Richard Francis Wyands was born July 2, 1928, in Oakland, California, and raised across the bay in Berkeley. He began piano lessons around age seven or eight with a neighborhood teacher, working first through the classical repertoire before turning his attention to the jazz records of Fats Waller and, around 1942, taking an eight-month course in jazz piano from a Bay Area teacher named Wilbert Barenco. He counted Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson among his formative influences, was gigging professionally around the Bay Area by his mid-teens, and earned a music degree from San Francisco State College in 1950.

Through the early 1950s Wyands worked as a member of bassist Vernon Alley's group, the house band at San Francisco's Black Hawk club, backing the touring soloists who passed through, at times playing opposite Tatum and Garner themselves; Tatum reportedly told him, "You can't compete with me anyhow, but keep it up." He also worked in Ben Watkins's bands and, within the Bay Area jazz circle of the mid-1940s, met bassist Charles Mingus, with whom he made his first recording in 1949. Other Bay Area associations from this period included vibraphonist Cal Tjader, reedman Jerome Richardson and saxophonist Paul Desmond.

In 1956 Wyands spent twelve weeks as music director for Ella Fitzgerald on a tour through San Francisco, Las Vegas, Palm Springs and Los Angeles. The following year he relocated to the Ottawa, Ontario area for roughly ten months, accompanying visiting pop singers in a club there, before touring for three months as accompanist to Carmen McRae. He arrived in New York with McRae in 1958 and spent a difficult first year working through the musicians' union's transfer restrictions before he could take steady work.

His first New York record date was the piano chair on the Roy Haynes Trio's Just Us (New Jazz, 1960). Through the same years he worked extensively with alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce's band, appearing on four Gryce LPs (Saying Somethin'!, The Hap'nin's, The Rat Race Blues and Reminiscin', all 1960-61), and played the Five Spot Cafe and Minton's Playhouse as one of the busiest sidemen in the city. In the 1960s he joined tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet's big band. He also became, in the words of a 2019 remembrance, "the most crucial accompanist" behind vocalist Etta Jones, starting with her breakthrough Prestige album Don't Go to Strangers (recorded June 21, 1960, later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame), a quintet date with Frank Wess on tenor and flute, guitarist Skeeter Best, bassist George Duvivier and Roy Haynes on drums, and continuing the following year on Something Nice. Forty years afterward the partnership resumed: Wyands returned for Jones's Easy Living (2000), described by All About Jazz as a "reunion," and for Etta Jones Sings Lady Day (2001).

From 1965 to 1974 Wyands was one of guitarist Kenny Burrell's most frequent pianists, appearing on The Tender Gender, A Generation Ago Today, Night Song, God Bless the Child (1971), 'Round Midnight and several more. Across the same decades he recorded with tenor saxophonist Oliver Nelson (Screamin' the Blues, Straight Ahead), multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk (We Free Kings, 1961), tenor saxophonist Frank Foster (Manhattan Fever, 1968), trumpeter Freddie Hubbard (First Light, 1971) and altoist Benny Carter (Over the Rainbow, 1989; Cookin' at Carlos I, 1990), among many others. From the 1990s on he became a key partner of tenor saxophonist Houston Person, appearing on a run of Person's HighNote albums (Person-ified, My Romance, Soft Lights, Blue Velvet, Sentimental Journey) and, in turn, having Person produce two of his own leader dates. He was also a member of drummer Jimmy Cobb's group Jimmy Cobb's Mob alongside guitarist Peter Bernstein, who called Wyands "one of the greatest jazz pianists ever to play," praising "his incredibly beautiful touch and total control of sound."

Wyands led only a small run of his own albums, almost always trios, beginning at nearly fifty with Then, Here and Now (recorded October 12, 1978, for the Danish label Jazzcraft Records) alongside bassist Lisle Atkinson and drummer David Lee. He returned to the trio format on The Arrival (1992, DIW), again with Atkinson, now paired with drummer Leroy Williams, then made a run of albums with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington: Reunited (1995, Criss Cross Jazz), Get Out of Town (1996, SteepleChase), Lady of the Lavender Mist (1997, Venus Records) and Half and Half (1999, Criss Cross Jazz). His last leader dates were the co-led Fine Wine Trio (1998, with drummer-vocalist Bobby Kapp and bassist Gene Perla) and As Long As There's Music (2000, Savant), a quartet with bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Grady Tate produced by Houston Person. In his final years Wyands led a weekly trio residency at the 75 Club in Lower Manhattan with Atkinson and Leroy Williams, the same drummer alongside whom he plays piano on the Leroy Williams Quartet's Time Is... (Jazz Child Records, recorded March 10, 2003, released 2004), a session on which guitarist Roni Ben-Hur plays and co-produces alongside Williams, with bassist Walter Booker completing the band. Richard Wyands died September 25, 2019, in New York, at 91.

Wyands built his reputation almost entirely as an accompanist rather than a bandleader, and critics singled out exactly that skill: a 2019 tribute called him "a pianist whose articulate touch and sensitive phrasing made him a first-tier accompanist over a career spanning 75 years." His own early models were Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, sharpened further by nightly proximity to Tatum and Garner themselves at San Francisco's Black Hawk club. Drummer Kenny Washington, a longtime bandstand partner, described him as a musician "taken for granted" for how reliably he "does everything right," with instinctive time and touch; guitarist Peter Bernstein, another regular collaborator, remembered playing alongside him as "a unique experience in the way he made you hear yourself and everything around you with greater clarity." That combination of harmonic clarity, understatement and unfailing swing made him one of the most in-demand pianists in New York jazz for singers and horn players alike across six decades.