Steven Douglas Coleman was born September 20, 1956, and grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He started on alto saxophone at fourteen, drawn first to R&B and funk bands built around players like Maceo Parker before Chicago's own tenor tradition, especially Von Freeman, pulled him toward jazz. He attended Illinois Wesleyan University for two years before transferring to Roosevelt University's Chicago Musical College, and moved to New York in 1978.

New York put him quickly into big bands: the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Slide Hampton's big band, Sam Rivers's Studio Rivbea Orchestra, and briefly Cecil Taylor's big band. From there he worked as a sideman with David Murray, Doug Hammond, Dave Holland, Michael Brecker, and Abbey Lincoln, joining Holland's regular quintet in the early 1980s alongside Kenny Wheeler, trombonist Julian Priester, and drummer Steve Ellington, a group documented on the ECM albums Jumpin' In (1984), Seeds of Time (1985), The Razor's Edge (1987), the trio session Triplicate (1988, with Holland and Jack DeJohnette), and Extensions (1990). During his first years in the city he also played in the streets and small clubs with a band he built around trumpeter Graham Haynes; that group evolved into Steve Coleman and Five Elements, which became the vehicle for most of his own music from 1985 onward. Coleman, Cassandra Wilson, Greg Osby, and other young New York players in this circle coined the term M-Base (short for "macro-basic array of spontaneous extemporization") around 1985 to describe a shared approach to improvisation built from nested rhythmic and melodic loops rather than conventional chord changes.

Coleman's debut as a leader, Motherland Pulse (1985, JMT), billed to the Steve Coleman Group, featured Haynes, Cassandra Wilson on vocals, Geri Allen on piano and synthesizer, bassist Kevin Bruce Harris, and drummer Marvin "Smitty" Smith. Five Elements followed with On the Edge of Tomorrow (1986), World Expansion (By the M-Base Neophyte) (1987), and Sine Die (1988), all on JMT or the affiliated Pangaea imprint, establishing the working band's early personnel around Haynes and a changing rhythm section. Coleman also formed Strata Institute, co-led with the alto saxophonist Greg Osby, which released Cipher Syntax (1989, JMT) and Transmigration (1991, Rebel-X); neither record carries a piano chair, the two saxophonists sharing the writing and production between them. Five Elements moved to RCA's Novus imprint for Rhythm People (The Resurrection of Creative Black Civilization) (1990), Black Science (1991), Drop Kick (1992), and The Tao of Mad Phat (Fringe Zones) (1993), while Coleman released the separately billed Rhythm in Mind (1992, Novus) under his own name and duetted with Dave Holland on Phase Space (1991). In late 1993 he traveled to Ghana, where contact with Dagomba drummers and their spoken drum language deepened a long-running interest in how West African and diaspora musical traditions encode information, an interest that shaped much of his work through the rest of the decade.

The mid-1990s saw Coleman start several parallel bands alongside Five Elements, all signed to BMG: the funk-and-hip-hop-inflected Metrics, heard on A Tale of 3 Cities (1994) and The Way of the Cipher (1995); the Mystic Rhythm Society, which recorded Myths, Modes and Means (1995); and the Council of Balance, a large ensemble. Five Elements itself released Curves of Life and Def Trance Beat (Modalities of Rhythm), both in 1995, the same year BMG issued the multi-disc Steve Coleman's Music: Live in Paris, drawing on Five Elements, Metrics, and the Mystic Rhythm Society. In 1996 Coleman took a group of American musicians and dancers to Havana, spending twelve days working with the folkloric ensemble AfroCuba de Matanzas, performing at the Havana Jazz Festival, and recording The Sign and the Seal (Transmissions of the Metaphysics of a Culture) (1996) under the joint billing of Steve Coleman and the Mystic Rhythm Society with AfroCuba de Matanzas. The following year he took a group of American and Cuban musicians to Senegal to work with the group Sing Sing Rhythm, and released the double album Genesis & The Opening of the Way (1997, RCA Victor), pairing a large Five Elements session with a Council of Balance disc recorded with dancers and a Cuban percussion section; the reed section on the Five Elements half alone ran to Greg Osby, Ravi Coltrane, Gregory Tardy, Yosvany Terry, and Aaron Stewart, with George Lewis on trombone and Vijay Iyer and Andy Milne on keyboards. In 1998 Coleman led Five Elements to south India for a cultural exchange with Carnatic musicians, and the following year released The Sonic Language of Myth (Believing, Learning, Knowing) (1999, RCA Victor).

Coleman's catalog moved to the French label Label Bleu in the 2000s, beginning with the double album Resistance Is Futile (2001) and continuing through On the Rising of the 64 Paths (2003), Lucidarium (2004), and Weaving Symbolics (2006), while a self-titled French BMG release, The Ascension to Light (2001), and the self-released Alternate Dimension Series I (2002) filled out the decade's Five Elements catalog. In 2007 he recorded Invisible Paths: First Scattering for John Zorn's Tzadik label, an unaccompanied alto saxophone session. Coleman signed to Pi Recordings in the following decade, releasing Harvesting Semblances and Affinities (2010) and The Mancy of Sound (2011), both recorded several years earlier, then Functional Arrhythmias (2013), a Five Elements record built around the rhythmic patterns of the human heart. Synovial Joints (2015), billed to Steve Coleman and the Council of Balance, was named a Jazz Album of the Year by the New York Times, and Morphogenesis (2017), credited to Steve Coleman's Natal Eclipse with saxophonist Maria Grand, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, pianist Matt Mitchell, vocalist Jen Shyu, and violinist Kristin Lee, topped several critics' year-end lists. Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. I (The Embedded Sets) (2018) and Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. II (Mdw Ntr) (2021) marked the end of a fifteen-year absence from live recording, and Coleman's most recent Five Elements album, PolyTropos / Of Many Turns, appeared on Pi Recordings in 2024. In September 2014 Coleman was named a MacArthur Fellow, honored for "refreshing traditional templates to create distinctive and innovative work in ... jazz."

In 2017 saxophonist Maria Grand, who had performed on and copied charts for Coleman's Synovial Joints and Morphogenesis, wrote an open letter accusing Coleman of using his position as an older mentor to initiate a romantic and sexual relationship with her. Coleman said the relationship had been consensual and sued Grand for defamation in U.S. district court; Grand countersued on the same grounds. A court ruled that Grand's public statements were protected opinion rather than defamation, Coleman appealed the ruling in 2021, and the appeal was rejected in 2025.

Coleman's music is built on cyclical, mathematically structured rhythmic and melodic patterns rather than the chord-change-driven forms of most postwar jazz, an approach he and his M-Base collaborators developed as an alternative vocabulary for improvisation in the mid-1980s. His alto tone is dry, urgent, and instantly identifiable, developed in part by practicing in the street rather than in a practice room, and his writing draws on rhythmic and structural ideas from West African drum languages, Cuban Santeria and rumba traditions, Indian Carnatic music, and, throughout his career, mathematics and the natural sciences: Functional Arrhythmias (2013) maps the pulse patterns of the human heart, and Synovial Joints (2015) takes its structure from human anatomy. AllMusic's Thom Jurek has written that "the influence of M-Base founder, composer, and alto saxophonist Steve Coleman cannot be overstated," crediting him with expanding the possibilities of spontaneous composition by engaging musical traditions from around the world on their own rhythmic terms. Coleman has mentored a long line of younger musicians who passed through Five Elements, the Council of Balance, and his other groups, among them Vijay Iyer, Ravi Coltrane, Jonathan Finlayson, and Maria Grand, several of whom carried his rhythmic language directly into their own later work.