Rick Faulkner was born July 30, 1967, and grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. He picked up the trombone the summer before sixth grade, having first auditioned on trumpet, and pursued jazz and classical training side by side through high school and college with jazz as the priority. He studied at Indiana University, where his principal teacher was Dee Stewart; he has also described taking a single lesson from Steve Turre. The players he names as his early models come from two traditions that his career later kept in contact with each other: Al Grey and J.J. Johnson on the jazz side, Don Drummond and Rico Rodriguez on the Jamaican side.

His earliest documented recording credit is not a jazz date at all. In 1991 he played trombone on Tan Lontant by the Haitian compas band Skah Shah #1 (Louis Records LR 007). In 1992 he joined the New York ska band the Toasters, replacing Mike Christiansen, and stayed through 1998 while working on a master's degree. Billed on that band's rosters as Rick "Chunk" Faulkner, he toured internationally and appears on Dub 56 (Moon Ska, 1994), Hard Band for Dead (Moon Ska, 1996), History Book (Moon, 1996), and Don't Let the Bastards Grind You Down (Moon Ska, 1997), and on the Toasters track "The Stage" on Island Records' 1997 compilation Ska Island.

With Toasters saxophonist Freddie Reiter he co-founded the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble, which he has described as beginning life as a horn section for hire before it turned into a band. Faulkner played trombone, sang, and produced on all three of its Moon Ska albums: the self-titled debut (MR057CD, 1995), Low Blow (MR092, 1996), and Get This! (MR132, 1998). The group was written up in Down Beat and JAZZIZ and played the Montreal and North Sea jazz festivals.

His leader debut came out of two sessions at Studio 900 in New York on July 16 and September 24, 1997. Waiting for the Rain was released on Laughing Buddha Records (LBP99004) in 1999 with a septet of Marty Ehrlich on alto saxophone, Patience Higgins on baritone saxophone and flute, Cary Brown on piano, Omer Avital on bass, Daniel Freedman on drums, Kahlil Kwame Bell on percussion, and Jessica Valiente on guiro. Six of the seven pieces are Faulkner originals; the exception is Johnny Green's "I Cover the Waterfront." Jazz Now called it "an impressive mainstream debut" and "straight ahead jazz of a high order," hearing Curtis Fuller and Bennie Green in his phrasing. The record went out of print for more than two decades and was reissued digitally on May 2, 2026.

The Latin and Caribbean half of his working life runs alongside all of this. With the flutist Jessica Valiente, his wife, he co-founded the charanga and Latin jazz group Los Mas Valientes, which has issued four albums between 1999 and 2022 with Faulkner as trombonist, arranger, and producer. He played on Pucho and His Latin Soul Brothers' The Hideout (Milestone, 2004) and on Juan-Carlos Formell's Las Calles del Paraíso (EMI Latin, 2002), and he is the trombonist and one of the arrangers in Victor Rendón's Bronx Conexión Latin Jazz Big Band, which has recorded True Flight (2016), Mambo Boulevard (2021), and Funky Frijoles (2024). He is also the trombonist in the horn section of the New York band Metropolitan Klezmer, whose "Rumanian Medley" he appears on for John Zorn's Tzadik label (Music from the Winery, TZ 7196, 2004), and he played on bassist Joe Gallant's big-band project Illuminati on Shadowhead (Accurate, 2000).

Faulkner has kept a publishing career running in parallel. His Afro-Caribbean big band charts, among them "Blackwater," "Afro Green," "Canto Lucumí," and "The Avid Listener," are sold through 3-2 Music Publishing, and his trombone and arrangement were heard every Saturday for more than twenty years in the theme music for the radio program "Que Viva la Música" on WFDU. A second leader recording sat unreleased for two decades: Live in Chelsea, a trombone and piano duo with Cary Brown taped at St. Peter's Chelsea in April 2003, finally appeared on Seven O Six Music on September 17, 2023. In 2020 he wrote and recorded Pegao with the Brooklyn reggae production outfit Crazy Baldhead, playing trombone plus bass, harmonica, and didgeridoo, and in 2021 he added trombone and trumpet to two tracks on Guided by Voices' It's Not Them. It Couldn't Be Them. It Is Them! He teaches in the New York City public school system and performs with Valiente and their daughters as the Faulkner-Valiente Family, a group that appeared at the World Flute Society convention in July 2024.

Faulkner's trombone playing is built on the plunger-and-blues line of Al Grey and the bebop articulation of J.J. Johnson, with the hard bop trombone tone of Curtis Fuller and Bennie Green close enough to the surface that reviewers of Waiting for the Rain reached for both names. What separates him from a straight-ahead specialist is that the Jamaican trombone tradition of Don Drummond and Rico Rodriguez is a first-order influence rather than a novelty, which is why the same player who cut a septet date with Marty Ehrlich also produced three ska-jazz albums and later made a reggae record under his own tunes. As a composer he writes for the rhythm rather than around it: "Blackwater" is a bembé, "Pa' Cachao" is a tribute to the Cuban bassist Israel Lopez, and his big band charts are catalogued at 3-2 Music Publishing by their Afro-Cuban rhythmic style. The New York Press review of his debut described "sophisticated, original harmonies and catchy melodies," and his sideman log across compas, salsa, charanga, klezmer, choro, ska, and indie rock is the practical expression of the same range.