Joanne Brackeen was born Joanne Grogan on July 26, 1938, in Ventura, California. She had no formal jazz training to speak of: after early piano lessons that didn't take, she taught herself by ear, transcribing eight recordings of pop pianist Frankie Carle's solos in six months at age eleven. She was working professional dance-band gigs by twelve, earning around ten dollars a night. The Los Angeles Conservatory offered her a full scholarship as a teenager; she turned it down, preferring the education she was already getting on the bandstand. What redirected her permanently toward jazz was hearing Charlie Parker, followed by close study of Bud Powell's playing on the Jazz at Massey Hall recording.

By her mid-teens she had formed her first trio, with bassist Herbie Lewis and drummer Doug Cox, and was sitting in at Los Angeles jam sessions alongside musicians who would go on to define West Coast jazz's more exploratory edge, including Billy Higgins, Scott LaFaro, Charlie Haden, and Ornette Coleman. Through the late 1950s she worked steadily around Los Angeles with saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Teddy Edwards, Harold Land, and Charles Lloyd. It was in this scene that she met and married saxophonist Charles Brackeen.

In 1965, pregnant with the fourth of the couple's children, she relocated with her family to New York. The years that followed were demanding rather than glamorous: raising four young children in modest East Village apartments while working to keep her playing sharp. Her harmonic language deepened during this period under the pull of McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman, and Chick Corea, three very different pianistic and compositional influences that she absorbed without ever settling into an imitation of any of them.

The turning point came in 1969. Brackeen, living near the club Slugs' Saloon, went to hear Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and asked the house pianist if she could sit in; he agreed, and Blakey, impressed by what he heard, hired her on the spot. She became the first woman ever to perform and record as a member of the Jazz Messengers, a group that had been an all-male finishing school for major jazz talent since the mid-1950s. Blakey's own career and bandleading legacy are covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Her tenure, which ran from 1969 to 1972, opened almost immediately with a seven-week tour of Japan and Korea comprising 44 concerts in 42 days. At her first Tokyo performance, Blakey abruptly walked the rest of the band off the stand mid-set and left her alone at the piano to work through "Just One of Those Things" solo — an unannounced, sink-or-swim initiation into solo performance that she credited as formative. The Messengers' February 19, 1970 live recording in Tokyo, later issued as Jazz Messengers '70 on Catalyst Records (a small independent jazz label, not a standalone album title), captures this lineup — Blakey, Brackeen, trumpeter Bill Hardman, tenor saxophonist Carlos Garnett, and bassist Jan Arnet — and stands as her only studio-quality document from the Jazz Messengers years.

After leaving Blakey's band in 1972, Brackeen worked extensively as a sideman with two more towering, very different leaders: saxophonist Joe Henderson from 1972 to 1975, whose harmonic sophistication she singled out as a major influence, and Stan Getz from 1975 to 1977, who — unusually for a leader of his stature — built sets around her original compositions rather than only his own book, treating her tunes the way a leader might feature a vocalist.

She began recording as a leader in 1975 with Snooze (Choice Records), a trio session with bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Billy Hart that AllMusic's Scott Yanow called "a very impressive effort" with chord voicings that were "thick and sometimes quite dense" yet "strangely accessible" — a fair early description of a style she would keep refining for the next five decades. The record was reissued on CD as Six Ate by Candid in 1996. A remarkably productive run followed on small European-connected labels: New True Illusion and Invitation (both trio dates with bassist Clint Houston and drummer Billy Hart) in 1976, Tring-A-Ling (1978, adding tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker to the working trio), AFT and Trinkets and Things (both 1978, both featuring guitarist Ryo Kawasaki), Prism (1979, with Eddie Gomez), and the solo album Mythical Magic (1979, MPS).

The turn of the decade brought her most celebrated working group: a trio with bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Jack DeJohnette, captured across Keyed In (1979) and Ancient Dynasty (1980, adding Joe Henderson on tenor), both on Tappan Zee/Columbia and produced by Bob James, then Special Identity (1981, Antilles), produced by Helen Keane. The Penguin Guide to Jazz would later single out Special Identity as "one of the high points" of her entire catalogue. The same Gomez/DeJohnette configuration reunited over a decade later for Where Legends Dwell (1992, Ken Music).

Brackeen signed to Concord Jazz in the mid-1980s, opening with Havin' Fun (1985, a quartet with Cecil McBee and Al Foster) and then Fi-Fi Goes to Heaven (1987), which paired her with a rhythm section of McBee and Foster alongside two young horn players just beginning their own major careers: trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonist Branford Marsalis. In 1989 she recorded Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, Volume 1 (released 1990), the inaugural entry in Concord's long-running solo piano series recorded at a private home recital hall in Berkeley — a significant honor, as the series went on to document more than forty major jazz pianists performing unaccompanied. She continued through Concord and Concord Picante with Breath of Brazil (1991, an Eddie Gomez/Duduka Da Fonseca session leaning into Brazilian rhythm) and Take a Chance (1994), and released independently through the 1990s on smaller labels: Turnaround (1995, Evidence, with Donald Harrison and Marvin "Smitty" Smith), Is It Really True (1995, Konnex, reuniting with Billy Hart), and Power Talk (1994, Turnipseed).

Her most honored later album is Pink Elephant Magic (1999, Arkadia Jazz), a quintet date with bassist John Patitucci, drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez, percussionist Jamey Haddad, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and saxophonists Chris Potter and David Liebman, with a guest vocal from Kurt Elling. Potter's solo on the track "In Vogue" earned a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo in January 2000 — Potter's own career is covered separately on JazzProfiles.com. She followed it with Popsicle Illusion (2000, also Arkadia Jazz).

Brackeen's honors accumulated steadily over her career: the International Association for Jazz Education's Outstanding Educator Award, International Women in Jazz's Living Legend Award, the BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award (2014), and two National Endowment for the Arts commissioning grants, culminating in her 2018 recognition as an NEA Jazz Master — the United States' highest official honor for a jazz musician, awarded for a body of work spanning her Jazz Messengers breakthrough, more than two dozen albums as a leader, and roughly a hundred recorded original compositions out of the more than 300 she has written. Bill Evans once described her as "a pianist-composer of phenomenal capacity." Since 1994 she has taught at Berklee College of Music, first as a weekly guest and eventually as a Distinguished Professor — becoming the first NEA Jazz Master to receive the honor while still actively teaching there — and she has also served as a guest professor at the New School's jazz program in New York. She has performed in 46 countries over the course of her career and continues to teach and tour.

Brackeen's playing is often described by critics as unpredictable in the best sense: harmonically dense, rhythmically restless, and never content to resolve where a listener expects. Her foundation is bebop, absorbed by ear from Charlie Parker and Bud Powell recordings as a teenager, but the mature style layers three later influences on top of that base — McCoy Tyner's modal weight, Ornette Coleman's harmonic freedom, and Chick Corea's rhythmic and compositional angularity — without her ever settling into a copy of any of the three. The result made her one of the defining post-bop pianists to emerge in the 1970s, equally comfortable in the tight, telepathic trio format she favored for most of her leader career (most enduringly with Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette) and in the fully unaccompanied setting of Live at Maybeck Recital Hall. Her 1969-1972 tenure as the only woman ever to record and perform with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers remains a landmark in itself: a hard-swinging, historically male-dominated proving ground that she entered, by her own account, simply by asking to sit in.