Earl Wesley Gardner, Jr. was born in New York City on April 19, 1950 and went through the city's own conservatory pipeline, the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. He then left for Philadelphia, where he studied at Temple University and started working professionally. One dated glimpse of him there survives in an oral history the University of the Arts music library recorded with its faculty: the saxophonist Bill Zaccagni, who led the Temple big band without pay in 1972 and 1973, remembered its trumpet section as Earl Gardner, Stu Satalof, Rick Kerber, Jeff Jarvis and Kevin Rogers. He was twenty-two, and already sitting in a section that produced four working professionals.

He came back to New York in 1976 for one job, and it lasted twenty-nine years. The job was lead trumpet in Thad Jones and Mel Lewis's orchestra, the Monday-night band at the Village Vanguard. His first document with it is almost immediate: Rhoda Scott In New York, cut live in the city on June 2 and 3, 1976. Three months later the band was in Germany, and Live In Munich, taped at the Domicile Club on September 9, 1976, is the record that shows what he was hired for. He is one of four trumpets, alongside the veteran lead player Al Porcino, Frank Gordon and Lynn Nicholson, behind a reed section holding Pepper Adams on baritone, and he takes the trumpet solo on Thad Jones's "Central Park North." By the following summer the chair had become formally his: on It Only Happens Every Time, recorded with the Swedish singer Monica Zetterlund in Finland and Stockholm in August 1977, the credit reads lead trumpet and flugelhorn, and it reads that way for most of the next quarter-century. That first New York year also produced a very different credit, the one that would become the pattern for half his working life: he is in the Miami Horns on Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes' I Don't Want To Go Home, a rock and soul record made for Epic in 1976.

The band changed its name twice around him and he stayed put. Thad Jones left for Copenhagen in 1979 and it became Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra, which cut Naturally for Telarc in March 1979 and then, in concert at the Vanguard in February 1980, a whole program of Bob Brookmeyer's writing with Clark Terry guesting. Two years later came the record that fixes the section on paper. Make Me Smile & Other New Works By Bob Brookmeyer, taped at the Vanguard over five nights in January 1982, numbers every chair in the band: Gardner first trumpet, Gary Smulyan fifth on baritone, Dick Oatts first alto, Kenny Garrett second, Joe Lovano third on tenor, Tom Harrell fourth trumpet, with Jim McNeely and Marc Johnson behind them. Live In Montreux the same year gave him a solo on Herbie Hancock's "Wiggle Waggle." 20 Years At The Village Vanguard followed on Atlantic in 1986, and in February 1988 the band recorded five nights at the club direct to two-track, producing Soft Lights And Hot Music and both volumes of The Definitive Thad Jones, with Gardner credited lead on all three. Lewis died in February 1990; the band made To You: A Tribute To Mel Lewis and carried on as a cooperative under a new name, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, with Gardner still at the top of the trumpets. He is on its first four records, Lickety Split (1997), Thad Jones Legacy (1999), Can I Persuade You? (2001) and The Way (2004), credited lead on three of the four.

The job most people have actually heard him do is on television. Gardner joined the Saturday Night Live house band in 1985 and held the trumpet chair until 2022, thirty-seven seasons, which makes it one of the longest tenures any musician has had on American network television. The band recorded exactly once, as G.E. Smith and the Saturday Night Live Band on Get A Little in 1992, where Gardner plays throughout and takes the lead credit on "Sloozy." Alongside it ran a Broadway pit career of the same kind: Annie, Anything Goes, Come Fly Away, La Cage aux Folles, The Boy from Oz, Side Show, Play On!, Saturday Night Fever and Me and My Girl, of which only Play On!, the 1997 musical built on Duke Ellington's songbook, left a cast recording with his name on it. The awards broadcasts came with the territory: the Grammys, the Tonys, the Emmys, the Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center, plus Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the Late Show with David Letterman, the Today show and Good Morning America.

