongside drummers Vernel Fournier and Oscar Deric Brown. He went on to Manhattan School of Music and Mannes College of Music, continuing his studies with Fournier as well as Ralph Peterson Jr. and Abraham Rodriguez Jr., and in the late 1990s traveled to Mali, Cuba, and Egypt to study percussion traditions directly with master drummers there.

Freedman came up in New York's fertile early-1990s scene at Smalls Jazz Club, performing weekly with Jason Lindner's Ensemble, the Omer Avital Sextet, and the Charles Owens Quartet. He worked as a sideman with Tom Harrell, Wynton Marsalis, vocalist Claudia Acuña (touring the US, Europe, and Japan), Gretchen Parlato, saxophonist Michael Blake, and bassists Ben Allison and Ben Wolfe, appearing on Wolfe's 13 Sketches (Mons Records, 2007). He also recorded twice for John Zorn's Tzadik label around this period, appearing on Voices in the Wilderness (2003) and the various-artists collection Great Jewish Music: Sasha Argov (2003); Smalls Jazz Club's own artist biography additionally credits him with producing and engineering Tzadik sessions, though that specific credit line could not be independently confirmed release-by-release on Discogs.

He stepped out as a leader in 2001 with the Daniel Freedman Trio (Fresh Sound New Talent), recorded in New Jersey on June 9-10, 2001, with Jason Lindner on piano and Omer Avital on bass, joined by Myron Walden, Joshua Levitt, and Tomer Tzur; the record received a nine-star review in Modern Drummer Magazine. That same circle of players became Third World Love, the culture-melding quartet Freedman co-leads with trumpeter Avishai E. Cohen, Avital, and pianist Yonatan Avishai, whose catalog runs from Third World Love Songs (2002, Fresh Sound World Jazz) through Avanim (2004, NMC Music), Sketch of Tel Aviv (2006, Smalls Records), New Blues (2007, Anzic Records), and Songs and Portraits (2011, Anzic Records).

Freedman's association with Anzic Records, the label Anat Cohen co-founded, runs deep. He toured and recorded with the Anat Cohen Quartet from 2005 to 2018, appearing on Poetica (2007), Notes from the Village (2008), and Luminosa (2015), and produced as well as played drums on her Claroscuro (2012), which paired her with Paquito D'Rivera and Wycliffe Gordon. In the same Anzic orbit he is a core sideman on trumpeter Avishai Cohen's Big Rain Trilogy, appearing alongside Lionel Loueke on After the Big Rain (2007) and on Flood (2008), and on the sideman-supergroup date Waverly Seven: Yo! Bobby (2007) plus Omer Avital's Suite of the East (2012) and New Song (2013).

Freedman's global reach extends well past the Anzic roster. From 2010 to 2015 he toured the world with Angélique Kidjo, including a Carnegie Hall performance alongside Youssou N'Dour, and he toured with Ethiopian vibraphonist and bandleader Mulatu Astatke in 2016. His own leader albums increasingly carry that world-music imprint: Bamako by Bus (2012, Anzic Records), inspired by a motorcycle trip through Mali and featuring Meshell Ndegeocello, Lionel Loueke, Jason Lindner, and Avishai Cohen, and Imagine That (2016, Anzic Records), which paired the same core group with Angélique Kidjo and Gilmar Gomes and drew a five-star review from DownBeat. He also recorded with Sting on If on a Winter's Night... (2009, Deutsche Grammophon/Cherrytree).

Freedman is also a fixture of New York's theater and orchestral-jazz worlds. He became a founding member of David Byrne's American Utopia, joining the 2018 world tour and playing drums and vocals in the original Broadway production (2019-2022, more than 400 performances), work captured on the American Utopia on Broadway cast recording and on Spike Lee's HBO film of the show (2020). He subsequently played in the Broadway productions of Hadestown (2023-2024) and Illinoise (2024, Tony-winning, with an Original Cast Recording on Nonesuch). He is a longtime member of the Michael Leonhart Orchestra, featured on The Painted Lady Suite (2018) and Suite Extracts Vol. 1 (2019), and tours with Leonhart's flamenco-jazz project alongside dancer Israel Galván.

Most recently, Freedman released Ghost Modern (2021, GSI Records), a solo world-fusion set co-produced with Michael Leonhart and featuring Gilad Hekselman, Gilmar Gomes, and Avishai Cohen, and in 2025 issued the debut album by Saha Gnawa (Pique Nique Records), a group he co-leads with Moroccan maalem Hassan Ben Jaafar, with guests including Nels Cline, Gilad Hekselman, and Donny McCaslin.

Freedman's early apprenticeship under Max Roach and Billy Higgins, deepened by later study with Vernel Fournier, Ralph Peterson Jr., and Abraham Rodriguez Jr. and by direct fieldwork with master drummers in Mali, Cuba, and Egypt, gave him a rare synthesis of American jazz drumming lineage and global percussion tradition. That combination shows up everywhere in his output: the straight-ahead post-bop of Third World Love and his Anat Cohen and Avishai Cohen sideman work sits alongside the West African, Afro-Cuban, and Gnawa-inflected world-jazz of Bamako by Bus, Imagine That, and Saha Gnawa, and alongside the theatrical pop precision required to hold down David Byrne's American Utopia on Broadway. Across all of it, reviewers have consistently singled out the same quality — a drummer who serves the song and the groove first, described by one critic as someone who has "quietly, almost surreptitiously, become a primal force, creating a kind of people's music."