Walter Blanding Jr. was born August 14, 1971, in Cleveland, Ohio, into a family already inside the music. His grandmother was music director of the family's Baptist church and taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where both his parents studied before turning professional. He started on saxophone at six. In 1981 the family moved to New York City, where his father, a bassist, and his mother, a pianist and singer, played in the house band at the Village Gate; by his mid-teens Blanding was on the stand with them, billed as the Blanding Family Trio. He went to Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, spent seven years studying with Barry Harris, and continued at the New School for Social Research, where his teachers included Jaki Byard, Jimmy Cobb, Billy Harper, Reggie Workman, and Joe Chambers.

His first record came at nineteen. The Tough Young Tenors, a five-saxophone collective he formed with James Carter, Herb Harris, Tim Warfield, and Todd Williams, cut Alone Together at BMG Studios on January 8, 9, and 10, 1991, and Billboard named it one of the year's best jazz albums. Work with Wynton Marsalis's Lincoln Center circle began almost immediately: Blanding plays on They Came to Swing, assembled from concerts recorded between October 1992 and April 1994, and on soprano saxophone across Blood on the Fields, the slavery oratorio recorded January 22 to 25, 1995, in the Grand Hall of the Masonic Grand Lodge and released in 1997, the year Marsalis won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for it, the first jazz work to take the award. Away from Lincoln Center he was working with Cab Calloway, the Count Basie Orchestra, Illinois Jacquet's big band, and trumpeter Roy Hargrove.

Then he left. In 1995 Blanding moved to Israel and stayed four years, an interval with no obvious parallel in the careers of his American contemporaries. He toured the country with his own quartet, brought over visiting Americans including drummer Louis Hayes and pianist Eric Reed, ran a concert series with backing from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, taught at Israeli high schools, opened his own private school in Tel Aviv, and took Israeli citizenship. Among the schools he taught at was the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Givatayim, the standard route for Israeli teenagers serious about music, where his students included the guitarist Yotam Silberstein and where the pianist Amit Golan was building the jazz curriculum over the same years. Newsweek International called him a "Jazz Ambassador to Israel." He also turned up on screen: the 2001 Israeli film Caravan 841, directed by Zion Rubin, casts him as a saxophone player who befriends a young Ethiopian immigrant, and the picture took Best Script at that year's Jerusalem Film Festival.

Blanding came back to New York and in 1998 accepted the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra chair he had turned down more than once. He held it for roughly twenty-five years, and the recorded trail runs the length of the band's discography: Big Train (1999), on which he plays alto, soprano, tenor, and clarinet; Marsalis Plays Monk (1999); the orchestra's readings of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (2004) and Don't Be Afraid... The Music of Charles Mingus (Charles Mingus, 2005); Vitoria Suite with Paco de Lucía (2010); The Abyssinian Mass, recorded over three nights in October 2013; Live in Cuba, from three more at Havana's Mella Theatre in October 2010; Una Noche con Rubén Blades (2018); and The Democracy! Suite (2020), where he is one of seven players in the pandemic-era septet. What the prose biographies leave out is that he also writes for the band: Discogs credit blocks list him as arranger of "Very Early" on Handful of Keys (2017) and of Wayne Shorter's "Lost" on the orchestra's Wayne Shorter programme, recorded in May 2015. He was on Ted Nash's Presidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom, taped September 14, 2014, which won Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 59th Grammy Awards, and he takes the tenor solo on its Kennedy movement.

His own leader catalog is small and deliberate. The Olive Tree, recorded December 6, 1999, and issued by Criss Cross Jazz in April 2000, put him in front of a quintet of Lincoln Center colleagues: Ryan Kisor on trumpet, Farid Barron on piano, Rodney Whitaker on bass, and Rodney Green on drums. A second album, Fantasy in Blue, eleven original compositions rooted in the blues and closing with a fresh reading of "The Olive Tree," appeared as a self-released CD in 2018 and did not reach streaming services until a digital issue in 2026. Alongside those he kept a busy sideman schedule outside the orchestra, most of it with people he had come up alongside: five SteepleChase and Nagel Heyer dates for trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, Vincent Gardner, and Marcus Printup between 2000 and 2011; Odean Pope's Odean's List (2009); and two tracks apiece on records well outside jazz, Natalie Merchant's Leave Your Sleep (2010) and Paul Simon's In the Blue Light (2018).

Teaching has run parallel to the playing for his whole career. He has given master classes on six of the seven continents, served as Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai's jazz ambassador from 2018 to 2020, and worked with the student band at the Shanghai Community International School. In the autumn of 2023 he joined Michigan State University as assistant professor of jazz saxophone, in a department run by Rodney Whitaker, the bassist on The Olive Tree.

Blanding is a big-toned, unhurried tenor player whose vocabulary comes straight out of the Barry Harris bebop pedagogy he absorbed over seven years as a teenager, filtered through two decades of playing Ellington, Basie, and Monk charts nightly in the most repertory-minded band in jazz. The doubling is the practical measure of him: the Big Train credit block alone lists alto, soprano, tenor, and clarinet, and the Lincoln Center book has him moving between tenor, soprano, and clarinet inside a single program. Reviewing The Olive Tree in November 2000, All About Jazz placed the 28-year-old alongside Criss Cross's other tenor signings, Walt Weiskopf, Tim Warfield, Seamus Blake, and Ralph Lalama, and read the record as delivering on the promise of the 1991 Tough Young Tenors session. What has separated him from that peer group is everything outside the horn: four years remaking a national scene in Israel, two more doing something similar in Shanghai, and a teaching career that started before the Lincoln Center chair did and outlasted it.