Arturo Sandoval was born on November 6, 1949, in Artemisa, a small town in the province of Havana, Cuba, to a poor family; his father was an auto mechanic. At 13 he joined the village band, where he learned the basics of music theory and percussion before settling on the trumpet, and he played with street musicians. In 1964 he enrolled at the Cuban National School of Arts, where he took classical trumpet lessons for three years. He was a founding member of the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, an experimental ensemble that became the Afro-Cuban jazz-rock band Irakere in 1973, led by the pianist Chucho Valdés and including the saxophonist and clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera. Sandoval played on Irakere's Columbia albums, among them the self-titled Irakere, which won the Grammy for Best Latin Recording, and he left the group in 1981 to lead his own band.

The turning point was Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie visited Cuba in 1977, met Sandoval, and became his friend and mentor; on that trip Sandoval also played on the Havana sessions that David Amram released as Havana/New York (1978). The two reunited in Finland, where they cut To a Finland Station (Pablo, 1983) with a Finnish rhythm section. Sandoval's own early records came out on Cuba's Areito label (Turi, 1981), then in Europe: Tumbaito (Messidor, 1986) and, from a live date at London's Ronnie Scott's Club in August 1986, No Problem (Jazz House, 1987), followed by the Jazz House albums Straight Ahead (1988, a quartet with Valdés) and Just Music (1989). From 1982 to 1984 he was voted Cuba's best instrumentalist, and he appeared as a guest with the BBC and Leningrad symphony orchestras. In 1989 Gillespie invited him into the United Nation Orchestra, whose June 10, 1989 concert at London's Royal Festival Hall, with Claudio Roditi also in the trumpet section, was released by Enja and won a Grammy.

In July 1990, during the orchestra's European tour, Sandoval defected at the American embassy in Rome; Gillespie had helped with the plan, and Sandoval's wife and son left Cuba as well. He settled in Miami and became a member of the faculty at Florida International University. Signed to GRP, he made Flight to Freedom (1991), his first American album, then I Remember Clifford (1992), a tribute to Clifford Brown that earned a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Individual or Group, and Danzón (Dance On) (1994), which won the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Performance. In the 1990s he was also a member of the GRP All-Star Big Band, recorded The Classical Album (RCA Victor, 1994) with the London Symphony Orchestra, and was commissioned by the Kennedy Center Ballet in 1996 to score Pepito's Story, choreographed by Debbie Allen. He became a United States citizen on December 7, 1998. Hot House (N2K Encoded Music, 1998), with guests including Michael Brecker, Tito Puente and Patti Austin, won him a second Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Performance at the 1999 ceremony.

His life was dramatized in the HBO film For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story, first shown on November 18, 2000, with Andy García in the title role and Charles S. Dutton as Gillespie. Sandoval composed the score and won the 2001 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special (Dramatic Underscore). Later records include Trumpet Evolution (2003), which he built from repertoire tied to his favorite trumpeters, Rumba Palace (Telarc, 2007), Mambo Nights with the WDR Big Band under Michael Philip Mossman, and, for Concord, A Time for Love (2010) and Dear Diz (Every Day I Think of You) (2012), his large-ensemble tribute to Gillespie, which won the Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 2013 ceremony and the Latin Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album. The Recording Academy lists four Grammy wins and eleven nominations in all. He scored Andy García's film At Middleton (2013), and on November 20, 2013 President Barack Obama presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Sandoval is active in his seventies. Rhythm & Soul (MetaJAX, 2022), written during the pandemic and played by his septet, was nominated for the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album, and My Foolish Heart (MetaJAX, 2024), a set of ballads produced by the trumpeter Tony Guerrero, followed. He was named a 2024 Kennedy Center Honoree, and the honors were presented on December 8, 2024. His album SANGÚ (TM Records, released May 1, 2026), which NPR described as his 49th studio album, was conceived with his son Arturo "Tury" Sandoval III and his daughter-in-law and manager Melody Lisman, and he has toured behind it this year.

Sandoval came up on the records of Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie, and the bebop vocabulary is still the base of his playing: very fast articulation, a command of the horn's highest register, and a bright, forceful attack on trumpet, set against a rounder, softer sound on flugelhorn. AllMusic calls him a technically flawless player who is as comfortable with classical repertoire as with jazz and traditional Cuban music, which shows in his concerto work with symphony orchestras and in the Afro-Cuban rhythms, timbales and piano that he brings to his own bands. His arrangements move between Latin jazz, big-band swing and Cuban popular forms such as the danzón, and his collaborators range from Gillespie's bebop circle to pop and salsa stars.