Cécile Sophie McLorin Salvant was born on August 28, 1989, in Miami, Florida. Her father, who is Haitian, is a physician, and her mother, who is French, founded and ran a French immersion school in the city. The family played Haitian music, hip-hop, soul, classical, jazz, gospel, and Cuban music at home, and she has named Sarah Vaughan, whose records she played over and over as a child, as her main jazz influence. She began classical piano at five, joined the Miami Choral Society at eight, and went on to study classical voice with private teachers and with Edward Walker, a voice teacher at the University of Miami.

In 2007 she moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study law and classical and baroque voice at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory. It was there, with the reedist and teacher Jean-François Bonnel, that she studied improvisation and repertoire and sang in her first band, and she later studied composition and music theory at The New School in New York. Her first album, Cécile & the Jean-François Bonnel Paris Quintet, was released in France on Sysmo Records in 2010. That year, at 21, she also won first prize in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition for vocalists, a prize that came with a recording contract with Mack Avenue Records.

Her Mack Avenue debut, WomanChild (2013), was recorded in New York with the pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Rodney Whitaker, drummer Herlin Riley, and James Chirillo on guitar and banjo, and mixed original songs with material that stretches from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. It earned a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album and was named Jazz Album of the Year in the 2014 DownBeat critics poll. For One to Love (September 4, 2015), made with Diehl, the bassist Paul Sikivie, and the drummer Lawrence Leathers and including five of her own songs, won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 2016 ceremony. The double album Dreams and Daggers (September 29, 2017), assembled from sets recorded live at the Village Vanguard on September 9 to 11, 2016, plus studio sessions with the string players of the Catalyst Quartet, won the same award in 2018. She also toured with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and its music director, Wynton Marsalis, told The New Yorker in 2017 that a singer like her comes along once in a generation or two.

The Window (September 28, 2018), a set of duets with the pianist Sullivan Fortner, brought her a third consecutive Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy at the 2019 ceremony. She received the Glenn Gould Prize's Protege Prize in 2019, presented by Jessye Norman, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020. She was the vocalist in the original lineup of the group that became Artemis, led by the pianist Renee Rosnes, and she sings on two tracks of its 2020 Blue Note debut; later lineups list her as a former member. In autumn 2019 she staged Ogresse, an 80-minute musical tale for which she wrote the words and music and illustrated the story, with a 13-piece orchestra under Darcy James Argue; its touring was cut short by the pandemic.

Ghost Song (March 4, 2022) was her first album for Nonesuch Records, with Fortner and Diehl at the piano and seven of her own compositions. Mélusine (March 24, 2023), recorded in Brooklyn in April 2022, turned the medieval French legend of Melusine into a concept album sung mostly in French, with songs in English, Occitan, and Haitian Kreyòl as well; it was nominated for two Grammys, for Best Jazz Vocal Album and for the arrangement of "Fenestra" by the saxophonist Godwin Louis. Oh Snap (September 19, 2025) was a change of direction: mostly her own songs, begun as home recordings made with digital tools and finished with Fortner, the bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and the drummer Kyle Poole, with a pop, folk, and electronic cast. With Every Breath I Take (June 26, 2026), her first orchestral album, pairs her with the Netherlands' Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley, in standards and show songs arranged and co-produced by Argue.

Salvant is known for an unhurried, theatrical way with a lyric: she sings a song as if playing a character, with wit, and uses scat sparingly. Her repertoire runs from vaudeville and early blues to rarely recorded standards, French chanson, Broadway numbers, and her own songs, and she sings in English and French, her first language, along with Occitan and Haitian Kreyòl. Her stated influences are Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Betty Carter; critics have also heard Blossom Dearie in her work, and French writers add Abbey Lincoln and Valaida Snow to the list. Ben Ratliff of The New York Times praised her clear tone, wide range, and expressive face in 2012, and John Fordham of The Guardian wrote in 2015 that she brings fresh ideas to familiar standards. Stereophile's Fred Kaplan called Dreams and Daggers the best jazz vocal album in a decade. She draws and embroiders as well, illustrates her own album artwork, and had her first solo gallery show in Brooklyn in March 2022. Her later records move further from the standard jazz-vocal format, from the cabaret-and-early-music mix of Mélusine to the pop-minded Oh Snap, which is why the genre tags above are the closest fit rather than a full description.