Joshua Redman Shedroff was born February 1, 1969, in Berkeley, California, to the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman and Renee Shedroff, a dancer and librarian. He grew up with his mother, and his first musical environment was not a jazz club but the Center for World Music in Berkeley, where she studied South Indian dance and where his earliest lessons in improvisation came on recorder from the gamelan player Jody Diamond. He took up clarinet at nine and switched to tenor saxophone a year later, and he has always described himself as self-taught on the horn. The records he absorbed were as much John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cannonball Adderley and his father as the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Earth, Wind and Fire, Prince, the Police and Led Zeppelin. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986 after four years in its jazz ensemble.

Music was not the plan. Redman took a degree in social studies at Harvard University in 1991, graduating summa cum laude and elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and had already been accepted to Yale Law School. He deferred entrance for what he expected to be a single year and moved to Brooklyn to share rent with friends. Within months he was gigging across the New York scene with Brad Mehldau, Peter Martin, Mark Turner, Peter Bernstein, Roy Hargrove, Christian McBride, Kevin Hays and Jorge Rossy. In 1991 he won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition. He never went to law school.

Warner Bros. signed him almost immediately, and the run that followed made him the most visible young saxophonist in jazz. His self-titled debut appeared March 23, 1993, and drew a Grammy nomination; Wish, out that September, put him in a quartet with Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, three musicians a generation ahead of him, with two tracks cut live at the Village Vanguard. The touring version of that band, with Christian McBride in Haden's chair, became the Joshua Redman Quartet. MoodSwing, recorded over three days at the Power Station in March 1994 with Mehldau, McBride and the then almost unknown drummer Brian Blade, is the record most often named as the definitive statement of that period. A week of Vanguard nights in March 1995 produced Spirit of the Moment, with Peter Martin on piano and Christopher Thomas on bass. He kept moving: Freedom in the Groove (1996) added Peter Bernstein's guitar and a backbeat, Timeless Tales (For Changing Times) (1998) built a whole program from standards and songs by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder and Prince, and Beyond (2000) and Passage of Time (2001) introduced a new working quartet of Aaron Goldberg, Reuben Rogers and Gregory Hutchinson.

The 2000s were about dismantling the format. A January 2002 trio session at Sear Sound with organist Sam Yahel and Brian Blade came out as Yaya3 on Loma; the same three musicians, recording again at Sear Sound that March, became the Joshua Redman Elastic Band on Elastic, an electric, groove-driven record that drew as much on funk and soul as on bebop. Momentum (Nonesuch, 2005) extended it with a guest list that ran from Flea and Questlove to vibraphonist Stefon Harris and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. Meanwhile Redman had taken on an institutional role: in 2000 he was named artistic director for SFJAZZ's spring season, and with the organization's executive director Randall Kline he founded the SFJAZZ Collective, the composer-focused octet whose first season in 2004 was built around the music of Ornette Coleman. He held the tenor chair and the musical directorship until announcing a hiatus from both jobs in March 2007. That April Nonesuch released Back East, his first piano-less trio record, cut with three separate rhythm sections and three guest saxophonists: Chris Cheek, Joe Lovano and his father. Compass (2009) pushed the same idea further into a double trio of two basses and two drummers.

From late 2009 he put much of his energy into a genuine collective. James Farm, with Aaron Parks, Matt Penman and Eric Harland, wrote and voted as a band of equals and made two Nonesuch albums, James Farm (2011) and City Folk (2014). Around them he assembled a catalog of one-off contexts: Walking Shadows (2013), a ballad record produced by Brad Mehldau with string arrangements by Patrick Zimmerli, Dan Coleman and Mehldau; Trios Live (2014), drawn from club dates at the Jazz Standard and Blues Alley; The Bad Plus Joshua Redman (2015), a full-album merger with Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and Dave King that earned him a Grammy nomination for his solo on "Friend or Foe"; and Nearness (2016), a duo record with Mehldau assembled from a 2011 European tour. On December 8, 2013 he joined the all-star band that saluted Herbie Hancock at the Kennedy Center Honors.

Still Dreaming, recorded at Sear Sound in April 2017 with Ron Miles on cornet, Scott Colley on bass and Brian Blade, is the most personal record he has made. It takes its shape from Old and New Dreams, the 1976 to 1987 quartet in which his father played alongside Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell, all four of them Ornette Coleman alumni. Then in September 2019 the MoodSwing quartet reconvened at Sear Sound for the first time in twenty-five years; those sessions produced RoundAgain (2020) and LongGone (2022), each musician contributing compositions. He moved to Blue Note for where are we (2023), a set of songs about American places built around the singer Gabrielle Cavassa and cut at Esplanade Studios in New Orleans, his first album to feature vocals, and followed it with Words Fall Short (June 2025), recorded in three days at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon, New York, with an entirely new young rhythm section of Paul Cornish, Philip Norris and Nazir Ebo.

Redman arrived fully formed technically, and the criticism that dogged his early Warner Bros. years was that he was too fluent, too well-schooled, too obviously the industry's chosen young man. What the catalog since has shown is a musician who kept refusing the position that fluency offered him. His tone on tenor is broad, dry and slightly grainy, closer to Dewey Redman's Texas inheritance than to the Coltrane lineage his technique might suggest, and his phrasing is built on long, rhythmically displaced lines that resolve later than expected. He is a genuine composer, not a saxophonist who also writes: Come What May and LongGone are entirely his, and the James Farm book is some of the most carefully constructed small-group writing of the 2010s. The through-line across the organ trio, the string record, the piano-less trio, the double trio, the Bad Plus merger and the vocal album is a refusal to settle into one working band, and it has kept a career that began in 1993 from calcifying. DownBeat's critics named him Tenor Saxophonist of the Year in 1993 and Jazz Artist of the Year in 1994, gave Wish Album of the Year in 1994, and returned him to the top of the tenor category in 2011; JazzTimes named him Best New Artist in 1992.