Walter Dewey Redman was born May 17, 1931, in Fort Worth, Texas, the nephew of swing-era bandleader Don Redman. He attended I.M. Terrell High School, where he played clarinet and then saxophone in a marching band that also included Ornette Coleman, Prince Lasha, and Charles Moffett. After briefly studying electrical engineering at the Tuskegee Institute, Redman earned a bachelor's degree in Industrial Arts from Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical University in 1953, switching from clarinet to alto and then tenor saxophone while there. He served two years in the U.S. Army, then pursued a master's degree in education at the University of North Texas, graduating in 1957, while teaching music in Texas public schools and freelancing as a saxophonist around Austin. In 1959 he moved to San Francisco, where he freelanced for several years, collaborating with clarinetist Donald Garrett and working alongside sidemen including Pharoah Sanders.

Redman's most celebrated association began in the late 1960s, when he joined the group led by Ornette Coleman, whom he had known since their days together in the Fort Worth high school band. Documented on records including New York Is Now! and Love Call (both 1968, Blue Note), Ornette at 12 (1968, Impulse!), Crisis (1969, Impulse!), the live Friends and Neighbors (1970, Flying Dutchman), and Science Fiction (1972, Columbia), Redman's tenor became the foil for Coleman's alto, matching the leader's harmolodic freedom with a tone rooted in the blues-drenched "Texas tenor" tradition. He also worked during this period with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra.

From 1971 to 1976, Redman was the saxophonist in pianist Keith Jarrett's "American Quartet," alongside Haden and drummer Paul Motian. The group's Impulse! and ECM albums, including Fort Yawuh (1973), Treasure Island (1974), Death and the Flower (1975), Backhand (1975), Byablue (1977), and Eyes of the Heart (recorded 1976, released 1979), are considered among Jarrett's finest work; The Survivors' Suite (recorded 1976, released 1977 on ECM) was named Jazz Album of the Year by Melody Maker in 1978. Redman had also appeared on Jarrett's earlier Atlantic session issued as El Juicio (The Judgement) in 1971 (later reissued as Birth) and on the Columbia album Expectations (1972).

In the mid-1970s Redman co-founded Old and New Dreams with fellow Coleman alumni Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and drummer Ed Blackwell, a cooperative quartet devoted to Coleman's book alongside original material. The group recorded four albums between 1977 and 1990: the self-titled Old and New Dreams (1977, Black Saint), a second self-titled album (1979, ECM), Playing (1981, ECM, recorded live in 1980), and A Tribute to Blackwell (recorded live in 1987, released 1990 on Black Saint). Redman contributed original compositions to the group's book, including "Dewey's Tune" and "Rushour."

Redman's own leader recordings began with sessions cut in San Francisco in 1966, eventually issued in 1975 as Look for the Black Star (Arista/Freedom); his debut released under his own name at the time was Tarik (1970, BYG Actuel), recorded in Paris with Ed Blackwell and Malachi Favors. He went on to record steadily as a leader through the 1970s and 1980s: The Ear of the Behearer (1973) and Coincide (1974, released 1975), both for Impulse!; Musics and Soundsigns (Galaxy, recorded in the same October 1978 sessions and released in 1979 and 1981); the duo album Red and Black in Willisau with Ed Blackwell (recorded live in 1980, released 1985 on Black Saint); and two albums billed to the Dewey Redman Quartet, The Struggle Continues (1982, ECM) and Living on the Edge (recorded 1989, released 1990, Black Saint), the latter featuring pianist Geri Allen.

In the early 1990s Redman began recording alongside his son, saxophonist Joshua Redman, on Choices (1992, Enja) and African Venus (recorded 1992, released 1994). He continued to lead and co-lead groups through the following decade, documented on In London (recorded live at Ronnie Scott's in 1996, released 1998 on Palmetto) and the trio album Momentum Space (recorded 1998, released 1999 on Verve) with Cecil Taylor and Elvin Jones. He was the subject of the 2001 documentary film Dewey Time, directed by Daniel Berman, and in February 2004 appeared as a special guest with Jazz at Lincoln Center for a concert devoted to the music of Ornette Coleman. Dewey Redman died of liver failure in Brooklyn, New York, on September 2, 2006, at age 75. His last recorded performance, from 2005, was issued posthumously as The Key of Life (2009, Vineyard Record Company); additional archival material appeared later as Look for the Other Black Star (2012, drawn from the 1966 session) and Pillars & Columns (2020, a live 1981 duo recording with bassist Mark Helias).

Redman built his sound on the "Texas tenor" lineage he absorbed as a Fort Worth teenager, a big, vocalized, blues-rooted tone that he carried directly into the outer reaches of free jazz. Working alongside Ornette Coleman, he matched the leader's harmolodic freedom without abandoning that grounding, and critics have long noted that his playing folded free-form abstraction into what AllMusic's Scott Yanow described as "a hard bop base," making Coleman's music sound more approachable without softening its edges. He was an early and idiosyncratic adopter of the Chinese suona (which he called a musette) as a jazz voice, using its reedy, vocal cry as a texture across dozens of recordings. Equally at home in the tightly composed settings of Keith Jarrett's American Quartet and the fully collective improvising of Old and New Dreams, Redman never achieved the wide contemporary recognition of some of his better-known bandmates, an irony compounded in his final years by his son Joshua Redman's mainstream visibility, but he is regarded by critics and fellow musicians as one of the most distinctive and influential tenor voices to emerge from the 1960s avant-garde.