Laurence "Larry" Howard Ridley II was born September 3, 1937, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Lawrence and Nevolena Ridley. He started on violin at five, studying with Ruth McArthur, who ran a music school for Black students within Indianapolis's segregated public system, and later with first violinist Mildred Lind. His grounding in jazz and blues came separately, from family friend and songwriter Ben Holliman; when Ridley made the switch to bass, he sought out lessons from Monk Montgomery — bassist brother of guitarist Wes Montgomery — to build a real jazz foundation on the new instrument. It's a detail that closes a loop decades later: Ridley would go on to play uncredited bass on session tapes that became Wes Montgomery's posthumous Echoes of Indiana Avenue (Resonance Records, 2012), recorded back home in Indianapolis in 1957-58 before either man had left for New York.

He graduated from Shortridge High School and was already working professionally before he left the city. In 1957, while still underage, he co-founded the Jazz Contemporaries with fellow teenager Freddie Hubbard, along with James Spaulding, Paul Parker, and Walter Miller, playing six nights a week at George's Bar on Indiana Avenue — Indianapolis's historic Black jazz strip. A violin scholarship took him to Indiana University's School of Music in 1955, where he also played in jazz combos and in David Baker's band; a stint at the Lenox School of Jazz summer program followed in 1959. He then moved to New York City to pursue music full-time, eventually completing a B.S. in Music Education at New York University.

The New York years turned Ridley into a first-call hard-bop bassist almost immediately. His discography from the period is a tour of the Blue Note and Prestige rosters at their peak: Freddie Hubbard's Hub Cap (1961) and Blue Spirits (1967), Red Garland's The Nearness of You (1962), four dates with drummer Roy Haynes between 1963 and 1964 (Cracklin', Cymbalism, People, and the single "Honey Dew"), Bill Barron's Hot Line (1964), Jackie McLean's Destination... Out! (1964), Hank Mobley's Dippin' (1965), Freddie Hubbard's live double LP The Night of the Cookers (recorded at Club La Marchal in Brooklyn, April 1965), Horace Silver's The Jody Grind (1966), Lee Morgan's Cornbread (1967), and Dexter Gordon's The Panther! (1970), among many others. Along the way he also toured and recorded with Wes Montgomery, Slide Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Dinah Washington, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane — associations documented in his own biographical accounts, even where a matching commercial release isn't catalogued, which was common for the era's uncredited studio and broadcast dates.

The defining credit of that decade came at its close: from 1970 to 1973, Ridley was Thelonious Monk's regular touring bassist, carrying the role through Monk's last active years on the road, including a 1970 Newport Jazz Festival tour of Japan that produced the live LP Thelonious Monk in Tokyo.

In 1971, the same year Monk's touring wound down, Ridley was hired as a professor of music at Rutgers University's Livingston College — a role that would define the second half of his career as fully as the bass work had defined the first. He is documented as the first jazz professor at Rutgers and the primary architect of jazz performance as a field of academic study there, building the undergraduate jazz degree program from 1972 to 1980 while serving as department chair, and later adding a graduate degree track. He taught at Rutgers until 1999, holding Professor Emeritus status after retiring, and in 1991 had already begun teaching part-time at the Manhattan School of Music, where he continued as Professor of Jazz Bass well past his Rutgers retirement.

Ridley's advocacy work ran alongside the teaching. In 1977, he and the late Anderson White founded the Black Jazz Music Caucus, an organization built to secure representation for Black jazz artists and educators within the broader jazz-education establishment; it was renamed the African American Jazz Caucus (AAJC) in 2000, with Ridley serving as executive director. He chaired the Jazz Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts and served, for several years in the late 1970s, as the NEA's national coordinator for the Jazz Artists in Schools program. He has advised the International Association for Jazz Education since 1978. In 1985 he founded Jazz Legacy, Inc. and its performing arm, the Jazz Legacy Ensemble, dedicated to programming a broad jazz repertoire and giving emerging players stage time alongside established ones; since 1993 he has held the role of Jazz Artist in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, presenting an annual series centered on the compositions of jazz's major composers.

As a leader, Ridley's recorded output is small relative to his sideman work but has real depth: Sum of the Parts (1975, Strata-East), a sextet date with Sonny Fortune, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Cornell Dupree, and Grady Tate; Live at Rutgers University (recorded 1989, released 1993, Strata-East/Bellaphon) with his Jazz Legacy Ensemble; and Other Voices (1999, Naima Records), a trio session with pianist Richard Wyands.

His academic credentials grew alongside the performing and advocacy careers: an M.A. in Cultural Policy from Empire State College (SUNY), and a Doctor of Performing Arts degree from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. The honors followed — induction into the International Association for Jazz Education's Jazz Educators Hall of Fame (1998) and DownBeat magazine's Jazz Education Hall of Fame (1999), the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation's Living Legacy Jazz Award (1997), Howard University's Benny Golson Award (2001), and induction into the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation Hall of Fame in 2013.

Ridley came up as a functional, ensemble-first bassist in the hard-bop mainstream — the kind of player Blue Note and Prestige called back session after session precisely because he didn't pull focus. His own Spotify artist bio still frames him that way: "an excellent accompanist and a thoughtful soloist." That instinct was set early, through direct bass instruction from Monk Montgomery back in Indianapolis, and it was tested and deepened by three years anchoring Thelonious Monk's quartet, where a bassist has to internalize some of the most oblique compositional logic in the jazz canon and still swing through it in real time. The same instinct carried directly into his second career: the educator who spent three decades building degree programs, chairing advocacy organizations, and mentoring younger players was, at bottom, applying the same accompanist's ear — support the music, develop the people around you — to an institutional scale.