Dionisio Jesús Valdés Rodríguez, known from childhood as Chucho, was born on October 9, 1941, in Quivicán, a town south of Havana in what is now Mayabeque Province. His father, Bebo Valdés, was the pianist and arranger who led the Tropicana Club orchestra and then his own big band, Orquesta Sabor de Cuba; his mother, Pilar Rodríguez, was a piano teacher and singer. He was picking out radio melodies at the piano by ear at three and began formal lessons at five with Óscar Muñoz Boufartique, finishing at Havana's Municipal Conservatory at fourteen. He went on to study privately with Zenaida Romeu, Rosario Franco and Federico Smith, and took composition lessons from the guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer. He formed his first jazz trio at fifteen and by 1959 was playing in his father's Sabor de Cuba orchestra, accompanying the singers who fronted it. Bebo left Cuba in 1960 and settled in Sweden, and the two did not make music together again for decades.

In the early 1960s Valdés worked in Havana theaters, hotels and house bands, and in 1963 he started a combo at Brouwer's suggestion. Its first recording sessions, for the newly formed state label EGREM at the Areíto studios in January 1964, included Paquito D'Rivera on alto saxophone and clarinet, and the combo's lineup in the following years brought in the bassists Cachaíto and later Carlos del Puerto and the drummers Guillermo Barreto and later Enrique Plá. In 1967 he and his bandmates became founding members of the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, a state-backed big band that accompanied singers such as Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo while its jazz players worked in smaller groups on the side. He recorded the LP Jazz Batá with del Puerto and the percussionist Óscar Valdés in 1972, setting the sacred batá drums of Afro-Cuban religion against piano and bass, and the next year he expanded that sound into a full band.

Irakere, founded in 1973 by members of the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna with Valdés as its director, was the vehicle that made him internationally known. Its founders included D'Rivera, the trumpeter Jorge Varona, the guitarist Carlos Emilio Morales, del Puerto, the drummer Bernardo García and Óscar Valdés, and the trumpeter Arturo Sandoval was among its leading soloists until he left in 1981. The band combined batá and conga percussion, rock and funk, bebop horn lines, classical writing and Cuban dance rhythms; "Bacalao con pan," recorded in Santiago, was the first Irakere piece to use batá. In 1977 members of Irakere jammed in Havana with American visitors on a jazz cruise that included Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz, and in 1978 the group played the Newport and Montreux festivals; five tracks recorded there became the Columbia album Irakere (1979), which won the Grammy for Best Latin Recording at the 1980 ceremony. D'Rivera left Cuba in 1980 and Sandoval followed in 1990. Valdés stayed with the band until 1997, when his son Chuchito, also a pianist, took over its piano chair and direction.

From the late 1990s Valdés concentrated on his own groups and on Blue Note Records, where his albums included Bele Bele en La Habana (1998), Briyumba Palo Congo (1999), Live at the Village Vanguard (2000, a Grammy winner for Best Latin Jazz Album), Solo: Live in New York (2001), Fantasía Cubana (2002) and New Conceptions (2003). In 1997 he was part of Roy Hargrove's Cuban and American band Crisol, whose album Habana won a Grammy. Around 1998 he began leading a quartet with the vocalist Mayra Caridad Valdés. His father's long silence on record had ended in 1994, and in 2007 father and son recorded two-piano sessions in Madrid, produced by Nat Chediak and Fernando Trueba and issued in 2008 as Juntos para siempre, which won the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album at the 2010 ceremony and a Latin Grammy. Bebo Valdés passed away on March 22, 2013.

Around 2010 he formed a new band, the Afro-Cuban Messengers, whose name nods to Art Blakey; its album Chucho's Steps (2010) won the 2011 Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album. Border-Free (2013) followed with a quintet, and in 2016 his quartet released Tribute to Irakere: Live in Marciac, which won the 2017 Grammy in the same category. Jazz Batá 2 (Mack Avenue, 2018), produced and engineered by John Lee, won the 2019 Latin Grammy for Best Latin Jazz/Jazz Album. In 2021 he played on three tracks of Eliane Elias's duet album Mirror Mirror, which she completed with him after the death of Chick Corea and which won the 2022 Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album. In July 2022 he and D'Rivera released the reunion album I Missed You Too! on Sunnyside. Cuba & Beyond (2024), with his Royal Quartet of Horacio "El Negro" Hernández on drums, José Armando Gola on bass and Roberto Jr. Vizcaíno on percussion, appeared on InnerJazz in September 2024, and a 2025 collaboration with the Cuban singer Albita, Masters of Our Roots, followed.

He was named a 2025 NEA Jazz Master, the National Endowment for the Arts' highest jazz honor, and was honored at the Jazz Masters tribute concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington on April 26, 2025. In 2025 he also received the Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award from the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among his other honors are Cuba's national music prize (2000, shared with Brouwer), a Goodwill Ambassadorship to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (named on October 16, 2006), and an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music (May 2011), which he received together with his father. He has won seven Grammy Awards in all across his own albums, Irakere and collaborations, five of them in the Best Latin Jazz Album category, the most of any artist in it as of 2026. He turned 85 on October 9, 2026, and his official website announced in August 2026 that a new solo piano album, UNCUT, was in preparation.

Valdés plays with a pianist's full technical command and a bandleader's feeling for orchestration, and his writing treats Afro-Cuban religious music as a living vocabulary: the Yoruba-derived songs and the batá drums behind them, the Congo-derived rhythms of Palo that gave Briyumba Palo Congo its subtitle, and a piece such as "Yansa" on Chucho's Steps, inspired by the Yoruba religion and an orisha call. The Irakere name itself is a Yoruba-style word for "forest." Beside these roots he writes homages to jazz figures: "To Bud Powell" on Live at the Village Vanguard, a title track on Chucho's Steps that nods to John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," and "Zawinul's Mambo" for Joe Zawinul, while Fantasía Cubana reworks classical themes. His chief influences were his father Bebo, whose big-band mambo and batanga arrangements shaped his sense of Cuban orchestration, and his teacher Leo Brouwer; the Cuban pianist Omar Sosa names him and Irakere among his forebears. In 2012 The New York Times called him the dean of Latin jazz.