Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, known until 2012 as Christian Scott and for years afterward as Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, was born Christian Andre Scott on March 31, 1983, in New Orleans, to Cara Harrison and Clinton Scott III. He has an identical twin brother, the writer-director Kiel Adrian Scott. His mother's family belongs to the Afro-New Orleanian Black Indian tradition: his grandfather Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr. founded the Guardians of the Flame in 1988, and his uncle is the saxophonist and Big Chief Donald Harrison. He began jazz lessons with his uncle at twelve, attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where Clyde Kerr Jr. and Kent Jordan directed the jazz program, and joined his uncle's quintet at sixteen. He graduated in 2001 and appears on Harrison's albums Real Life Stories (recorded in November 2001), Kind of New (2002) and Paradise Found (recorded in 2000 and released in 2003 under the billing "Donald Harrison Introducing Christian Scott").

On a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston he majored in professional music with a film-scoring concentration and graduated in 2004. There he founded Impromp2 Records and released his first album, Christian Scott (recorded in 2002, issued in 2003), played in the Berklee Monterey Quartet, took part in a student quintet recording led by Pat Metheny and Gary Burton, and studied with Burton among others. Concord Music signed him in 2005. That year he played trumpet on Nnenna Freelon's Billie Holiday project Blueprint of a Lady, and in February 2005 he recorded his Concord debut, Rewind That (released March 28, 2006), which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Jazz Album. Anthem (2007) was written in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the concert recording Live at Newport, taped at the JVC Jazz Festival on August 9, 2008, came out that November. Yesterday You Said Tomorrow (recorded at Van Gelder Studio in April 2009, released in 2010) won an Edison Award and introduced the idea he calls stretch music, his term for pushing jazz past its prescribed boundaries. In 2010 he also joined David Sánchez and Stefon Harris for the Ninety Miles project, a week of recording in Havana with the Cuban musicians Rember Duharte and Harold López-Nussa that produced a studio album (2011), a documentary and a live album from that year's Cubadisco festival (2012).

In 2012 he began performing as Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, taking the names of two ancient towns in present-day Ghana to reflect his West African and Indigenous ancestry. The double album Christian aTunde Adjuah (July 31, 2012) won him a second Edison Award, for Best International Jazz Artist. In 2014 he started his own label, Stretch Music, and partnered with Ropeadope Records, which issued Stretch Music on September 18, 2015, the album that introduced the flutist Elena Pinderhughes. In 2017 he released The Centennial Trilogy, three albums timed to the hundredth anniversary of the first jazz recordings in 1917: Ruler Rebel (March 31), Diaspora (June 23) and The Emancipation Procrastination (October 20), the last of which was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. That year he also joined R+R=NOW, the sextet assembled by Robert Glasper with Terrace Martin, Derrick Hodge, Taylor McFerrin and the drummer Justin Tyson, whose studio album Collagically Speaking came out on Blue Note on June 15, 2018. Ancestral Recall (March 22, 2019) featured the poet Saul Williams, and Axiom was recorded live over five nights in March 2020 at the Blue Note in New York, just before the pandemic closed the city's clubs, and released on August 28, 2020. He has six Grammy nominations in all, including two for Best Jazz Solo Performance, for "Guinnevere" and "Sackodougou."

He has also designed instruments with Adams Musical Instruments: a trumpet whose bell is tilted upward at 22 degrees, the reverse flugelhorn that Adams sells as the Adjuah Trumpet, the trumpet-cornet hybrid called the Siren and a smaller Sirenette. He also devised the Adjuah bow, a double-sided electric harp that combines features of the ngoni and the kora, built to his specifications by Bob Grawi. In 2023 he had his name legally changed to Xian aTunde Adjuah and began performing as Chief Adjuah; he is Chieftain of the Xodokan Nation of Maroons and was named Grand Griot of New Orleans at the Maafa commemoration hosted by the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, a title his grandmother Herreast Harrison once held. The same year he received a Doris Duke Artist Award, and on July 28, 2023, Ropeadope issued Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, recorded in Los Angeles and at Trombone Shorty's studio in New Orleans. It is the first album on which he does not play the trumpet, it draws on Black Indian chant traditions, and Giovanni Russonello of The New York Times named it the best jazz album of 2023.

He formed Chief Adjuah & the Sound Carved from Legend in 2021, and the group closed the Prospect.5 triennial in New Orleans in January 2022. On October 11, 2025, at the Vermont Jazz Center, he played trumpet, harp and vocals with a quintet of Lawrence Fields (piano and keys), Cecil Alexander (guitar), Kris Funn (bass) and Brian Richburg (drums). In 2025 Ropeadope also began releasing new tracks from a tenth-anniversary deluxe edition of Stretch Music: "Back 2 Back" with Pinderhughes, "Shared Stories of Rivals II" with Logan Richardson and Weedie Braimah, and "Take Off Your Cool" with Glasper. The deluxe edition reached streaming services in September 2025, and a limited double-LP edition was listed by retailers for April 2026.

Adjuah's sound starts with a close, speaking middle-register trumpet tone that PopMatters likened to Miles Davis when Anthem appeared, but the music around it draws as much on rock, hip-hop and electronics as on bebop. From 2010 on he built what he calls stretch music: by WNYC's description, a blend of trap beats, traditional West African percussion and the Afro-Native American music of New Orleans, played with a pan-African drum kit and pad samplers alongside the usual rhythm section. The Centennial Trilogy and Ancestral Recall push that approach into long, ritual forms and spoken word, and Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning sets aside the trumpet altogether for harp, ngoni and percussion, in tribute to the Guardians of the Flame and the Congo Square Nation, the Black Indian tribes of his grandfather and uncle. His uncle Donald Harrison was his first teacher and his earliest bandleader. His tilted-bell trumpet is often compared with the upswept horn of Dizzy Gillespie, which was bent at 45 degrees rather than 22. Critics have been divided and generous in turn: John Fordham called the double album Christian aTunde Adjuah a courageous and ambitious experiment, and he has won two Edison Awards, the Jazz FM Innovator of the Year title and the Jazz Journalists Association's Trumpeter of the Year.