Rashied Ali was born Robert Patterson on July 1, 1933, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a musical family — his mother sang with Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra — and one that later converted to Islam together, Ali included. He started on piano before working his way through trumpet and trombone to the drum kit, and after a stretch in the U.S. Army playing in a military band, he came home to Philadelphia's rhythm-and-blues circuit, backing local outfits including Dick Hart & the Heartaches, Big Maybelle, and Lin Holt. From there he drifted into the city's jazz scene alongside Lee Morgan, organist Don Patterson, and Jimmy Smith. He had company in the family business: his younger brother, drummer Muhammad Ali (born Raymond Patterson), would go on to his own free-jazz career in Europe, most notably in saxophonist Frank Wright's Center of the World Quartet — the two brothers independently orbiting the same generation of players for much of the 1970s.

Ali relocated to New York in the early 1960s and quickly became a fixture of the emerging avant-garde, backing Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, and pianist Paul Bley, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. His first significant recording date was Shepp's On This Night (Impulse!, 1965). According to several later accounts, Ali was also penciled in as a second drummer alongside Elvin Jones for John Coltrane's Ascension session that June, but withdrew before the recording took place — a choice he reportedly came to regret. Coltrane didn't forget him: that November, he brought Ali into the band for real, as a second drummer working alongside Jones during a run at the Village Gate. The document of that short-lived two-drummer format is Meditations, recorded November 23, 1965, and released the following year — one of the most extreme rhythmic textures Coltrane ever put on record, and still one of the few full studio examples of dual drumming in jazz history.

By the time of Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, recorded that May, Jones had left the band and Ali was Coltrane's sole drummer, a role he held for the saxophonist's final, most radical stretch. He appears throughout the run of records that followed — Expression, Cosmic Music, The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording (Coltrane's actual final live taping, unreleased for over three decades) — and, above all, on Interstellar Space, a duo suite for saxophone and drums alone, recorded February 22, 1967, five months before Coltrane's death but left unissued until 1974. Coltrane described Ali's playing as "multi-directional," a term that stuck: rather than keeping a single time-feel, Ali worked several rhythmic strands simultaneously, a polytonal, polyrhythmic conception that became foundational to how free jazz drumming was understood for decades afterward. A companion session, Stellar Regions, recorded the same week as parts of Expression, stayed in the vault even longer, surfacing only in 1995 after Alice Coltrane rediscovered the tapes.

Ali stayed with Alice Coltrane's group after her husband's death, appearing on four of her albums through 1971, then spent time in Europe — Copenhagen, Germany, Sweden, and a period studying with Philly Joe Jones in England — before returning to a New York jazz scene he found in decline. His response was to build his own infrastructure: in 1973 he converted his loft at 77 Greene Street in Soho into Ali's Alley, a club with its own bandstand, bar, and kitchen, and co-founded Survival Records with saxophonist Frank Lowe to document work that couldn't find a home elsewhere. Duo Exchange, his debut as a leader, paired him with Lowe that same year; New Directions in Modern Music, recorded live in 1971 at The East, a Brooklyn cultural center, became something close to a manifesto record for the loft-jazz generation. Ali's Alley closed in 1979, but Survival Records kept releasing his music, including two 1976 dates cut at his own Studio 77 — a duo with violinist Leroy Jenkins, Swift Are the Winds of Life, and the blues-inflected Moon Flight and N.Y. Ain't So Bad: Ali Plays the Blues, the latter featuring vocalist Royal Blue.

The following decades brought a run of notable partnerships. In the 1980s he co-led Phalanx with guitarist James Blood Ulmer, saxophonist George Adams, and bassist Sirone; he also turned up on Jaco Pastorius's live Blackbird and worked with David Murray. In October 1991 he recorded Touchin' on Trane in Berlin with saxophonist Charles Gayle and bassist William Parker, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — a trio session on the FMP label, co-founded by German bassist Peter Kowald, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, that's widely regarded as one of the defining free-jazz trio dates of its era. A year later, in June 1992, Ali convened a quintet session that quietly closed a circle: saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist Matthew Garrison, sons of John Coltrane and Jimmy Garrison respectively, playing alongside the one man in the room who had actually shared a bandstand with their fathers. The tapes sat unreleased for nine years before finally surfacing as No One in Particular (2001).

Ali also became a custodian of his old employer's legacy through Prima Materia, a collective with bassist Joe Gallant, pianist Greg Murphy, and saxophonists Louis Belogenis and Allan Chase formed to tackle Coltrane's and Albert Ayler's most demanding late compositions; the group recorded Meditations and Bells live at the Knitting Factory in 1995 and 1996, with a posthumous release, Configurations, following in 2009. In May 2000, at his own Survival Studio, Ali recorded Deals, Ideas & Ideals with Peter Kowald and saxophonist Assif Tsahar — the only documented studio meeting between Ali and Kowald, released the following year on Hopscotch Records. He kept working into his final years: duo recordings with bassist Henry Grimes (Going to the Ritual, 2008, and the posthumous Spirits Aloft, 2010), and a reconstituted Rashied Ali Quintet with bassist Joris Teepe, pianist Greg Murphy, saxophonist Lawrence Clark, and trumpeter Jumaane Smith, who recorded Judgment Day, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 in 2005.

Ali died August 12, 2009, at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan; his wife, Patricia, attributed his death to a heart attack, while some later accounts describe a blocked artery or pulmonary embolism. He was 76.

Ali's central place in jazz history rests on his role as John Coltrane's last drummer during the saxophonist's most radical period, culminating in the sparse, unaccompanied duo of Interstellar Space — but his "multi-directional," polyrhythmic conception of the kit, playing several rhythmic ideas at once rather than anchoring a single pulse, made him a foundational figure for free-jazz drumming well beyond the Coltrane association. He was, like his later duo partner Peter Kowald and his Touchin' on Trane bandmate William Parker, also an institution builder: Ali's Alley and Survival Records gave New York's 1970s loft-jazz generation a stage and a label of its own at a moment when neither reliably existed elsewhere. In his later decades he doubled as a custodian of the Coltrane/Ayler avant-garde repertoire through Prima Materia, and, with No One in Particular, literally brought the next generation of the Coltrane band's children into the room.