George Rufus Adams was born April 29, 1940, in Covington, Georgia, took up piano at eleven, and switched to tenor saxophone in high school, where the paying work was in local rhythm-and-blues bands. He studied at Clark College in Atlanta and took flute lessons from Wayman Carver, the reed player from Chick Webb's orchestra who had been the first musician to make the flute a serious jazz solo instrument. In 1961 Adams went on the road backing Sam Cooke. Two years later he moved to Ohio and spent the middle of the decade inside the organ-combo circuit, including a long stretch in Cleveland with Bill Doggett, work that left a permanent mark: for the rest of his career the blues and the church were the floor under everything he played, however far out the music went.

He moved to New York in 1968 and found steady jazz employment quickly, joining drummer Roy Haynes's Hip Ensemble (heard on Hip Ensemble, 1971, and Senyah, 1972, both for Mainstream) and passing through Art Blakey's band. He also kept a foot in funk, recording with the Fatback Band on its early-1970s Perception sessions, which is why his name turns up on rare-groove compilations alongside his jazz credits.

The association that made his name was Charles Mingus's. Adams joined the bassist's group in 1973 and stayed until 1976, arriving with pianist Don Pullen on Mingus Moves, cut at Atlantic Recording Studios on October 29-31, 1973 with Dannie Richmond on drums. He was on the bandstand for Mingus at Carnegie Hall in January 1974, in a horn line that also held Rahsaan Roland Kirk, John Handy and Charles McPherson, and he anchored the December 27, 28 and 30, 1974 sessions that produced Changes One and Changes Two, singing the vocal on "Devil Blues" as well as taking the tenor solos. He returned for Cumbia & Jazz Fusion in 1977. Touring Europe with Mingus in 1975 also gave Adams his first records under his own name, both made in Rome for the Italian Horo label with Pullen and Richmond: Jazz a Confronto 22, recorded March 29, 1975, on which he plays tenor and piano at the same time on "Song of Adam," and Suite for Swingers, recorded July 28, 1976.

Mingus's orbit fed directly into the rest of the decade. Adams joined Gil Evans's orchestra in 1975 and worked with it on and off for more than a decade, from There Comes a Time through Priestess (recorded 1977), the live Little Wing taped in Germany on October 19, 1978, and the Monday Night Orchestra's Live at Sweet Basil sets of 1984. From 1976 he worked intermittently with McCoy Tyner, appearing on The Greeting (1978), Horizon (recorded April 1979) and Things Ain't What They Used to Be (1990). He played the Antibes Jazz Festival on July 20, 1977 with trumpeter Hannibal Marvin Peterson, a partner he kept returning to, and in May 1979 he made the one record of his career for ECM, Sound Suggestions, an international sextet with Kenny Wheeler, Heinz Sauer, Richard Beirach, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette. One of his three originals on it was called "Got Somethin' Good for You," a title he would hand to a very different band six years later.

The George Adams-Don Pullen Quartet, formed in 1979 with Cameron Brown on bass and Dannie Richmond on drums, is the group he is remembered for. It took its shape straight out of Mingus's last working band, two of the four having played in it, and it kept the same appetite for gospel, calypso, ballads, free playing and Ellington inside a single set. Its first recordings were made in Milan on November 2 and 3, 1979, live at the Ciak (issued as All That Funk and More Funk on Palcoscenico) and in the studio at Barigozzi for Soul Note (Don't Lose Control). A run of albums for the Dutch Timeless label followed, most of them cut in Holland: Earth Beams (August 1980), Life Line (April 1981), City Gates (March 1983), Decisions (February 1984) and Live at Montmartre, taped in Copenhagen on April 4 and 5, 1985 with John Scofield added on guitar. A single night at the Village Vanguard, August 19, 1983, yielded two Soul Note albums, Live at Village Vanguard and its 1986 second volume. The last two were for Blue Note: Breakthrough, recorded April 30, 1986 at RCA Studio A with liner notes by Amiri Baraka, and Song Everlasting, recorded April 21, 1987. Twelve albums came out of eight years. Through the same period Adams ran a parallel co-led quintet with Dannie Richmond and trombonist Jimmy Knepper, with Hugh Lawson on piano, which made Hand to Hand (1980) and Gentlemen's Agreement (1983) for Soul Note.

Alongside the quartet ran a much rougher project. Adams had first recorded with guitarist James Blood Ulmer at a 1977 New York session that stayed in the can until 1990, when In+Out issued it as Revealing. By 1985 the two were co-leading Phalanx, a quartet that set Adams's blues-and-church tenor against Ulmer's harmolodic guitar. Its earliest surviving document is a concert at the Friedrichstadtpalast in East Berlin on June 23, 1985, released five years later as Jazzbühne Berlin '85, with Amin Ali on electric bass and Calvin Weston on drums; the studio debut, Got Something Good for You, was cut in Hamburg that September for Moers Music, borrowing the title of Adams's own ECM tune. In late 1986 or early 1987 the rhythm section changed to Sirone on bass and Rashied Ali on drums, and that lineup made both of the group's records for the Japanese label DIW, Original Phalanx (February 1987) and In Touch (February 1988).

Dannie Richmond's death in March 1988 effectively ended the quartet; Lewis Nash filled the chair briefly before the group stopped. Adams put together a new band with Hugh Lawson, Cameron Brown and the young drummer Gregory Hutchinson, and signed to Blue Note and its Japanese sister imprint Somethin' Else for three very different leader records: Nightingale, recorded August 19 and 20, 1988 with Sirone and Victor Lewis, a ballad program running from "Bridge Over Troubled Water" to Thomas A. Dorsey's "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"; America (1989), an entire album of American vernacular song, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "The Star Spangled Banner" included, with Adams singing on several tracks; and Old Feeling, recorded March 11 and 12, 1991, which opens with Mingus's "Better Git Hit in Yo' Soul." He also played in the Mingus Dynasty repertory band and was among the musicians assembled for the 1989 recording of Mingus's Epitaph. His last documented session was in Tokyo on December 16, 1991, a version of "Georgia on My Mind" with the New York Unit, released in 1993 on an album the group titled Tribute to George Adams. After roughly a year of worsening breathing trouble, Adams passed away in New York City on November 14, 1992, at fifty-two.

Adams had one of the largest tenor sounds of his generation and almost no interest in keeping it clean: a phrase would start as a plain blues line and end in a scream, a growl or a smear of overtones, and he could turn from that into an unhurried ballad without any visible seam. What held the extremes together was where he came from, the Georgia church and the Cleveland organ bars, so that even his freest playing kept the shape of a hymn or a shout underneath it. He sang too, in a hoarse, unschooled voice used sparingly and to real effect, on Charles Mingus's "Devil Blues" and across his own late records. Critics have tended to place him a step ahead of his contemporaries rather than beside them: the Penguin Guide to Jazz, reviewing the 1983 Village Vanguard set, heard him anticipating what David Murray would do with the instrument later in the decade. His standing rests less on any single date than on the range he covered without ever sounding like a tourist in any of it, from Mingus's book to Gil Evans's orchestral washes to the free-funk racket of Phalanx.