Rashied Ali was born Robert Patterson on July 1, 1933, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his mother sang with Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra. He began his career backing local R&B groups, including Dick Hart & the Heartaches, Big Maybelle, and Lin Holt, before gradually moving into Philadelphia's jazz scene alongside Lee Morgan, Don Patterson, and Jimmy Smith.

He relocated to New York in the early 1960s and became a fixture of the avant-garde jazz scene, backing musicians including Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Paul Bley, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, and Albert Ayler. In November 1965, John Coltrane chose Ali to complement drummer Elvin Jones in a new two-drummer format, resulting in Meditations (1965), considered one of the greatest examples of dual drumming in jazz. He is best known for being Coltrane's duet partner on Interstellar Space, recorded in 1967 but not released until 1974, and was a progenitor of the multidirectional, polyrhythmic drumming style that came to define free jazz.

After leaving Alice Coltrane's group in 1971, Ali founded the Survival Records label with saxophonist Frank Lowe to issue his own recordings, and became active in New York's loft scene, opening his own club, Ali's Alley, in 1973, which closed in 1979. Ali died August 12, 2009, in New York City, of a heart attack, at age 76.

Ali's role as John Coltrane's drummer during the saxophonist's final, most radical period, culminating in the duo recording Interstellar Space, gave him a singular place in jazz history, and his multidirectional, polytonal approach to the drum kit helped define what "free jazz drumming" meant for generations of players who followed.