Thomas Walter Turrentine Jr. was born April 22, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, six years before his younger brother Stanley, the tenor saxophonist he'd spend much of his career playing alongside. Tommy served his apprenticeship in the swing-era big bands that still dominated Black popular music in the mid-1940s: the Benny Carter Orchestra (1946-1948) and George Hudson's Orchestra came first, followed over the next several years by stints with Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie. From 1952 to 1955 he held down a chair with alto saxophonist and bandleader Earl Bostic, whose jump-blues-inflected outfit doubled as a finishing school for a generation of modern players.

By most accounts, including AllMusic's and Wikipedia's, Turrentine spent 1956 in Charles Mingus's orbit, a credit repeated widely enough in secondary biographical sources to be treated as reliable even though no surviving studio session pairing the two turns up in the Discogs release database — a gap that likely reflects live work or an undocumented date rather than a fabricated claim. What is fully documented is his next major association: joining drummer Max Roach's group in the late 1950s, a berth he shared for a run of Mercury sessions with his brother Stanley, trombonist Julian Priester, and bassist Bob Boswell. That lineup cut Quiet As It's Kept (1959) and Rich Versus Roach (1959, Roach's summit meeting with Buddy Rich), then reconvened at Chicago's Universal Recording on October 9 and 10, 1959, for Moon Faced and Starry Eyed, with Ray Bryant sitting in on piano. The same working unit — with Kenny Dorham added on a second trumpet chair — backed vocalist Abbey Lincoln on Abbey Is Blue (Riverside), recorded that spring and fall.

It was out of this same circle of Roach sidemen that Turrentine's sole outing as a leader took shape. Tommy Turrentine, cut for Bob Shad's Time Records and released in 1960, drew directly on the Roach band's personnel: Stanley Turrentine on tenor, Julian Priester on trombone, Horace Parlan on piano, Bob Boswell on bass, and Max Roach himself on drums. Turrentine wrote five of the album's seven tracks himself, rounding out the program with Horace Parlan's "Blues for J.P." and Bud Powell's "Webb City." AllMusic's retrospective judgment holds up: "a fine straight-ahead hard bop set" in which "all of the musicians play up to par and the results are swinging and fit securely into the modern mainstream of the time." It remains the only record built specifically around his own writing and his own trumpet as the lead voice.

The years immediately following found him constantly in demand as a sideman on the Blue Note and Bethlehem hard-bop circuit, usually alongside pianist Horace Parlan: Speakin' My Piece (recorded July 1960, its Blue Note sleeve crediting Turrentine's appearance "by courtesy of Time Records," evidence of how tightly the era's labels tracked their contracted artists) and On the Spur of the Moment (recorded March 1961). He turns up on Booker Ervin's The Book Cooks (recorded April 1960, with Mingus's regular drummer Dannie Richmond behind the kit), Jackie McLean's A Fickle Sonance (recorded October 1961), Sonny Clark's Leapin' and Lopin' (recorded November 1961, one of the last studio dates supervised by producer Alfred Lion before Clark's death two years later), and Lou Donaldson's The Natural Soul (1963), a soul-jazz date on which he shared the front line with guitarist Grant Green and organist John Patton. Beyond the trumpet, Turrentine had real facility at the piano — Wikipedia's summary describes him as "adept on the piano at chord blockings" and notes his compositions leaned on Thelonious Monk's chordal vocabulary fused with a lyricism closer to Benny Golson, filtered through the harder attack of the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet he'd absorbed firsthand.

After 1963, new studio dates under his own name or as a regular sideman effectively stop. He didn't vanish completely — in the summer of 1979 he joined Jon Faddis and other trumpeters at New York's Village Gate for an all-star tribute to the recently deceased Blue Mitchell, and a decade later he turned up on Sun Ra's 1989 album Blue Delight — but these were occasional reappearances rather than a return to active recording. No specific illness or personal account for the retirement survives in the standard biographical sources; what's clear is that a trumpeter Roach, Mingus, McLean, and Clark all wanted on their sessions through the early 1960s simply stopped being part of the working scene, and his reputation settled into something closer to a musician's musician remembered by his peers rather than a documented catalog. His younger brother's far more prolific solo career, stretching from Blue Note soul-jazz through 1970s crossover and beyond, only deepened the contrast and further receded Tommy from public view.

Turrentine died May 13, 1997, in New York City, of cancer, at age 69.

Turrentine's trumpet voice was forged in the swing big bands and hardened in Earl Bostic's jump-blues unit before Max Roach's late-1950s group gave it a genuinely modern hard-bop setting; his brief but concentrated run alongside Roach, Jackie McLean, Sonny Clark, and Horace Parlan placed him squarely inside the Blue Note/Bethlehem mainstream of 1959-1963. What distinguished him from other capable section players of the era was a real compositional and harmonic sophistication carried over from the piano: a chordal vocabulary indebted to Thelonious Monk, a melodic lyricism closer to Benny Golson, and a rhythmic drive inherited directly from the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet's example. That combination made Tommy Turrentine (1960) a more personal statement than a typical sideman's one-off leader date, even as his own recorded output stayed limited to that single session — his standing as a player was, and remains, out of proportion to how little of it survives on record, and it was permanently overshadowed by his more famous younger brother.