Aaron Parks was born October 7, 1983, in Seattle, Washington, and began playing piano at ten, learning largely by ear and gravitating almost immediately toward improvised music. He was an unusually fast-tracked student: at fourteen he entered the University of Washington through its Transition School and Early Entrance Program as a double major in computer science and music, and at fifteen he was selected for the GRAMMY High School Jazz Ensembles, an experience that pointed him toward New York. He transferred to the Manhattan School of Music at sixteen, studying with pianist Kenny Barron and winning the 2001 Cole Porter Fellowship of the American Pianists Association while still a teenager.

Parks came to wider public attention at eighteen, when he joined trumpeter Terence Blanchard's touring quintet. Over the next several years he recorded four albums with Blanchard's group: 2003's Bounce, 2005's Flow, the score to Spike Lee's 2006 film Inside Man, and, in 2007, A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina) — a 13-song cycle grown out of Blanchard's score for Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke, recorded with the quintet and the 40-piece Northwest Sinfonia, that won the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 2008.

Parks made his own Blue Note leader debut in 2008 with Invisible Cinema, recorded that January and March at Brooklyn Recording and ObliqSound Studio with guitarist Mike Moreno, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Eric Harland, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — Harland's first studio session with Parks, three years before the two would co-found a band together. Invisible Cinema announced a distinctive compositional voice that moved comfortably between post-bop pyrotechnics and sparser, more sculpted tone poems, drawing as readily on Radiohead and Björk as on Wayne Shorter.

That band arrived in 2009: saxophonist Joshua Redman invited Harland, Penman, and Parks to join him at that year's Montreal Jazz Festival, and the quartet's chemistry was strong enough that they kept touring through 2010, with all four members contributing original material, before formally taking the name James Farm. Their self-titled debut followed on Nonesuch in April 2011, recorded that August at the Clubhouse in Rhinebeck, New York, blending composed post-bop with rock, folk, and electronica textures; a second album, City Folk, followed on Nonesuch in October 2014. Parks and Harland's musical partnership outlasted the group itself — in 2022 the two reunited with bassist Matt Brewer for the self-released trio sessions Volume One and Volume Two.

Parks signed to ECM in the following decade, opening a more exploratory chapter in his catalog. Arborescence (2013), recorded that November at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, was a set of eleven unaccompanied solo piano improvisations that Parks described as pieces allowed to develop in the moment, like living things. Find the Way (2017) reunited the classic piano-trio format with bassist Ben Street and drummer Billy Hart, recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France with longtime ECM producer Manfred Eicher — an album built, fittingly, around melody-rich originals and a closing cover of a song Parks had grown to love on an old Rosemary Clooney and Nelson Riddle record.

Alongside the ECM work, Parks built a second working band, Little Big, with guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard Jr., and, initially, drummer Tommy Crane. The group's self-titled debut appeared on Ropeadope in 2018, followed by Little Big II: Dreams of a Mechanical Man in 2020, both featuring Crane on drums. South Korean drummer Jongkuk Kim — profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com — joined the band afterward; Bandcamp's liner notes for the self-released Live in Berlin (recorded and released in 2023) describe that set as documenting Kim joining the group, and by the time Little Big returned to Blue Note in October 2024 with Little Big III — co-produced by Parks and Don Was — Kim, not Crane, is the drummer credited on the record. Parks announced Kim as the band's new drummer around the same month, describing the "exciting kinetic energy" he brought to the group.

Parks's most recent leader album, By All Means (Blue Note, November 2025), returned to the Street/Hart rhythm section from Find the Way and expanded it into a quartet with tenor saxophonist Ben Solomon, reorienting the trio into a rhythm section supporting a horn soloist across seven original compositions, including dedications to his wife and son. Outside his own projects, Parks maintains one of the more extensive sideman discographies of his generation, with recorded credits alongside Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian Scott, Kendrick Scott, Gretchen Parlato, Gilad Hekselman, Dayna Stephens, and Terri Lyne Carrington's Social Science, among many others, plus a July 2017 Jazz Gallery engagement leading a band that included saxophonist María Grand — profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com — alongside vibraphonist Chris Dingman, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Anwar Marshall.

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 coming out of the Terence Blanchard band. His catalog since has moved fluidly between idioms without losing that throughline: the collectively composed, textural post-bop of James Farm; the unaccompanied, almost meditative improvisation of Arborescence; the classic acoustic-trio language of Find the Way and By All Means, filtered through ECM's spacious production aesthetic; and the more groove-driven, electronics-inflected writing of Little Big, which draws on indie rock and ambient production as much as the jazz tradition. Across all of it, Parks's playing favors long, patient melodic development over pure technical display — a sensibility formed early, under Kenny Barron, and never abandoned even as the settings around it kept changing.