Park Frederick "Pepper" Adams III was born October 8, 1930, in Highland Park, Michigan. His family moved to Rochester, New York, during his childhood, and at sixteen he moved to Detroit and switched to baritone saxophone, playing in Lucky Thompson's band by 1947. Bassist Oscar Pettiford recommended Adams to Stan Kenton in May 1956, a connection that established his reputation.

From 1958 to 1961, Adams co-led a quintet with trumpeter Donald Byrd, and across his career he worked with an extraordinary range of major figures, including John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charles Mingus, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. He composed 43 pieces, led eighteen albums as a leader across 28 years, and participated in roughly 600 recording sessions as a sideman, bringing the notoriously cumbersome baritone saxophone into hard bop's fastest tempos with a facility no one before him had matched.

Adams died September 10, 1986, in Brooklyn, New York, of lung cancer, at age 55.

Adams's ability to play the baritone saxophone, the largest and least agile horn in common jazz use, at hard bop's fastest speeds redefined what the instrument could do within small-group jazz, and his 600 sideman sessions place him among the most heavily documented musicians of the postwar era.