Born in Opelousas, Louisiana, Ricky Sebastian started drum lessons at the age of eight and excelled under two great band directors, Carl DeLeo and Carl Schexnayder, leading the drum line at every school he attended. He began piano studies at seventeen, earned a full scholarship to the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and then a partial scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston. He returned to New Orleans in 1976 and spent six years working professionally with the city's greats across jazz, Afro-Cuban, traditional New Orleans music, Carnival music, Brazilian, reggae, calypso, funk, rock, R&B, Cajun and zydeco.
In 1983 he moved to New York, where over the next eighteen years he built a career as an in-demand recording and touring artist. The roster of artists he performed and recorded with reads like a hall of fame: Jaco Pastorius, Paul Butterfield, Les McCann, Dr. John, Larry Coryell, Blood Sweat & Tears, Bobby McFerrin, John Scofield, Mike Stern, Michael Franks, Harry Belafonte, Dianne Reeves, Ellis Marsalis, Herbie Mann and Tania Maria, among many others. He taught drums at New York's famed Drummers Collective for thirteen years, played drums and percussion on close to 300 records, toured the world four times, and performed at every major jazz festival on the planet.
He came home to New Orleans in 1998 and became the head percussion instructor at the University of New Orleans under Ellis Marsalis, later earning his master's degree in music from UNO. Today he leads the percussion and world music ensembles at UNO and teaches at the Heritage School of Music, the International School of Louisiana and the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, alongside private lessons. His debut as a leader, The Spirit Within (STR Digital, 2001), featured Donald Harrison Jr., Bill Summers, Steve Masakowski, Randy Brecker and Peter Martin, and his drum-set instruction book Independence on the Drum Set (Hal Leonard, 2005) is a modern classic. An active clinician for Zildjian, Pearl, LP, Remo, Audix and Pro-Mark, he received OffBeat magazine's Best of the Beat Lifetime Achievement in Music Education award in 2024.
