Catherine Russell was born on September 20, 1956, in New York City, into a family of jazz musicians. Her father, Luis Russell, was a Panamanian-born pianist, composer and bandleader whose orchestra was one of the leading New York big bands of the late 1920s; when Louis Armstrong took over the band in 1935, Russell stayed on as its musical director for about eight years. Her mother, Carline Ray, was a Juilliard graduate who played rhythm guitar and sang with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm in the 1940s, later worked with Mary Lou Williams and Sy Oliver, and went on playing bass and singing into her eighties. Luis Russell died on December 11, 1963, when his daughter was seven, and Ray raised her in New York. Russell has said she grew up on her father's records and also on the pop radio of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which meant Ella Fitzgerald, the Mills Brothers and Peggy Lee, along with rock and blues. She later studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and graduated with honors.

One of her first regular New York jobs was a short slot of soul and blues songs at the comedy club Catch a Rising Star. In the mid-1980s she was invited on stage with Donald Fagen of Steely Dan at a Manhattan club where Jimmy Vivino led the house band, and in 1992 she toured with Fagen's New York Rock and Soul Revue. When Steely Dan reunited in 1993 she joined them and toured with the band until 1996; she sang backing vocals on Fagen's Kamakiriad (1993), sang, played percussion and whistled on the live album Alive in America (1995), and is credited again on the band's Everything Must Go (2003) and on live releases in 2021. Around those tours she sang backing vocals for Madonna ("Rescue Me," 1990), Rosanne Cash, Cyndi Lauper, Joan Osborne and Lizz Wright (The Orchard, 2008), among many others, and she sang on one track of Levon Helm's Electric Dirt (2009). From 2002 to 2004 she was a member of David Bowie's touring band for the Heathen and Reality tours, singing backing vocals and playing keyboards, percussion, guitar and mandolin, and she appears on his 2003 album Reality.

She was already singing lead in other people's bands. In 1999 she was one of the guests on Terrapin, a reconstruction of the Grateful Dead's Terrapin Station by Joe Gallant's Illuminati, and she sang with the group for about a year afterward. In May 2000 she recorded Live at Shanghai Jazz at a club in Madison, New Jersey, billed to bassist Earl May's quintet as "Introducing Catherine Russell." When Bowie's touring stopped in 2004, her business partner and later husband, Paul Kahn, suggested she make a record of her own. She resisted, thinking she already had a good career as a backing singer, but agreed to record some tracks at a friend's studio in Skokie, Illinois. Kahn then brought record-company executives to hear her in New York, which led to a contract with Harmonia Mundi's World Village label, and the Skokie recordings became her first album, Cat (2006). She followed it with Sentimental Streak (2008), produced by guitarist Larry Campbell with Steven Bernstein and Howard Johnson among the players, which won the German Record Critics' Award and the Hot Club de France's Prix Découverte; Inside This Heart of Mine (recorded October 5 to 7, 2009; released in 2010); and Strictly Romancin' (February 14, 2012). The last included a duet with her mother on the Sister Rosetta Tharpe song "He's All I Need," led to a studio session on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and won the Prix du Vocal Jazz from the Académie du Jazz and the Grand Prix of the Hot Club de France. Bring It Back (2014, Jazz Village) was recorded June 3 to 5, 2013. Her mother died on July 18, 2013, the year Russell produced Ray's first album as a lead singer, Vocal Sides.

Her band settled into a steady lineup built around guitarist and music director Matt Munisteri, pianist Mark Shane, bassist Tal Ronen and drummer Mark McLean, with a horn section that usually included trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso and trombonist John Allred. With that group she made Harlem on My Mind (released September 9, 2016), a collection of vintage songs that was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and Alone Together (March 1, 2019, Dot Time Records; recorded August 20 to 22, 2018, at Sear Sound), which received a second nomination in the same category and, according to her biography at the American Symphony Orchestra, finished 2019 at number one on JazzWeek's year-end national radio chart. In 2016 the Louis Armstrong House Museum gave her its Louie award for preserving and promoting Armstrong's legacy. Her recording of "Crazy Blues" was used in an episode of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, on a soundtrack album that won the 2012 Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media, and in 2019 she appeared in the film Bolden!, singing "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor."

Send for Me followed in 2022, with Sean Mason sharing the piano chair with Shane, and in January of that year she sang on Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra album Good Time Music. My Ideal (August 23, 2024, Dot Time), a duo album with pianist Mason recorded at Sear Sound on August 23 and 24, 2023, earned her a third Best Jazz Vocal Album nomination, announced in November 2024. In 2025 she made Cat & The Hounds (Turtle Bay Records, August 15) with Colin Hancock's Jazz Hounds, a set of early blues and jazz songs recorded November 7 to 9, 2024, and served as Harvard's Jazz Master in Residence. Her first live album, Live at Jazz at Lincoln Center, was released on Dot Time Records on April 24, 2026. It was recorded at the Appel Room for the venue's 2023-24 season, with a program drawn from 78 rpm records and 1930s and 1940s short films by Hot Lips Page, Tiny Grimes, Cab Calloway, her father and others, and the tap dancer Michela Marino Lerman as a guest on four tracks.

Russell is a specialist in the jazz, blues and pop of the 1920s through the 1950s, and she mixes well-known standards with lesser-known songs from the 78 rpm era, including material her father recorded. Critics have compared her to Dinah Washington: JazzTimes called her the post-millennial answer to Washington, citing the same vocal dexterity and clarity and the same ability to move between sassy and torchy, and one of the songs she chose for Harlem on My Mind, "Let Me Be the First to Know," was co-written by Washington. Her phrasing, she has said, was shaped by the swing and pop records she heard on the radio as a child, among them Ella Fitzgerald, and "Under the Spell of the Blues," which opens Strictly Romancin', was one of Fitzgerald's earliest hits. JazzTimes also described her as a blues shouter and a jazz stylist in one voice, and her albums range from small-band swing arrangements with a hot-jazz horn section to the piano-and-voice program of My Ideal. The tags above describe where her own albums sit; her long career as a backing singer for rock and pop artists is a separate body of work.