Teddy Charles was born Theodore Charles Cohen on April 13, 1928, in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. He studied percussion at the Juilliard School of Music in New York in the mid-1940s, and by his own account got his real start on a fluke: asked to sit in on piano with a Coleman Hawkins band, deputizing for Thelonious Monk. Through the late 1940s he worked as a vibraphonist, billed as "Teddy Cohen," in the big bands of Randy Brooks, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Buddy DeFranco, and Chubby Jackson. He shortened his name to Teddy Charles in 1951.

Settled in New York, Charles fell in with the circle of musicians who hung around 821 Sixth Avenue, the loft building rented by photographer David X. Young and known as the Jazz Loft, where pianist Hall Overton (a subletting tenant) became his mentor. He began leading his own record dates in 1953, cutting the West Coasters EP and the first two volumes of the New Directions series for Prestige, all in a polytonal, chamber-scaled style that drew as much on Bartok and Stravinsky as on bebop. Around the same time he joined Charles Mingus's Jazz Composers' Workshop, and the two musicians' overlapping ambitions toward long-form, classically inflected jazz produced two key records: Evolution (Prestige, sessions of August 1953 and January 6, 1955, with Mingus on bass) and, on July 9, 1955, Blue Moods, a pianoless quintet for Mingus's own Debut label pairing Charles's vibraphone with trumpeter Miles Davis, trombonist Britt Woodman, Mingus, and drummer Elvin Jones.

His most celebrated recording as a leader followed on January 6, 1956: The Teddy Charles Tentet for Atlantic, a ten-piece date with charts by Charles himself alongside Gil Evans and George Russell, and a band that included Art Farmer, Gigi Gryce, Mal Waldron, and tubist Don Butterfield. The record is still cited as a landmark of what critics were starting to call Third Stream, the fusion of jazz improvisation with modern classical composition, and it sits in The Penguin Guide to Jazz's "Core Collection." He followed it with the nonet date Word from Bird (Atlantic, October and November 1956), a set of Charlie Parker tunes rearranged for an unusual brass-and-reed frontline, and in 1957 co-led the short-lived Prestige Jazz Quartet with Mal Waldron, bassist Addison Farmer, and drummer Jerry Segal.

That same year, working as a staff producer and A&R man for Prestige, Charles supervised a two-session project that would later become significant far beyond its modest original release. On April 20, 1957, he assembled a baritone-saxophone-heavy septet at Van Gelder Studio: John Coltrane on tenor, Cecil Payne and Pepper Adams on baritones, Waldron on piano, Doug Watkins on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. Charles wrote three of the session's six tunes, including the title track, but did not perform on it. On May 18 he supervised a companion date built around French horns: Julius Watkins, David Amram, trombonist Curtis Fuller, Sahib Shihab on alto, and pianist Hampton Hawes (except for one tune, on which Charles himself sat in on piano). Prestige issued the two dates together in 1958 as a 16⅔ rpm sampler, Modern Jazz Survey 2 / Baritones and French Horns (Prestige 6); the baritone side was reissued twice on LP and twice more on CD as Dakar, credited to Coltrane, and Charles produced several of those later reissues himself. He also produced Waldron's own Billie Holiday tribute Left Alone (Bethlehem, 1960) around this time.

From the late 1950s Charles worked increasingly as a producer rather than a performer, a role in which his fingerprints turn up on records that far outnumber his own leader catalog. He produced Curtis Fuller's Boss of the Soul-Stream Trombone (1961), Booker Ervin's The Book Cooks (1961), Booker Little's Booker Little and Friend (1962), and, on March 2, 1961, the Warwick label session that reunited him with Pepper Adams: Out of This World, the Donald Byrd/Pepper Adams Quintet date that gave pianist Herbie Hancock his recording debut. Charles produced the record and also stepped in as a guest on vibraphone for one track, "It's a Beautiful Evening." He continued to lead occasional dates of his own through the turn of the decade, among them Coolin' (recorded 1957, issued on New Jazz in 1959), the Lionel Hampton tribute Salute to Hamp (Bethlehem, 1959, with Zoot Sims, Hank Jones, Art Farmer, and Bob Brookmeyer sitting in across its two sessions), and a concert recording made at the Museum of Modern Art, Jazz in the Garden (Warwick, 1960).

Charles largely stepped back from full-time music in the early 1960s, redirecting his energy toward a second career as a charter-boat captain in the Caribbean and, later, on Long Island. He surfaced occasionally on record, including the novelty date Russia Goes Jazz (United Artists, 1964), but did not lead another studio album until Live at the Verona Jazz Festival 1988 (Soul Note, 1989), a quartet comeback recorded in Italy. He settled in Greenport, on Long Island's North Fork, where he restored and captained the 1906 schooner Mary E starting in 1973 and later ran the boat Pilgrim, earning the nickname "Captain Ted" while still performing locally. The Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame inducted him in 2010. In his final years he worked with saxophonist Chris Byars, recording Dances with Bulls (Smalls, 2008) and appearing on Byars's Bop-ography (2010); his last recorded performance was a 2011 collaboration with singer Wily Bo Walker on "You Don't Know What Love Is." Teddy Charles died of heart failure on April 16, 2012, in Riverhead, New York, three days after turning 84.

Charles came to the vibraphone as a boy after hearing Lionel Hampton on Benny Goodman's quartet records, and critics group him with Milt Jackson and Terry Gibbs as the generation of players who took the instrument's vocabulary beyond Hampton and Red Norvo into the harmonic language of bebop and beyond. What set Charles apart was his second life as a composer-arranger steeped in 20th-century concert music: Bartok, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev shaped his polytonal writing as much as Charlie Parker did, and his best-known dates, especially The Teddy Charles Tentet and Evolution, are frequently cited as founding documents of the Third Stream movement, alongside collaborators like Gil Evans, George Russell, and Charles Mingus who shared his interest in extended jazz composition. That same intellectual restlessness made him, in practice, more consequential as a producer and A&R man than as a performer for much of his career; from the late 1950s on he shaped other musicians' definitive recordings, including Mal Waldron's Left Alone, the Byrd-Adams Warwick sessions that introduced Herbie Hancock, and several posthumous John Coltrane reissue packages, at least as often as he stepped in front of a microphone himself.