David Sidney Liebman is born September 4, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. He contracts polio as a child in 1949, begins classical piano lessons at nine, and switches to saxophone at twelve, growing up in a home just blocks from the jazz clubs of Manhattan. Hearing John Coltrane live at Birdland, the Village Vanguard, and the Half Note reshapes his sense of what the saxophone can do, and he studies afterward with Joe Allard, Lennie Tristano, and Charles Lloyd while earning a degree in American history from New York University. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he works as a sideman with Genya Ravan's group Ten Wheel Drive and helps organize Free Life Communication, a musician-run loft-jazz collective in New York that gives young improvisers a place to develop outside the club circuit.

His professional breakthrough comes through two of the era's most demanding apprenticeships. From 1971 to 1973 he holds the saxophone/flute chair alongside Steve Grossman in Elvin Jones's group, documented on Genesis (1971), Live at the Lighthouse (1972), Merry Go Round (1972), and Mr. Jones (1973, with Thad Jones on flugelhorn), all for Blue Note. Liebman later describes Jones's uncompromising demand for total commitment on the bandstand as a formative lesson in professionalism. He then joins Miles Davis's electric group, appearing on soprano saxophone on five of the six tracks of On the Corner (recorded June 1972, Columbia) and on flute on two tracks of the sprawling compilation Get Up with It (1974, Columbia). His final performance with the band is captured on Dark Magus, recorded live at Carnegie Hall on March 30, 1974, and first issued in Japan in 1977, with Al Foster on drums alongside Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, Michael Henderson, and James Mtume.

Liebman leaves Davis's band in 1974 to lead his own working group, co-founding Lookout Farm with pianist Richie Beirach, bassist Frank Tusa, drummer Jeff Williams, and tabla player Badal Roy. The band's self-titled debut, recorded that October, becomes his first release for ECM and wins a DownBeat readers' poll award for album of the year in a 1974 critics' survey category; the group tours the United States, Canada, India, Japan, and Europe through 1976. In 1977 Liebman undertakes a world tour with pianist Chick Corea, and the following year he forms a quintet featuring guitarist John Scofield, pianist Kenny Kirkland, and trumpeter Terumasa Hino, a lineup he leads into 1980.

In 1981 Liebman and Beirach co-found Quest, a collaborative quartet completed at various points by bassists George Mraz or Ron McClure and drummers Al Foster or Billy Hart; the group records seven albums through 1991 and reunites periodically afterward. Liebman's Homage to John Coltrane (1987, Owl Records) wins the Académie du Jazz's Grand Prix du Disque, one of several tributes to Coltrane's music he records across his career, including Joy: The Music of John Coltrane (1993) and, decades later, Compassion: The Music of John Coltrane (2017) with fellow saxophonist Joe Lovano. From 1991 to 2012 he leads the Dave Liebman Group with guitarist Vic Juris, releasing nearly twenty albums, and in 1989 he founds the International Association of Schools of Jazz (IASJ), an organization now linking jazz programs in more than twenty countries, serving continuously as its artistic director. He is named an NEA Jazz Master in 2011, the highest honor the United States government bestows in the field, and is made an Officier of France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009.

Liebman continues to record and perform prolifically into his late seventies, leading ensembles including Expansions (formed 2013), the Dave Liebman Big Band, and the long-running duo We3, while remaining artist-in-residence at Manhattan School of Music and a guest lecturer at Berklee College of Music. Recent releases include New Now (2022), Live at Smalls (2023), CODA(s) (2023), and Beingness (2025), maintaining a release pace that has produced close to two hundred albums as a leader or co-leader across five decades. He remains based in the Northeast United States and married to oboist and composer Caris Visentin Liebman since 1987.

Liebman is best known for a soprano saxophone sound of exceptional focus and vocal quality, built on the chromatic, motivically driven vocabulary he absorbed from John Coltrane and then codified in his own instructional writing, most notably A Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody. DownBeat's critics have ranked him among the top three soprano saxophonists in its annual poll every year since 1973, a run matched by almost no one else on the instrument. His catalog moves comfortably between idioms that many players treat as separate careers: the tribal electric funk of Miles Davis's early-1970s group, the free-floating modal explorations of Lookout Farm and Quest, straight-ahead standards dates, and structured chamber-jazz writing for larger ensembles. As an educator he has shaped several generations of saxophonists directly through the IASJ and his widely translated method books, and critics and peers alike, including saxophonists Joe Lovano and Michael Brecker, have cited his combination of harmonic rigor and emotional directness as a model for how to extend Coltrane's legacy without simply imitating it.