Raphael Homer Bryant was born in Philadelphia on December 24, 1931, into a musical family. His mother was an ordained minister who had taught herself piano, and his father also played piano and sang. His brothers were the bassist Tommy Bryant, the drummer and singer Len Bryant, and Lynwood, and his sister Vera was the mother of the musicians Kevin, Robin and Duane Eubanks. He began on piano at about six or seven, following his mother and Vera, and absorbed gospel from church. By his early teens he had moved from classical music to jazz, and he also played double bass in junior high school. He was first paid to play at twelve, taking dance jobs that sneaked him into bars, and he turned professional at fourteen with a Philadelphia band led by Mickey Collins.

After about three years with Collins he toured with the guitarist Tiny Grimes in 1948 and 1949, spent a year as a solo pianist in Syracuse, New York, and then played Dixieland for roughly two years at Billy Krechmer's club back in Philadelphia. In 1953 he became house pianist at the Blue Note club in Philadelphia, a post he held until 1956, accompanying visiting stars including Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt. Davis and Sonny Rollins liked his playing enough to record with him in New York in 1955, on Davis's Quintet/Sextet and Rollins's Work Time, both for Prestige. His own first records as a leader came the same year, Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant, a co-billed album with the singer Betty Carter, and in 1956 he made a trio album for Epic that opened with his composition "Cubano Chant," with bassist Wyatt Ruther and drummers including Jo Jones.

Prestige used him as an occasional house pianist, and he made his own trio album for the label on April 5, 1957, with bassist Ike Isaacs and drummer Specs Wright. His unaccompanied Alone with the Blues (recorded in December 1958 for New Jazz) is often counted a classic of solo blues piano. In the same years he was the accompanist for the singer Carmen McRae (1956 and 1957), spent four months in 1957 in the small and big bands of Dizzy Gillespie, and recorded for Art Blakey in 1957 and 1958. He played the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival with Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, and in 1958 he was in Jo Jones's trio. He settled in New York in 1959, and for three months that year was the pianist in the small band of Ella Fitzgerald. He also recorded in 1959 with Hal Singer, Arnett Cobb, Benny Golson, Lem Winchester and Oliver Nelson.

From about 1959 to 1969 he led his own trio, with his brother Tommy and later Jimmy Rowser on bass and drummers including Walter Perkins, Mickey Roker, Grady Tate and Freddie Waits. The producer John Hammond signed him to Columbia in 1960. The first album, Little Susie, took its title from a blues he had worked up while playing with Jo Jones, and a rival version issued on Signature as "Little Susie (Part 4)" reached number 12 on the Billboard R&B chart. Hammond also paired him with a young Aretha Franklin for her Columbia debut, Aretha: With the Ray Bryant Combo, and, at Hammond's suggestion, Bryant reworked an earlier composition for the Madison dance craze as "Madison Time," which reached number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1960. Another single, "Sack o' Woe," reached the R&B chart in 1961. He recorded four albums for Sue from 1963, then moved in 1966 to Cadet, which recorded him in settings from trio to orchestra and for which he also wrote horn and string arrangements without formal training in the craft. Gotta Travel On (1966) reached number 111 on Billboard's album chart, and his cover of Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" was another top-100 single in 1967. The crossover success irritated some jazz purists, but Bryant said he had been playing such material in clubs long before the records sold. In 1964 he and Tommy formed a trio for the off-Broadway run of the comedy revue Cambridge Circus at Square East.

In 1972 he played the Montreux Jazz Festival, his first trip to Europe and his first live solo concert, and he was nervous about playing to an audience of thousands; the set was released by Atlantic as Alone at Montreux and led to more work as a solo pianist and frequent European tours. He played electric piano on some 1970s dates. Between 1976 and 1980 he made five albums for Pablo, including Here's Ray Bryant (1976, with bassist George Duvivier and drummer Grady Tate) and Montreux '77. After seven years without a leader session he was signed by an admiring producer at Japanese Polygram, for which he recorded ten albums between 1987 and 1995, many with bassist Rufus Reid. All Mine and Yours (1989) holds only his own compositions and was recorded on tour in Japan. In the mid-1990s he made a trio album with Ray Brown and Lewis Nash, toured widely as an unaccompanied soloist, and played in the group 100 Golden Fingers in Japan and Europe. His performances in the 2000s were mostly in Europe and Japan, and two solo concerts at Rutgers University in 2004 and 2008 were issued as In the Back Room. He passed away in Queens, New York, on June 2, 2011, at 79, after a long illness.

Bryant came up on Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, but blues and gospel soon outweighed them. He had a firm touch, steady time (especially in the left hand, which often set up a vamp) and a church-tinged tone even in bebop settings, and in solo playing he often set blues figures in the right hand against stride or boogie-woogie patterns in the left. He said he liked to carry the sound of the Count Basie Orchestra over to the piano. He was not known as an innovator, but his style was easy to recognize, and one writer likened his unaccompanied sets to carefully built sonatas with sharp changes of mood, tempo and dynamics. Scott Yanow of AllMusic judged him at his best playing blues alone on acoustic piano, and found even the electric-piano dates of the 1970s rewarding. As an accompanist his touch varied with the setting, less tied to blues and boogie. His tunes, among them "Cubano Chant," "Little Susie," "Madison Time," "Monkey Business" and "Blues Changes," move between Latin feels, blues, ballads, waltzes and calypsos, and "Cubano Chant" and "Blues Changes" were taken up by other players. His nephews Kevin, Robin and Duane Eubanks became prominent musicians in their own right, and the pianist Kenny Barron studied as a boy with Bryant's sister Vera, according to his profile.