Underneath the television work, he was the lead trumpet in an unusually large share of the important New York big bands of the period, and four of those chairs produced Grammy-winning records. He was in the McCoy Tyner Big Band for all three of its award winners, Uptown/Downtown from the Blue Note in November 1988, The Turning Point and Journey; in Joe Henderson's Big Band; and in the Dave Holland Big Band for What Goes Around, cut at Avatar in January 2001 in a trumpet section with Duane Eubanks and Alex Sipiagin. He played in Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra on Dream Keeper, in Carla Bley's big band on Looking For America and Appearing Nightly, in Jon Faddis's Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, in the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Star Big Band under Slide Hampton, and on six Mingus Big Band records between 1996 and 2010, taking the lead chair on Blues & Politics. Add the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band, Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, the Mike Gibbs Orchestra, the Manhattan Jazz Orchestra and the Bill Warfield Big Band, and the leader dates that used a section: Stanley Turrentine, Bobby Hutcherson, Faddis, Zoot Sims with Benny Carter's charts, J.J. Johnson's Brass Orchestra, the Heath Brothers of Jimmy Heath, Tom Harrell, Andy Bey, Carmen Lundy, Nnenna Freelon, Hank Crawford, Nancy Wilson and Betty Carter, whose big band he was in at Aaron Davis Hall in March 1992 for a concert Jazz at Lincoln Center did not release until 2019.

The other half of the listing is commercial New York, and it is enormous. His trumpet is on Paul Simon's Graceland, in the horn section of "Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes"; on Talking Heads' Naked; on David Bowie's Never Let Me Down; on Rod Stewart, Laurie Anderson, Mariah Carey, Santana, TLC, Tony! Toni! Toné!, Aretha Franklin, Ricky Martin, Katy Perry, Eddie Murphy, James Ingram and David Byrne records; on the disco and boogie sides that came out of New York's studios in the early 1980s, D-Train, Kleeer, Change and the Jammers among them; on Eumir Deodato and Cornell Dupree dates; and, through the Japanese fusion connection, on Casiopea and Kazumi Watanabe albums. He plays a Cannonball 789 RL trumpet, on the show and in the pit.

One late credit is the reason many listeners outside the big-band audience have heard him at all, and it is a small thing in a long career. In December 2002 the John Scofield Band recorded Up All Night at Long View Farm Studios in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, with Avi Bortnick on rhythm guitar, samples and loops, Andy Hess on bass and Adam Deitch on drums. The following January four horn players went into The Hit Factory in New York and overdubbed a section Scofield had arranged himself: Gardner on trumpet, Smulyan on baritone saxophone, Craig Handy on tenor, flute and bass clarinet, and Jim Pugh on trombone. All four carry the same track restriction, six of the album's eleven pieces, and none of them was ever in the room with the rhythm section. Two years later Gardner was back for Scofield's Ray Charles record, That's What I Say, on four tracks. What the casting of that horn section actually reflects is a working relationship two decades old: Gardner and Smulyan appear together on twenty-eight releases beginning with Make Me Smile in January 1982, through the Mel Lewis and Vanguard orchestras, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, the Mingus Big Band, and the Holland and Bley big bands, and Gardner is one of the three trumpets on Smulyan's own Blue Suite, cut in Brooklyn three years before the Scofield date.

Gardner is a lead player first, which is a specific and largely invisible job: he sets the pitch, the phrasing, the articulation and the volume that four other brass players match, and he does it for a living rather than as a route to solo space. Down Beat gave him a feature under the title "Lead Trumpet Supreme," and the qualities that title points at are the ones his credits record, since the mark of the work is that a band sounds like one instrument rather than five. Thad Jones and Mel Lewis hired him at twenty-six and the chair outlasted both of them and one change of the band's name, which is the strongest available evidence about his reliability; so is the fact that Sue Mingus, Jon Faddis, McCoy Tyner, Carla Bley, Dave Holland and Charlie Haden all wanted the same player at the top of their trumpet sections in the same decades. He solos less often than his catalog might suggest and the credited spots are worth naming for that reason: "Central Park North" on Live In Munich, "Wiggle Waggle" on Live In Montreux, "Tip Toe" on the second volume of The Definitive Thad Jones, "Sloozy" on the Saturday Night Live band's album. He doubles on flugelhorn throughout, and a handful of records use him on flugelhorn alone, Andy Bey's Tuesdays In Chinatown among them. In the New York studio world he is known as Earl "Big Bird" Gardner, a nickname old enough and settled enough that Discogs carries it as one of his name variations.