Karriem Riggins was born on August 25, 1975, in Detroit, the son of the keyboardist Emmanuel Riggins, who played with the guitarist Grant Green and the trumpeter Marcus Belgrave. As a child he watched his father's gigs, and he joined the band at Kennedy Elementary School in sixth grade as a trumpeter, studying with Belgrave, before switching to drums full time in eighth grade. Belgrave stayed on as his teacher: Riggins has recalled weekly Sunday jazz workshops with him at Detroit's Serengeti Ballroom from seventh grade through eleventh. At Southfield High School he played in three school bands and began making hip-hop beats, and he also played quads in the Cass Tech marching band alongside Ali Jackson, a future jazz drummer. He left school in the eleventh grade to join Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead band at 17, and he moved to New York in 1994.

In New York he worked in the trio of the pianist Mulgrew Miller and in bands with the pianist Stephen Scott and Benny Green, then joined Roy Hargrove's band in the middle of 1995. His first three commercially issued sideman credits date from that year: a track each on Scott's Renaissance and Hargrove's Family, and the whole of Miller's Getting to Know You. After about three years with Hargrove he joined the trio of the bassist Ray Brown, and for more than three years was Brown's regular drummer, the youngest man on The Very Tall Band, a live date at the Blue Note in New York with Oscar Peterson, Brown and the vibraphonist Milt Jackson (Telarc, 1999). He is also on the trio's Telarc albums Some of My Best Friends Are... The Trumpet Players (2000) and Walk On, the last Ray Brown Trio record. Brown died in his sleep on July 2, 2002, in Indianapolis, before an evening show, with Riggins and the pianist Larry Fuller as his final trio.

In 1996, on a night he was playing with Hargrove at a club, the rapper Common came by, and the two have worked together ever since. Riggins co-wrote, produced and played drums on the closing track of Common's 1997 album One Day It'll All Make Sense, then led Common's touring band. The same year he met the Detroit producer J Dilla, and the two became close friends. Dilla bought the first beat Riggins ever sold, "The Clapper" on Welcome 2 Detroit (2001). When Dilla was ill he asked Riggins to finish The Shining; Riggins co-produced two of its tracks, and the album came out in August 2006, six months after Dilla's death on February 10. He went on to produce for Slum Village, Erykah Badu ("Soldier," on New Amerykah Part One), the Roots, Talib Kweli, Kanye West ("30 Hours," on The Life of Pablo) and Kaytranada, and he was the main producer and an executive producer of Common's Black America Again (2016), which features Stevie Wonder on the title song.

The jazz work continued alongside. His list of collaborators as a drummer includes Hank Jones, Cedar Walton, Donald Byrd, Bobby Hutcherson and Norah Jones. He toured Eastern Europe with the singer and pianist Diana Krall in 2009 and 2010 and plays on her albums Wallflower (2015), Turn Up the Quiet (2017) and This Dream of You (2020). In 2012 he drummed on Paul McCartney's standards album Kisses on the Bottom, and he was one of two drummers, with Justin Tyson, in the band behind Esperanza Spalding's 2016 album Emily's D+Evolution. He produced and played on Indigo (2018), the second Blue Note album by the singer and pianist Kandace Springs, and in 2019 he and the bassist Robert Hurst were the rhythm section on the pianist Junko Onishi's trio album Junko Onishi Presents Jatroit.

His own records began in 2012 with Alone Together on Stones Throw Records, an instrumental double LP of beats and sample collages released first as the halves Alone (July) and Together (October) and then as a combined set on October 23, 2012; a second Stones Throw album, Headnod Suite, followed on February 24, 2017. In September 2017 he, Common and Robert Glasper shared the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for "Letter to the Free," written for Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th. The trio recorded as August Greene; they made their live debut at New York's Highline Ballroom on January 26, 2018, played an NPR Tiny Desk Concert on February 21 and released a self-titled album that year. With Madlib he made the albums Pardon My French (Madlib Invazion, November 27, 2020) and YHWH Is Love (2024, the first release on Riggins's own Law of Rhythm label) as the Jahari Massamba Unit, a name first used on a track of Madlib's 2007 compilation Yesterdays Universe, and in 2024 he issued To the Jungle, a set of drum tracks for Madlib's library-music series.

In 2023 Riggins was the Detroit Jazz Festival's artist-in-residence, a post that combined festival sets with educational and community work in the region through the year. In 2025 he released Triune, a trio album with Spalding and the trumpeter Nicholas Payton, issued under Payton's name. In 2026 he formed the duo GENA with the singer and rapper Liv.e, whose album The Pleasure Is Yours came out on Lex Records.

Riggins is a drummer who learned jazz in the Detroit tradition, through his father's circle, Belgrave's workshops and Betty Carter's band, and who then spent three decades moving between that world and hip-hop production without treating them as separate jobs. AllMusic's Andy Kellman calls him a rare musician with concurrent jazz and hip-hop resumes that are equally impressive. Kellman names Dilla as Riggins's primary inspiration as a hip-hop producer, and Riggins has said Dilla helped him get past several creative ruts. Kellman describes Alone Together as a set of abstract, sample-heavy beat collages close in spirit to Dilla's Donuts, sometimes with live instruments added, and Headnod Suite as another beatmaking showcase. Riggins has argued that sampling and a jazz soloist's quoting of earlier players are parallel arts, and that hip-hop's syncopation and rhythms come out of jazz. He does not claim either genre as home: in a 2012 interview he said the two genres were not the end for him and that he enjoys playing and producing all types of music. His catalog divides between drumming for jazz leaders and producing rap and beat records, and his own albums lean toward beats, with the Jahari Massamba Unit albums and Triune sitting closest to jazz. Reviewers placed Pardon My French in jazz terms: AllMusic's Thom Jurek heard Afro-futurist jazz explored through hip-hop, vanguard and funk influences, and The Line of Best Fit called it an expressive jazz tour de force.