Aaron Parks was born October 7, 1983, in Seattle, Washington, and began playing piano at a young age, entering an early-entrance degree program at the University of Washington by age fourteen. Originally pursuing both science and music, he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music at sixteen, studying with pianist Kenny Barron and earning the 2001 Cole Porter Fellowship of the American Pianists Association.

Parks came to public attention joining trumpeter Terence Blanchard's ensemble at eighteen, recording four albums with the group including 2003's Bounce, 2005's Flow, the Inside Man soundtrack, and Blanchard's Grammy-winning 2007 album A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina). In 2010 he co-founded the cooperative jazz quartet James Farm alongside saxophonist Joshua Redman, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Eric Harland, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. He also leads Little Big, featuring guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard Jr., and drummer Tommy Crane, returning to Blue Note Records with the group's third album, Little Big III, in 2024.

Parks is known for a lyrical, innovative approach to contemporary jazz that blends influences ranging from Wayne Shorter to Radiohead and Björk, moving comfortably between post-bop pyrotechnics and sparse, sculpted tone poems.

Parks's genre-crossing lyricism, drawing as readily on Radiohead and Björk as on the post-bop tradition of Wayne Shorter, made him one of the most distinctive pianist-composers of his generation, and his James Farm collaboration with Joshua Redman and Eric Harland placed him at the center of one of the era's most acclaimed cooperative quartets.