Rodney Green was born on March 17, 1979, in Camden, New Jersey, and grew up an only child surrounded by gospel music at home and in church, where his father was a preacher and organist and his mother sang in the choir. He climbed onto a drum kit whenever he could from age three. An older cousin, also a musician, introduced him to jazz, funk, and soul, playing him records like A Love Supreme, Transition, and Four More that made him a devotee of Elvin Jones and Tony Williams — drummers, he'd later say, whose range and technique first showed him what the instrument could do. He was largely self-taught and playing by ear until, at fourteen, percussionist Scott Robinson noticed the gap between his ear and his understanding and offered to teach him for free.

Green came up in the overlapping club and school scenes of Camden and Philadelphia, playing venues including the Blue Moon, Zanzibar Blue, and Chris' Café alongside emerging Philadelphia-scene musicians — pianist Orrin Evans, trumpeter Duane Eubanks (whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile), and bassist Christian McBride among them. He also drew early notice working with saxophonist Antonio Hart. At sixteen, when drummer Brian Frasier-Moore left his house gig at Patti LaBelle's own club, Chez LaBelle, Green took over the chair — and talked the club's manager into starting a Sunday Jazz Brunch that he then staffed with players like Evans and saxophonist Sam Newsome. Saxophonist Bobby Watson was impressed enough by the teenager's playing that he called Green's parents to ask permission to bring him on tour to Italy; after some persuading, they agreed, and Green was touring internationally at seventeen, still in high school.

He moved to New York right after graduating. Saxophonist Stefon Harris recommended him to Greg Osby, and Green became a fixture in Osby's bands, appearing on the Blue Note albums Zero. (1998) and Banned in New York (1998) — the latter a live date at Sweet Basil that Osby had deliberately captured on a personal MiniDisc recorder with a single stock microphone and released looking like a bootleg, to considerable critical notice. Pianist Jason Moran held the piano chair in Osby's band on both records, making them Green and Moran's earliest shared credits. At nineteen, on bassist Ben Wolfe's recommendation, Green joined Diana Krall's touring band; he spent roughly two years crossing the world with her, an apprenticeship he has credited with teaching him the business side of music as much as the playing side. Discogs' catalog corroborates the outline of that period: five bootlegged live Krall recordings from 2000 and 2001, taped in Syracuse, San Sebastián, Buenos Aires, Marciac, and Newport, survive as unofficial documentation of the tour, even though they are not verifiable commercial releases.

The sideman work kept accumulating from there, official and well-documented rather than anecdotal: pianists Mulgrew Miller, Eric Reed, Benny Green, and Orrin Evans; trumpeter Terell Stafford; saxophonists Seamus Blake and Gary Smulyan; a 2010 studio credit on Charlie Haden Quartet West's all-star vocal album Sophisticated Ladies (EmArcy/Universal), a genuine recorded connection to Charlie Haden — whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — alongside guest singers Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Melody Gardot, and Renée Fleming; and drums on pianist Aaron Diehl's chart-topping Mack Avenue debut The Bespoke Man's Narrative (2013), a date that also introduced him to vibraphonist Warren Wolf. He also played the string-orchestra bonus track "When You Wish Upon a Star" on the deluxe reissue of Gregory Porter's Grammy-winning Liquid Spirit (2015) — a narrower credit than the LP itself, whose core rhythm section throughout is drummer Emanuel Harrold, not Green. His own biographical materials and artist pages additionally cite work with Ravi Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis, Joe Henderson, Terence Blanchard, Dianne Reeves, Lizz Wright, and Tom Harrell.

Green has also stepped out as a leader in his own right, twice on record: Rodney Green Quartet: Live at Smalls (2013, SmallsLIVE), recorded at the Greenwich Village club with Seamus Blake, Luis Perdomo, and Joe Sanders, and Live at Jazzhus Montmartre Copenhagen (2017, Storyville), recorded with vibraphonist Warren Wolf, pianist Jacob Christoffersen, and bassist David Wong.

More recently, Green has built out a second career as a music entrepreneur. During the pandemic he launched Purgatory Perceptions, a monthly interview podcast and YouTube show pairing a musician guest with an interview subject, and started releasing genre-crossing material under the alias Jackson Miller, exploring the overlap between jazz improvisation and DJ/hip-hop culture. In February 2023 he opened his own jazz club, Brvsh Cul7ur3, a fifty-seat room in Teaneck, New Jersey, citing the pandemic's toll on live music and the cost of getting into Manhattan's clubs as his motivation; as of 2026 the club remains active, hosting regular programming including a Rodney Green birthday celebration with trumpeter Freddie Hendrix and pianist Jeb Patton.

Green's foundation is gospel — learned in his father's Camden church before he had formal instruction — layered with a devotion to Elvin Jones and Tony Williams that shaped his sense of range and dynamics behind the kit. His teenage apprenticeships (free lessons from percussionist Scott Robinson, then the road with Bobby Watson) gave him hard-bop fundamentals early; his twenties, split between Greg Osby's more exploratory postbop and Diana Krall's mainstream vocal-trio setting, taught him to move between contexts without losing feel, an adaptability that has defined the four decades-spanning sideman career since. Zildjian, one of his cymbal endorsers, lists his working setup as medium K hi-hats, an 18" crash-ride, and a 22" K ride, occasionally supplemented with thinner flat rides and swish knockers — gear choices for a drummer built to swing hard but stay out of a soloist's way, the temperament that has made him one of the more consistently in-demand drummers of his generation across hard bop, post-bop, and mainstream jazz settings.