Ravi Coltrane was born August 6, 1965, on Long Island, New York, the second of the three sons of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, and was named for the sitarist Ravi Shankar, a friend of his father's. His father died of liver cancer on July 17, 1967, when Ravi was 23 months old, and Alice moved the family from Dix Hills to the San Fernando Valley. The house in Woodland Hills stayed full of music: he has described his mother playing piano and organ every day, and a record collection that ran from European classical repertoire through R&B and soul to his father's Impulse! albums. He took up clarinet in junior high without much conviction. What changed that was the death of his older brother, John Coltrane Jr., in a car accident in 1982 at the age of 17. Ravi left school for a time, then returned to it seriously through music, graduating from El Camino Real High School in 1983 and entering the California Institute of the Arts in 1986, where he took a BFA in 1990 studying tenor and soprano saxophone.

He moved to New York in 1991, to an apartment in Queens with rehearsal space attached, and served the standard apprenticeship in a fast band: Elvin Jones's Jazz Machine, the working group of his father's former drummer. That association put him on In Europe (Enja, recorded 1991) and Going Home (1993), and it was on a Jazz Machine date at the Regattabar in Cambridge that he met the club's manager, Kathleen Hennessy; they married in 1999 and have two sons, William and Aaron. Freelance work came quickly: Ryan Kisor's Minor Mutiny (1992), David Murray's MX (1992), records with Wallace Roney and the Bob Thiele Collective. Two sessions in June 1992 bracket that first year. On June 1 and 2 he cut Sax Storm for the Japanese label Alfa Jazz with Grand Central, a two-tenor band pairing him with Antoine Roney over Jacky Terrasson, Santi Debriano and Cindy Blackman. Three weeks later, on June 25, he was in a studio at 102 Greene Street for Rashied Ali's quintet, alongside bassist Matthew Garrison. Ali, who had played with both of their fathers, was the only person in the room who could make that particular introduction. The tapes sat for nine years before Ali's own Survival Records issued them in 2001 as No One in Particular.

The formative apprenticeship, by his own account, was not with a Coltrane-alumnus bandleader but with alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, whose Five Elements he worked in from the mid-1990s: Def Trance Beat (Modalities of Rhythm) (recorded June 1994), The Sign and the Seal (1996), Genesis & the Opening of the Way (1997), The Sonic Language of Myth (1999) and Lucidarium (2004). Coleman's rhythmic and harmonic systems, built from cycles rather than chord changes, gave him a way into the music that had nothing to do with his surname, and Coleman went on to produce and co-mix his debut. Grand Central returned in March 1995 for Tenor Conclave, a Hank Mobley tribute with Craig Handy in Roney's chair, and in 1996 he joined pianist Yosuke Yamashita's New York Trio with Cecil McBee and Pheeroan akLaff for Canvas in Vigor and, the following year, Wind of the Age.

He had appeared on more than thirty records before he made one of his own. Moving Pictures, cut October 15 to 17, 1997 at Systems Two in Brooklyn with pianist Michael Cain, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts, came out on RCA Victor in 1998; From the Round Box (recorded September and December 1999) followed on the same label with Geri Allen at the piano and Ralph Alessi on trumpet, reaching No. 19 on Billboard's Traditional Jazz Albums chart. Mad 6, taped May 26 and 27, 2002 and issued through the Japanese Eighty-Eight's imprint, split a sextet's worth of players across two rhythm sections and set his father's "26-2" and "Fifth House" beside Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Heath and Charles Mingus. That same year he co-founded RKM Music, an independent label he has used to release Alessi, pianist Luis Perdomo and guitarist David Gilmore. In Flux (Savoy Jazz, 2005) introduced the quartet that became his most settled working band, with Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress and drummer E.J. Strickland, and brought his first Grammy nomination, for his solo on "Away." Blending Times (Savoy, 2009) was assembled from sessions running August 2006 to September 2007 and closes with "For Turiya," written for his mother, who died in January 2007 while the record was being made.

Spirit Fiction, released June 19, 2012, was his first album for Blue Note and remains his most recent studio record as a leader. Co-produced with Joe Lovano, it alternates two bands across eleven tracks, the Perdomo/Gress/Strickland quartet and a quintet of Alessi, Allen, James Genus and Eric Harland, with pieces by Ornette Coleman and Paul Motian among the originals. AllMusic gave it four stars, and his solo on "Cross Roads" drew a second Grammy nomination.

