Hampton Barnett Hawes Jr. was born November 13, 1928, in Los Angeles, the son of Hampton Hawes Sr., minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church, and Gertrude Holman, the church's pianist. Despite that musical household he taught himself piano, and by his teens he was already working Los Angeles's Central Avenue scene alongside Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Art Pepper, Sonny Criss, and Teddy Edwards. At eighteen he spent eight months in Howard McGhee's quintet at the Hi De Ho Club, sharing the stand with Charlie Parker. His first recordings date to 1947, and between 1948 and 1952 he worked steadily at clubs including The Haig, The Lighthouse, and the Surf Club (a February 12, 1952 double-header with Art Pepper later surfaced on Xanadu as The Early Show and The Late Show), cutting his first sessions as a leader for the Discovery label that same period.

Drafted into the Army in 1952, Hawes was stationed at Camp Drake near Tokyo, where he played officers'-club dates and sat in around the city's jazz venues, leaving a lasting impression on the emerging postwar Japanese jazz scene, including a young Toshiko Akiyoshi. Narcotics trouble caught up with him there: he was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned in Tokyo before being sent back to California in 1954 to finish his sentence.

Once free, Hawes formed a trio with bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Chuck Thompson, and their June 28, 1955 session for Contemporary Records began a run of albums, Hampton Hawes Trio, Vol. 1: The Trio (1955), This Is Hampton Hawes, Vol. 2 (1956), and Everybody Likes Hampton Hawes, Vol. 3 (1956), now regarded among the finest small-group records to come out of the West Coast. He added guitarist Jim Hall for the November 12, 1956 marathon that produced All Night Session!, issued across three LPs (Contemporary C-3543 through C-3545) as a single continuous overnight date with no retakes. The run of records won him Down Beat's "New Star of the Year" and Metronome's "Arrival of the Year" for 1956. In New York the following year he recorded July 9, 1957 as the ostensible co-leader, alongside drummer Dannie Richmond, of Charles Mingus's Mingus Three (Jubilee), and on May 18, 1957, at Van Gelder Studio, he sat in on piano for a Prestige date with trombonist Curtis Fuller, French horns David Amram and Julius Watkins, and alto saxophonist Sahib Shihab, issued as Curtis Fuller and Hampton Hawes With French Horns (Status ST 8305). That session was one half of Prestige's multi-date "Modern Jazz Survey" sampler project; the other half, a baritone-saxophone date pairing Pepper Adams and Cecil Payne with Mal Waldron on piano, was later folded into the 2023 John Coltrane compilation Dakar. Back in Los Angeles, Hawes cut Hampton Hawes!!!! - Four! (January 27, 1958, with Barney Kessel, Red Mitchell, and Shelly Manne) and For Real! (March 17, 1958, with Harold Land, Scott LaFaro, and Frank Butler), his first date built around a horn player.

Arrested on his thirtieth birthday, November 13, 1958, on federal heroin charges, Hawes received a ten-year sentence. In the gap between trial and sentencing he recorded The Sermon (November 24 and 25, 1958, with bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Stan Levey), a set of spirituals and gospel material dedicated to his father, who was then retiring from the pulpit. Imprisoned at the federal medical facility in Fort Worth, Hawes watched John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address and became convinced the new president would eventually pardon him; he pursued executive clemency with help from friends and fellow musicians on the outside, and in August 1963 Kennedy granted it, one of only 43 such pardons issued in the final year of his presidency.

Hawes returned to recording with The Green Leaves of Summer (February 17, 1964) and Here and Now (May 12, 1965, with bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Donald Bailey), but the American jazz audience was shrinking fast in the wake of the Beatles, and work grew harder to find. A ten-month tour of Europe and Asia in 1967-68, undertaken while his wife Jacque was on a teaching sabbatical, showed him how large his reputation had grown overseas: he recorded almost continuously, cutting Hamp's Piano (November 8, 1967, in the Black Forest with bassist Eberhard Weber), the duo album Key for Two with pianist Martial Solal (Paris, January 1968), Spanish Steps (Paris, March 10, 1968, with Jimmy Woode and Arthur Taylor), and, in Tokyo that May, both the solo album The Challenge and the sextet date Jam Session with Japanese saxophonists Hidehiko Matsumoto and Akira Miyazawa.

The early 1970s found Hawes doubling on electric piano for a run of Prestige albums with a harder, funk-inflected edge, Universe (1972), Blues for Walls (January 1973, Berkeley), and Playin' in the Yard (recorded live at Montreux, July 7, 1973), alongside a return to straight-ahead piano trio work documented on Live at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago (June 1973, with Cecil McBee and Roy Haynes). His memoir, Raise Up Off Me, written with Don Asher and published in 1974, told the story of his addiction, his ambivalent friendship with Parker, and his years inside; it won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 1975 and carried an introduction by critic Gary Giddins calling it a major contribution to jazz literature. Hawes's last studio work included the 1976 duo sessions with bassist Charlie Haden that became As Long as There's Music (Artists House, 1978) and Hampton Hawes at the Piano (August 14, 1976, with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne). He died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 22, 1977, in Los Angeles, at 48.

Hawes came up inside the bebop language of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, by his own account most affected by "Bird's conception of time," but he played with a cleaner articulation than Powell and folded in the boogie-woogie drive of Earl Hines, the gospel harmony he grew up hearing in his father's church, and touches of Nat King Cole; later in his career some Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans phrasing crept in as well. He became known for an assertive locked-hands block-chord style in which the top note of each voicing rang out clearly over the rest, and for percussive double-note blues figures and a rhythmically insistent comping approach that younger hard-bop pianists, Horace Silver among them, absorbed into their own playing. His stint stationed near Tokyo left a direct mark on the first generation of modern Japanese jazz musicians, and his own account of addiction and a decade lost to imprisonment, told in Raise Up Off Me, remains one of the most candid firsthand narratives in jazz literature, distinct from and often compared with Art Pepper's later memoir Straight Life.