Owen Broder was born on November 1, 1989 and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, with family ties to Detroit that he still names when he describes where he comes from. He took a Bachelor's degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, graduating in 2012, and a Master's at the Manhattan School of Music, and he arrived in New York with a band already half-formed: at Eastman he had been rooming with the alto saxophonist Ethan Helm and the drummer Matt Honor, and the three of them moved to the city together and started playing under a name borrowed from a 1988 David Lynch short film. Cowboys & Frenchmen came together in 2013 with Ethan O'Reilly on bass and Chris Ziemba on piano, both Eastman players, and it was built deliberately as a workshop rather than as one person's group. Its distinguishing feature is a front line of two alto saxophones, an instrumentation chosen to test how much distance two players can find inside a single timbre.

The quintet's debut, Rodeo, came out on Outside In Music on November 6, 2015 and did well on jazz radio. Bluer Than You Think followed on October 13, 2017, produced by Ryan Truesdell and cut at Bunker Studios in Brooklyn, and drew a four-star review from DownBeat. By then the band had reached the finals of two competitions, the DC Jazz Festival's DC JazzPrix in 2016 and the Umbria Jazz Festival's Conad Competition in 2017, and had played more than twenty cities, from Blues Alley in Washington to Herb Alpert's Vibrato in Los Angeles and Cliff Bell's in Detroit, pairing dates with masterclasses at the University of Michigan, Southern Methodist University and Florida Atlantic. A third record, Our Highway, arrived on February 26, 2021, recorded live at SubCulture in New York with Addison Frei in the piano chair, written entirely by Helm and released as a video album with a forty-five-minute film cut from footage of a cross-country tour.

The record that made his name as a leader was a different project altogether. Heritage, credited to Owen Broder's American Roots Project, came out on ArtistShare in early 2018 and took Appalachian folk, early blues, spirituals and bluegrass through a jazz large ensemble. Broder played the woodwind chair and wrote two of the nine pieces, and handed the rest of the writing and arranging to Miho Hazama, Bill Holman, Jim McNeely, Alphonso Horne and Ryan Truesdell, who also produced. The band was Sara Caswell on violin, Scott Wendholt on trumpet, Nick Finzer on trombone, Frank Kimbrough on piano, Jay Anderson on bass, Matt Wilson on drums and James Shipp on percussion, with Wendy Gilles, Kate McGarry and Vuyo Sotashe singing. DownBeat called it "a transcendent work of art"; Francis Davis named Broder Debut Artist of the Year in his 2018 NPR critics' poll, and the opening piece, "Goin' Up Home," won an ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award the same year. The project ran alongside the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which supplied images from its permanent collection as visual companions.

From 2016 he held the baritone saxophone chair in the Anat Cohen Tentet, the ten-piece band the clarinettist runs with Oded Lev-Ari as music director. He is on both of its albums, doubling on bass clarinet: Happy Song, recorded at Avatar Studios in August 2016 and released October 6, 2017, and Triple Helix, recorded by Brian Montgomery at Sear Sound in January 2019 and released June 14, 2019, which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. The chair is a playing one. The writing on both records belongs to Lev-Ari and to Cohen, and the title suite of the second is Lev-Ari's. Around the Tentet he built a wide New York working life: Truesdell's Gil Evans Project, Miho Hazama's ensembles, the Ulysses Owens Jr. Big Band, the Manhattan Saxophone Quartet, and the baritone chair in the Kyle Athayde Dance Party, a fifteen-piece band whose 2017 record arranges video game music. He toured with Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox, and he worked steadily in theatre pits: the German tour of Grease, the off-Broadway For the Last Time, the bands of David Bowie's Lazarus and of Tootsie, and the woodwind chair he originated in the United States premiere tour of The Bodyguard the Musical.

When the pandemic shut the clubs in March 2020, Broder co-founded Live From Our Living Rooms with the singers Thana Alexa and Sirintip. Rolling Stone called it the first online jazz festival, and it raised more than $140,000 in grants for American musicians whose performing careers had stopped. The following year the University of North Carolina School of the Arts gave him its Artpreneur of the Year award for that and for the way he has run his own projects; the Eastman/ArtistShare New Artist program had recognised the same thing in 2018, and in 2020 the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers gave him a commission grant. His writing has been commissioned by the U.S. Air Force Band in Europe, the Airmen of Note, the Winchester Symphonic Winds, the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, the off-Broadway show About Love, and the woodwind quintet WindSync, whose 2026 Delos album Nadia carries his arrangement of a Quincy Jones piece.

The project that has occupied him longest is a two-volume study of Johnny Hodges. Hodges: Front and Center, Vol. 1 was recorded at Bunker Studios on September 10 and 11, 2021 and released October 14, 2022, with Riley Mulherkar on trumpet, Carmen Staaf on piano, Barry Stephenson on bass and Bryan Carter on drums; DownBeat put it on its Best Albums of 2022 list. Vol. 2 followed from the same sessions and the same quintet on April 19, 2024. Both draw as much on Hodges's own small-group records as on the Duke Ellington book, which is the point of the exercise: Hodges is usually discussed as an Ellington sideman rather than as a leader. DownBeat's critics named Broder a Rising Star Alto Saxophonist in their polls in 2023 and 2024. He taught a Swing University course on Hodges's music at Jazz at Lincoln Center during that program's Ellington centenary season. He served as Director of Jazz at Reed College and taught jazz arranging and jazz ear training at Portland State University and saxophone at Pacific University, directing ensembles at all three, and he sits on the board of the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble. He relocated to Washington, D.C. in 2026.

Broder is the rare baritone player whose reputation rests as much on the alto, and the doubling shapes how he sounds on both. Where the postwar baritone vocabulary runs through Pepper Adams, whose bark-edged tone and tumbling double-time lines pushed the horn through hard bop's fastest tempos, Broder's line of descent is the older, more vocal one: Harry Carney's weight underneath an Ellington band, and above all Johnny Hodges, whose portamento and command of the space between the notes he has spent two albums and a Jazz at Lincoln Center course thinking about in public. DownBeat's Frank Alkyer described the result as "smooth-as-silk alto and baritone saxophone work," and Pierre Giroux, writing in All About Jazz, called his improvising "a model of restraint and concision" while noting his "facility, timbre, and nimble attack." Restraint is the operative word: he is not a player who fills space, and in the Tentet the baritone and bass clarinet function as colours in Oded Lev-Ari's orchestration rather than as a soloist's platform. The other half of the work is writing, and there the reference points are large-ensemble composers rather than saxophonists. DownBeat's Bobby Reed placed him on "the sturdy artistic thread that connects bandleaders Maria Schneider, Ryan Truesdell and Owen Broder," a lineage audible in Heritage, where he treated American vernacular material the way Truesdell's Gil Evans work treats a score, as something to be re-orchestrated rather than covered.