George Edward Coleman was born March 8, 1935 in Memphis, in a city whose public schools were turning out an extraordinary run of players at exactly that moment. He went to Manassas High School alongside pianist Harold Mabern, trumpeter Booker Little, alto saxophonist Frank Strozier, Hank Crawford and Charles Lloyd. He heard Charlie Parker on record at fifteen, taught himself alto saxophone with no formal lessons, and worked out harmony by ear well enough that within a few years other Memphis musicians were coming to him for it. He worked in Ray Charles's early band, and in 1953 joined B.B. King, who needed a tenor player and handed Coleman a tenor saxophone to make it happen. That switch, made for a paycheck on the blues circuit, defined the rest of his career. Sources disagree slightly on the year: the National Endowment for the Arts dates the King job to 1952, when Coleman was seventeen, while Wikipedia and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame both give 1953 and point to the King recording "Woke Up This Morning."

Coleman left for Chicago in 1956 with Booker Little, working there with Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin and drummer Walter Perkins's MJT+3 before moving on to New York. On August 25, 1957 he turned up on two separate Blue Note dates, playing alto on the Manhattan Towers organ jam that produced Jimmy Smith's House Party and The Sermon! and playing both tenor and alto on Lee Morgan's City Lights. He joined Max Roach's quintet in 1958, stayed about two years, and recorded Deeds, Not Words (cut in New York on September 4, 1958), The Max Roach 4 Plays Charlie Parker and Max Roach + 4 at Newport. The same period produced Booker Little 4 & Max Roach, taped at Nola Studios in October 1958, and Down Home Reunion, a 1959 United Artists date billed to the "Young Men from Memphis" that put Coleman, Little, Strozier, Louis Smith and the Newborn brothers on one record.

From 1959 to 1962 he held the tenor chair in trombonist Slide Hampton's octet, a tightly arranged eight-piece band that worked as one of the better finishing schools in New York. The octet cut Sister Salvation (Atlantic, 1960), Somethin' Sanctified (Atlantic, 1961) and Slide Hampton and His Horn of Plenty for Strand, and toured Europe, recording Exodus in Paris on November 14 and 18, 1962. Coleman also worked with Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb and organist Wild Bill Davis in these years, and appeared on Frank Strozier's Long Night (Jazzland, 1962) and Booker Little's Booker Little and Friend.

In 1963 Miles Davis hired him to replace Hank Mobley, and Coleman became the first tenor player in the rhythm section that would become Davis's second great quintet, with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. He is on Seven Steps to Heaven (Columbia CL 2051, issued September 1963), on the Antibes festival set released as Miles Davis in Europe, and on the February 12, 1964 Philharmonic Hall benefit concert that Columbia split into two very different albums: the ballad program My Funny Valentine, released in April 1965, and the up-tempo 'Four' & More, held back until 1966. Coleman left in the spring of 1964, followed briefly by Sam Rivers and then permanently by Wayne Shorter. A year later Hancock called him back for Maiden Voyage, recorded at Van Gelder Studio on March 17, 1965, where Coleman's tenor sits inside one of the most-copied small-group records of the decade. He spent 1965 and 1966 with Lionel Hampton and cut the run of Prestige quintet sessions with Chet Baker that the label eventually spread across five separate LPs.

The next decade was the busiest stretch of his sideman life and the start of his own. He recorded four albums with Elvin Jones, beginning with the Village Vanguard set of March 20, 1968 and continuing through Poly-Currents (taped September 26, 1969), Mr. Jones and Time Capsule. He became a first-call horn for organ dates, working with Shirley Scott, Charles Earland, Don Patterson, Jack McDuff and Big John Patton, and he cut three Prestige albums with his Memphis schoolmate Harold Mabern. In December 1975 he joined pianist Cedar Walton, Sam Jones and Billy Higgins for Eastern Rebellion, the record that named a co-op band Coleman would keep returning to for decades of archival releases. He played alto and tenor on Charles Mingus's Three or Four Shades of Blues in March 1977. From the early 1970s he also led his own groups, most ambitiously the George Coleman Octet, an all-horn front line captured on Revival, recorded November 2 and 3, 1977 with Junior Cook, Frank Strozier, Mario Rivera, Danny Moore, Mabern, Lisle Atkinson and Idris Muhammad. His first widely circulated leader albums came from the Dutch label Timeless: the duo record Meditation with Catalan pianist Tete Montoliu (February 1977) and the quartet date Amsterdam After Dark (recorded December 29, 1978).

Coleman spent the 1980s and 1990s alternating leader dates with a long teaching career at Mannes College, Long Island University and New York University. The two Theresa albums Manhattan Panorama (live at the Village Vanguard, 1985) and At Yoshi's (1989) put his working quartet with Mabern on record, and My Horns of Plenty (Birdology, 1991) is the album where he laid soprano, alto and tenor side by side on one program. He received the Jazz Foundation of America's Life Achievement Award in 1997, entered the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2012, and was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2015. The last decade produced more leader records than the two before it: A Master Speaks (2016) and The Quartet (2019) for Smoke Sessions, two organ-quartet albums for SteepleChase with Brian Charette and his son, drummer George Coleman Jr., the live Live at Smalls Jazz Club (recorded March 15, 2022), the septet date Big George with One for All, and George Coleman with Strings, a Bill Dobbins-arranged album HighNote issued in 2025. He plays the tenor chair throughout Israeli guitarist Yotam Silberstein's Standards (2024) and guests on "Tenor Madness" on Standards, Vol. 2 (2025), and he appears on Emmet Cohen's Universal Truth (Mack Avenue, May 2026). In December 2025 the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation named him the recipient of its fifteenth annual Satchmo Award. He was still working a New York bandstand at ninety-one, playing the midtown club The Pocket with his son on July 17, 2026.

Coleman's standing among musicians rests on harmony. He came up teaching himself Charlie Parker's language off records, and he never stopped treating a chord sequence as something to be exhausted rather than negotiated: long, unbroken eighth-note lines that reach for the upper structures of a chord and land cleanly at any tempo, delivered in a big centered tone with almost no rhetorical grandstanding. That is why the tenor chair on Seven Steps to Heaven went to him, and why the phrase most often attached to his name is the title of his own Ronnie Scott's album, Playing Changes. The same command made him one of the most sought-after teachers of his generation, at Mannes, Long Island University and NYU, and the reason younger tenor players from Bob Berg onward went looking for him. He is a real multi-instrumentalist rather than a doubler: alto on the 1957 Blue Note organ sessions, on Mal Waldron's Sweet Love, Bitter soundtrack and on the Mingus date, and soprano, alto and tenor together on My Horns of Plenty. Critics have consistently placed him just outside the small circle of tenor players who changed the instrument and squarely inside the smaller circle of those who mastered it, with the Penguin Guide and AllMusic both treating the Theresa quartet albums as the clearest recorded evidence.