Leon Parker was born August 21, 1965, in White Plains, New York. He started on drums at three and got serious about the instrument around eleven; by fifteen he was playing in a local youth jazz band, and two years later he began studying classical percussion. After high school he moved into New York City, took lessons with pianist Barry Harris, and worked freelance gigs around the city. During a regular engagement as a leader at the Greenwich Village club Augie's, he began stripping down his kit, eventually learning to build a full set behind just a single cymbal, the seed of the "less is more" minimalism he became known for.

His recording debut came as a sideman with bassist Harvie Swartz, and through the early 1990s he toured with vocalist Sheila Jordan and gigged with pianist Kenny Barron. In 1989 he spent the year touring Spain and Portugal with his wife, flutist Lisa Parker. Back in New York, he became part of the house band at the Village Gate, then toured and recorded with saxophonist Dewey Redman, including the 1992 Enja session Choices, credited to Redman and Joshua Redman with bassist Cameron Brown and Parker on drums. He also worked with saxophonist David Sanchez, appearing on The Departure (1994) and Sketches of Dreams (1995), both on Columbia, and in December 1994 recorded as the drummer on Consenting Adults, a Criss Cross Jazz date credited to "M.T.B." for its three co-leaders, pianist Brad Mehldau, saxophonist Mark Turner, and guitarist Peter Bernstein. By the mid-1990s he had joined pianist Jacky Terrasson's trio alongside bassist Ugonna Okegwo, appearing on Terrasson's first three Blue Note albums, the self-titled Jacky Terrasson (1994), Reach (1995), and Alive (1998), and later on A Paris... (2000).

Parker's own leader catalog began with Above & Below (1994, Epicure), built around a working band of Terrasson, Okegwo, drummer-percussionist Adam Cruz, Mark Turner, David Sanchez, and flutist Lisa Parker, with Joshua Redman guesting on tenor saxophone for "It's Only a Paper Moon." Belief followed in 1996 on Columbia, and Awakening in 1998, also on Columbia, which reached number 20 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart with a band that folded in saxophonists Steve Wilson and Sam Newsome alongside a widening array of hand percussion, congas, shekere, ashiko, and singing bowls among them. In 1999 he recorded Duo with guitarist Charlie Hunter for Blue Note, a stripped-down two-man session that Hunter later credited for combining "the visceral and the intellectual" in a drummer. His fourth leader date, The Simple Life (2001, Label M), produced by Joel Dorn, arrived on his 36th birthday and brought back Terrasson alongside pianist Xavier Davis, trumpeter Tom Harrell, and singer Elisabeth Kontomanou.

Not long after The Simple Life, Parker relocated to France and stepped back from the recording industry almost entirely, devoting himself instead to developing a personal percussion pedagogy he calls "embodi rhythm," later extended into a jazz practice he terms "embodi jazz." His main documented recorded credits from this period are with Italian pianist Giovanni Mirabassi, a fellow Paris-based musician: Terra Furiosa (2008) and Out of Track (2009), both on Discograph, and the 2010 duo release Live At the Blue Note, Tokyo with bassist Gianluca Renzi. It was in Paris in 2008 that he met French pianist Fred Nardin; Parker later introduced Nardin to New York bassist Or Bareket in Harlem, and the three began playing together well before formally launching the Fred Nardin Trio in 2016. That group recorded three albums with Parker on drums, Opening (2017), Look Ahead (2019, which includes his own composition "New Direction"), and Live In Paris (2022, recorded at the Sunside club in February 2020).

A 2015 French-American Jazz Exchange grant, shared with pianist Aaron Goldberg, helped bring Parker back toward more active recording and performing after his long period out of the public eye. That return culminated in The LEO (2021, Embodi Jazz Maker/Ropeadope), his first album as a leader in two decades, built around an international cast of 21 musicians including Joshua Redman, Mark Turner, Aaron Goldberg, Tom Harrell, and vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, mixing new originals with reworkings of pieces by Kenny Barron, Abbey Lincoln, and Thelonious Monk. By the time the Fred Nardin Trio released its fourth album, Trio [+] (2025), the group's rhythm section had changed: Swedish bassist Viktor Nyberg and drummer Romain Sarron replaced Or Bareket and Parker, whose tenure in the trio spans its first three releases, 2017 to 2022.

Parker's signature is subtraction rather than addition: a kit reduced, at its most extreme, to a single cymbal, bass drum, and snare, built during his early leader gigs at Augie's and carried through his entire career. Rather than losing information, the stripped-down setup forces every stroke to count, an approach AllMusic critic Scott Yanow summarized as showing that "less is more." Guitarist Charlie Hunter, his duo partner on 1999's Duo, praised Parker for balancing "the visceral and the intellectual" in a way he looked for in every drummer he worked with. Parker layers that minimalism with a wide vocabulary of hand percussion, congas, shekere, ashiko, caxixi, singing bowls, drawn from African and Afro-Cuban traditions, giving his own leader albums a textural range well beyond a standard drum kit. That interest eventually became formalized as "embodi rhythm," a percussion pedagogy he developed during his years in France and later extended into "embodi jazz," the concept underlying his 2021 comeback album The LEO. Reviewing the Fred Nardin Trio's Look Ahead for Citizen Jazz, critic Denis Desassis noted that Parker had himself worked alongside pianists Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Barron, two of Nardin's own named influences, calling it "an honor" for Nardin to inherit that lineage once removed through his trio's drummer.