Perry Morris Robinson was born in New York City on September 17, 1938, the son of Earl Robinson, the composer of "Joe Hill," "Ballad for Americans" and "The House I Live In." (Several reference works give the birth date as August 17; discographer Michael Fitzgerald corrected it to September 17 from Robinson directly, and Wikidata, AllMusic and Discogs all carry the September date.) The family moved to Los Angeles when Perry was five, and the household his father kept was a working folk-music salon: Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Leonard Bernstein were regular guests, and Guthrie wrote the boy letters encouraging his curiosity. Robinson took up clarinet at nine and studied with Kalman Bloch, principal clarinetist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He returned to New York at twelve and attended the High School of Music and Art from 1952 to 1956, where his classmates included drummer Pete LaRoca and saxophonist George Braith. There he found Buddy DeFranco and Tony Scott, and Scott became the decisive influence. "Tony Scott was my mentor," Robinson said in 2015. "He had the biggest sound of any clarinet player and he would play with anyone, even free players." What Robinson wanted was to put the saxophone language of Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker onto a clarinet, and by 1955 he was already hanging around Minton's Playhouse.

After a year at the Manhattan School of Music and private study with Ernie Simon of the Mannes School, Robinson won a scholarship to the Lenox School of Jazz on the strength of a 1957 audition tape made at Nola Studios with pianist Jon Mayer, bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Arnie Wise. The Lenox summer of 1959 changed his direction: Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry had arrived as students and were effectively teaching by the end, and Robinson took the freer vocabulary with him when he went to Spain with the Mayer group, which became Spain's first resident jazz band. He was fired from Madrid's Whiskey Jazz Club for playing too freely, then spent several months working with the Catalan pianist Tete Montoliu. In 1962 he traveled to the World Youth Festival in Helsinki specifically because Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp were going; he played there with Shepp and with trumpeter Bill Dixon, beginning two associations that carried him into the New York avant-garde. He also served in a United States military band in the early 1960s. He would go on to use an unusual French "double embouchure," with both lips on the mouthpiece, which he credited for the bent, vocalized notes that became his signature.

His first album as a leader, Funk Dumpling, was cut at Medallion Studio in Newark in 1962 for Savoy with a startling band: a very young Kenny Barron on piano, Henry Grimes on bass and Paul Motian on drums. The record has never been well known and has never stopped being cited, and the Grimes partnership it began outlasted everything else in Robinson's career. He recorded with Grimes again on December 28, 1965 for ESP-Disk; the resulting album was issued as The Call under the Henry Grimes Trio name, though ESP's Bernard Stollman wrote in the liner notes that a more accurate title would have been Henry Grimes/Perry Robinson, and two of the six pieces are Robinson's. In April 1965 he played clarinet in the Jazz Composers Orchestra at the Contemporary Center in New York, on Bill Dixon's "The Lonely People," in a band that also held Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd and Paul Bley. On August 19, 1966, at Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs studio, he was the clarinet in Archie Shepp's octet for Mama Too Tight, alongside Tommy Turrentine, Roswell Rudd, Grachan Moncur III, Howard Johnson, Charlie Haden and Beaver Harris. Around the same period he worked in the Uni Trio with bassist David Izenzon and drummer Randy Kaye, a group built on holding a pulse and abandoning it in the same phrase.

The late 1960s and 1970s put Robinson inside nearly every large avant-garde project in New York. He is the clarinetist on Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, recorded across three days at Judson Hall in late April 1969 and issued by Impulse! in 1970, and he stands in the front row of that album's cover photograph. He played on Carla Bley and Paul Haines's three-record opera Escalator Over the Hill, on the Jazz Composers Orchestra's Numatik Swing Band under Roswell Rudd, and on Grachan Moncur III's Echoes of Prayer. He recorded electric clarinet for the Bley-Peacock Synthesizer Show in 1969. He was a fixture at Environ, John Fischer's loft on Broadway, and a member of Fischer's INTERface. From 1971 he began the longest working relationship of his life, with the German vibraphonist and reed player Gunter Hampel, whose Galaxie Dream Band, with the singer Jeanne Lee, he stayed with on and off for four decades and for well over a dozen albums on Hampel's Birth label. Then, in an abrupt change of altitude, he joined Darius Brubeck's group in 1972 for Chaplin's Back and stayed through its absorption into Two Generations of Brubeck, playing clarinet on the Atlantic albums Two Generations of Brubeck (1973) and Brother, the Great Spirit Made Us All (1974) and reaching the largest audiences of his career.

Recognition came, in the peculiar form the jazz press reserves for musicians its readers have not heard of. Robinson placed first in the Down Beat International Critics Poll's Talent Deserving Wider Recognition category six times, in 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1984, and finished in the top five of the Established Talent category in six separate years between 1972 and 1979. In 1979 he joined the Clarinet Summit, an all-star group convened by producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt at the New Jazz Meeting in Baden-Baden with John Carter, Gianluigi Trovesi, Theo Jörgensmann, Bernd Konrad and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky; from 1975 to 1977 he had already been part of Clarinet Contrast with Jörgensmann and Konrad. A clarinet concerto was written for him by Gary Schneider and premiered in 1985 by the Hoboken Chamber Orchestra; it was performed several times and never recorded.

Robinson's last three decades were spent as a working improviser who would play almost anything with almost anyone. He led a long-running quartet with the Russian-born pianist Simon Nabatov, bassist Ed Schuller and drummer Ernst Bier that recorded for West Wind and Konnex from 1988 onward. He was the clarinet in Burton Greene's Amsterdam klezmer band Klezmokum and in Greene's later Klez-Edge, and cut the duo album Two Voices in the Desert with Greene for Tzadik in 2009. He recorded through the late 1990s and 2000s with Lou Grassi's PoBand, with William Parker's Clarinet Trio on the two-disc Bob's Pink Cadillac, in a trio with tabla player Badal Roy and Ed Schuller, and in a 2004 quartet at the Iridium with Henry Grimes, Dave Douglas and Andrew Cyrille. He helped form Cosmic Legends, the improvising performance group led by the composer and pianist Sylvie Degiez that also drew in Rashied Ali. In March 2004 in Brooklyn he played clarinet and ocarina on Anat Fort's A Long Story, with Paul Motian and Ed Schuller, produced by Fort with Manfred Eicher and released by ECM on January 19, 2007, the record that made Fort the first Israeli artist on the label. His autobiography, Perry Robinson: The Traveler, co-written with Florence F. Wetzel, appeared in 2002. He appeared on more than 120 albums. After heart valve surgery from which he never fully recovered, Robinson passed away at a Jersey City rest home on December 2, 2018, at 80. He never married and left no known survivors.

Robinson's problem, and his subject, was that the clarinet had been out of fashion in modern jazz since bebop, and the free players who came after him mostly picked up saxophones. He solved it by refusing the swing-era tone entirely: the double embouchure gave him a soft, slightly reedy sound he could bend and smear at will, and he built lines out of speech shapes rather than running changes, though Peter Kuhn, who took up clarinet after hearing him on The Call and later studied with him, noted that "he played free but he could play changes like nobody's business." The folk music of his childhood never washed out, and neither did his knowledge of Pee Wee Russell and Johnny Dodds; the klezmer records he made with Burton Greene from the mid-1990s and the Yemenite Jewish material he recorded in Poland in 2011 were extensions of the same instinct rather than a departure. Critics placed him precisely: on the timeline of free clarinet he sits after Jimmy Giuffre and before John Carter, and the Down Beat critics named him the year's most under-recognized player on his instrument six times without his ever becoming a headline act.