Much of his work since has been collective rather than solo. He replaced Michael Brecker in Saxophone Summit after Brecker's death in January 2007, recording Seraphic Light with Lovano and Dave Liebman at Clinton Recording Studio on October 4 to 6, 2007 and closing it with his father's "Expression"; he returned to the group for Visitation, taped at Bennett Studios on February 10 and 11, 2011 and released in 2014. In 2008 he joined the Blue Note 7, the septet Blue Note assembled for its 70th anniversary with Bill Charlap, Nicholas Payton, Steve Wilson, Peter Bernstein, Peter Washington and Lewis Nash; Mosaic: A Celebration of Blue Note Records was recorded in May 2008 and released January 13, 2009, and the band played roughly 50 North American cities between January and April that year. The strongest of these partnerships put him back with Matthew Garrison: the trio with drummer Jack DeJohnette recorded In Movement at Avatar Studios in October 2015 for ECM, opening with "Alabama," working through "Two Jimmys" (for Jimi Hendrix and Garrison's father) and "Rashied" (for Rashied Ali), and earning him a third Grammy nomination for the title track. He has also recorded with Chick Corea (The Vigil, 2013), Terence Blanchard, Cassandra Wilson, harpist Brandee Younger, Dave Douglas and Marcus Gilmore, Bill Laswell, and his cousin Steven Ellison, who records as Flying Lotus, on Cosmogramma (2010).

The other half of his working life is archival. He chairs The Coltrane Home, the organization restoring his parents' house in Dix Hills as a museum and research center, and he has been the family's voice on the Impulse! and Verve releases drawn from his father's vault, credited variously as producer and executive producer: One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note (2005), the label history The House That Trane Built (2006), and then the two releases that reset public expectations of what was left in the tape library. Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, a complete March 6, 1963 studio session recovered from a reference copy after Impulse! destroyed the master to save shelf space, came out June 29, 2018 with Ravi as compilation producer alongside Ken Druker; it entered the Billboard 200 at No. 21, the first John Coltrane album ever to chart there, and topped the Top Jazz Albums chart. Blue World, the quartet's June 24, 1964 soundtrack session for Gilles Groulx's Canadian film Le chat dans le sac, followed on September 27, 2019 with Ravi as executive producer, and Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, found in a New York Public Library collection, in July 2023. He has done the same for his mother's catalog: he produced and mixed Translinear Light (2004), her first jazz record in 26 years, produced the ashram tapes issued as Kirtan: Turiya Sings (2021), and was executive producer with his sister Michelle on The Carnegie Hall Concert, the February 21, 1971 tape released March 22, 2024. That release opened The Year of Alice, a 2024 and 2025 program run by the Coltrane Home, the family and Impulse!, for which he curated the Detroit Jazz Festival's Labor Day weekend opening concert and further large-scale concerts in New York and Los Angeles.

He lives in Brooklyn and keeps a full touring schedule. Arkadia Records has issued two sets from a week he played at the Jazz Standard with pianist Joanne Brackeen, bassist Ira Coleman and drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez, as Friday (2023) and Saturday (2024), and in 2024 he was working a new trio, TriFoura, with pianist Gadi Lehavi and drummer Elé Howell, at the Jazz Gallery and around Brooklyn.

The obvious comparison is the one Ravi Coltrane has spent a career declining to invite. His tenor sound is drier, tighter and more contained than his father's, with a soprano voice that several critics have singled out as his more distinctive horn, and his writing tends toward short forms, oblique heads and group improvisations directed rather than soloed over: five of the ten tracks on Blending Times are credited as improvisations he conceived and directed rather than composed. The formative influence he names is Steve Coleman, whose cyclic, language-based approach to rhythm and harmony he absorbed across a decade in Five Elements, and it shows in a rhythmic sense that sits closer to the M-Base generation than to the hard-bop revivalism that dominated the young-lion years he came up in. AllMusic has credited him with "never exploiting his family name and focusing exclusively on deeply intellectual, harmonically complex post-bop," and the recurring critical complaint runs the other way, that the music can be more absorbing than immediate. Three Grammy nominations, all for improvised solos rather than albums (from In Flux in 2006, Spirit Fiction in 2013 and In Movement in 2017), point at where his reputation actually sits: he is valued as a player inside other people's ensembles at least as much as a bandleader. The second, less visible half of his influence is editorial. As the executor of his parents' recorded legacy he has decided what comes out of the Impulse! vault and how, and Both Directions at Once and The Carnegie Hall Concert have measurably changed how both of his parents are heard.