Park Frederick "Pepper" Adams III was born October 8, 1930, in Highland Park, Michigan, to college-educated parents. The Depression moved the family first to Columbia City, Indiana, then in 1935 to Rochester, New York, where Adams began formal music training at eight on piano before switching to tenor saxophone and clarinet. As a boy he absorbed Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway from records, and in 1943 he met members of Ellington's band directly, taking informal lessons from saxophonist Skippy Williams. The nickname stuck early: classmates in seventh grade thought he resembled the baseball player Pepper Martin.

At sixteen, Adams moved to Detroit with his mother and threw himself into the city's fertile postwar jazz scene, working alongside up-and-coming locals including Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, and Elvin Jones. Around 1948 he bought a used Bundy baritone saxophone, soon trading up to a Selmer "Balanced Action" horn he would play for the next three decades. He attended Wayne State University and served in a U.S. Army band, including a stretch of duty during the Korean War, before returning to Detroit in 1953 and taking up residence at the Blue Bird Inn alongside trumpeter Thad Jones, eventually serving as the group's music director. Bassist Oscar Pettiford recommended Adams to bandleader Stan Kenton, and Adams spent most of 1956 touring with the Kenton Orchestra — the connection that first put him in front of a national audience.

Adams settled in New York City in the mid-1950s and immediately became one of the most in-demand horns in the city, appearing on Cecil Payne's 1957 session Baritones and French Horns (later reissued under John Coltrane's name as Dakar) and on Lee Morgan's The Cooker. From 1958 to 1961 he co-led a working quintet with Donald Byrd, documented on 10 to 4 at the 5 Spot, Motor City Scene, and Out of This World — the latter notable as pianist Herbie Hancock's recording debut. It was also in New York that Adams began his long, on-and-off association with Charles Mingus, contributing a celebrated extended solo on "Moanin'" from Mingus's 1959 Atlantic album Blues & Roots and continuing to record with him sporadically until Mingus's death in 1979; Mingus's own catalog and career are covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Adams paid tribute to that relationship directly on his own leader date Pepper Adams Plays the Compositions of Charlie Mingus, recorded September 9 and 12, 1963 and released August 10, 1964, cut for Motown's short-lived jazz imprint Workshop Jazz with Thad Jones, Zoot Sims, and Charles McPherson in the band.

The mid-1960s brought Adams's most consequential professional partnership. In 1964 he and Thad Jones formed a new group with drummer Mel Lewis, a pairing that built the momentum for the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra's founding in 1965. Adams stayed with the band for its entire run through 1976 — for years its de facto lead voice on baritone and a key soloist on records including Presenting Thad Jones/Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra (1966), Live at the Village Vanguard (1967), and Consummation (1970) — while his broader working relationship with Jones stretched across roughly eighteen years and produced the co-led quintet album Mean What You Say (1966). The orchestra anchored itself at the Village Vanguard on Monday nights and toured extensively through the U.S., Europe, and Asia, with Copenhagen's Montmartre a frequent stop. Through the same period Adams kept up an enormous freelance sideman schedule, recording with Gene Ammons, Chet Baker (including 1959's Chet), Wes Montgomery, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and dozens of others; in September 1963 he turned down a lucrative offer to join Harry James's band in favor of a Motown recording and management contract, a decision that reflected his consistent preference for musical integrity over money.

Adams built a smaller but steady run of his own leader dates alongside the big-band and sideman work: Encounter! (1968, Prestige), Ephemera (recorded 1973 in London, released 1974 on Spotlite), and, after a 1975 live date at Munich's Domicile club yielded enough strong material for two separate LPs, both Julian (dedicated to Cannonball Adderley, who died days after the session) and Twelfth & Pingree (named for the Detroit intersection near where Adams grew up), both on the German Enja label. His most productive stretch as a leader came in the last decade of his life: Reflectory (1978, Muse), The Master (1980, Muse), Urban Dreams (1981, Palo Alto), and the two-night, later expanded live document Live at Fat Tuesday's / Conjuration: Fat Tuesday's Session (recorded August 1983, first issued 1984 on Uptown, reissued with additional tracks in 1990 on Reservoir) — the last one a 1984 Grammy nominee for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist. He composed 42 originals over his career, including "Urban Dreams," reportedly written in the air during a London-bound flight in July 1980.

Adams's later years were shadowed by injury and illness but not by any drop in his playing. A December 1983 accident, in which his car's parking brake failed and pinned him against his garage, put him in bed for five months; he was back on a bandstand in Singapore by October 1984. He toured steadily through 1985 and into 1986 despite a lung cancer diagnosis reached that March in Sweden and a course of radiation treatment that summer; a benefit concert that September drew Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Foster, Kenny Burrell, and Tommy Flanagan. His final performance came July 2, 1986, at the Montreal Jazz Festival, where he received a standing ovation before playing a note. Pepper Adams died of lung cancer in Brooklyn on September 10, 1986, at age 55.

Where Gerry Mulligan and Serge Chaloff had built the baritone saxophone's reputation on cool, melodic restraint, Adams took the same unwieldy horn — the heaviest and least agile in common jazz use — and pushed it through hard bop's fastest tempos with a raw, bark-edged tone and long, tumbling double-time lines that no one before him had managed on the instrument. He was equally commanding in two very different settings: a dominant, powerfully swinging low voice inside the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis big band, and a ferocious, stamina-driven small-group soloist on the hundreds of sideman dates that made him one of the most heavily documented musicians of the postwar era. He could also slow down convincingly, as his ballad playing on "Alone Together" from Chet Baker's 1959 album Chet shows. DownBeat's international critics named him the year's best baritone saxophonist four years running (1979–1982), and its readers' poll crowned him the world's best in December 1982, unseating Mulligan himself.