Lewis Barry Tabackin was born March 26, 1940, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, taking up flute at twelve and tenor saxophone at fifteen. He majored in flute at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, earning his B.M. in 1962, and studied privately with the composer Vincent Persichetti. His saxophone playing drew early on Al Cohn and Coleman Hawkins, while his flute approach leaned toward classical models — William Kincaid, Julius Baker, Jean-Pierre Rampal — rather than jazz precedent, since few jazz musicians of his generation played the instrument seriously at all.

After U.S. Army service from 1962 to 1965, Tabackin moved to New Jersey and then to New York, where he first played with guitarist Tal Farlow and pianist Don Friedman before working his way into some of the city's most in-demand big bands: ensembles led by Cab Calloway, Les and Larry Elgart, Maynard Ferguson, Joe Henderson, Chuck Israels, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Clark Terry, and Duke Pearson. During the same stretch he led his own trio at a club called La Boheme back in Philadelphia, worked in smaller New York groups alongside Donald Byrd, Roland Hanna, Elvin Jones, and Attila Zoller, and held down chairs in two television studio bands — the Dick Cavett Show orchestra and, later, Doc Severinsen's Tonight Show band. He also spent time overseas as a soloist with European ensembles including the Danish Radio Orchestra and the Hamburg Jazz Workshop.

In 1968 Tabackin met the pianist and composer Toshiko Akiyoshi when the two performed together in a quartet. They married, and in 1972 Tabackin's chair in the Tonight Show band brought them both to Los Angeles. There, in 1973, they founded the Toshiko Akiyoshi–Lew Tabackin Big Band: a sixteen-piece ensemble built around Akiyoshi's writing and Tabackin's tenor and flute, with Tabackin as principal soloist. The band's first three albums — Kogun (1974), Long Yellow Road (1975), and Insights (1976) — established it immediately as a major new voice in big-band jazz. Insights was voted Jazz Album of the Year in Down Beat's 1978 critics' poll, and the band drew Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance – Big Band across nearly every year from 1976 to 1994, alongside Swing Journal gold and silver disk honors in Japan. Away from the orchestra, Tabackin also cut small-group and duo dates through the late 1970s and early 1980s — including Rites of Pan (1979), an unusual all-flute record made to satisfy what he described as a longstanding wish to record on flute exclusively, and Tenor Gladness (1977), a twin-tenor date with Warne Marsh.

Tabackin's flute work brought him overdue individual recognition through the 1980s, when he won repeated Down Beat critics' and readers' poll honors on the instrument. In 1982 he and Akiyoshi relocated back to New York, putting Tabackin within reach of the city's all-star ensemble scene: he became a member of George Wein's Newport All-Star Band, the New York Jazz Giants, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, and Switzerland's George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band, in addition to his continuing work as the Akiyoshi band's featured soloist on records like Ten Gallon Shuffle (1984) and Four Seasons of Morita Village (1996).

The 1990s brought Tabackin's most sustained run as a small-group leader in his own right, on a string of albums for Concord Jazz: Desert Lady (1990), with Hank Jones, Dave Holland, and Victor Lewis; I'll Be Seeing You (1992) and What a Little Moonlight Can Do (1994), both with Benny Green, Peter Washington, and Lewis Nash; and Tenority (1996), his first record devoted solely to tenor saxophone, with Don Friedman, Peter Washington, Mark Taylor, and guest trumpeter Randy Brecker. He also recorded Pyramid (1999) with the Netherlands' Metropole Orchestra, compiling orchestral sessions taped between 1988 and 1994.

The Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra played its official farewell at Carnegie Hall on October 17, 2003, closing out thirty years of work together, with a final live recording taped at Blue Note Tokyo that November. The group has reunited on occasion since — a 2011 tour and live album, In Shanghai, among them — and Akiyoshi and Tabackin have continued performing and recording together as a duo, including 2008's Vintage: Duke Ellington Songbook and 2019's The Eternal Duo! Tabackin has also kept a working trio going across this same period, with records like Tanuki's Night Out (2002), Live in Paris (2008), and Soundscapes (2015). Well into his eighties, he remains an active performer: a December 2025 quartet date at Klavierhaus in New York, with Bruce Barth, Jason Tiemann, and Boris Kozlov, was still drawing coverage from All About Jazz as of this writing, and he continues to appear on concert listings into 2026.

Tabackin is one of the few jazz musicians to have built two genuinely distinct musical personalities on two instruments. On tenor saxophone, shaped early by Al Cohn and Coleman Hawkins, he plays with a hard-driving, sometimes abrasive forcefulness — wide intervals, abrupt shifts in mood and tempo, a willingness to push the horn to its limits. On flute, where his models came from the classical world rather than jazz, his playing is airier and more lyrical, closer in spirit to the instrument's concert-hall tradition than to the jazz flute of his contemporaries. That split personality made him an unusually versatile principal soloist for Toshiko Akiyoshi's big-band writing, which routinely called on both horns within a single arrangement, and it has carried through five decades of small-group leader dates as well, from the all-flute Rites of Pan to the tenor-only Tenority.