Bola Sete was born Djalma de Andrade on July 16, 1923, in Rio de Janeiro, the only son in a poor family of seven children in which everyone played an instrument. He taught himself on a cavaquinho he found at home, and he received his first guitar for Christmas in 1932. At ten he was taken in by a well-off couple who sent him to school and introduced him to classical music; they hoped he would study law, and during World War II they sent him into the Brazilian interior to keep him out of military service. He chose music anyway, studying guitar at the National School of Music in Rio and then at a conservatory in São Paulo. His stage name is Portuguese for the seven ball in snooker, the only black ball on the table, a nickname he picked up as the only Black member of a small jazz group.

By the mid-1940s he was working steadily. In 1945 he won a guitar contest run by Rio's Rádio Transmissora, which hired him, and he spent three years in its Trem da Alegria show at the João Caetano Theater. At the end of the 1940s he formed his own group, Bola Sete e Seu Conjunto, whose singer for a time was Dolores Duran, later a celebrated Brazilian singer and songwriter. In 1952 he went to Italy to play clubs and hotels, then led an orchestra on tours of South America, and he recorded for Odeon in Rio, including Aqui Está o Bola Sete (1957) and Ritmolândia (1958). Those are Brazilian samba, choro and dance-band sessions; his documented jazz recordings begin only after he reached the United States.

He reached the United States with a Sheraton Hotels engagement, playing at the Park Sheraton in New York and then the Tudor Room cocktail lounge of the Sheraton Palace in San Francisco. This was the bossa nova moment, when the music was in demand as classy background for hotel dining rooms, and he spent his early American years in exactly that role. In early 1962 Dizzy Gillespie, who had met him in Rio years earlier, heard him at the Palace and returned with his pianist Lalo Schifrin, who had played with Sete in Argentina. Gillespie put him on his album New Wave! (Philips, 1963), where he plays guitar on three tracks recorded in New York in 1962, and in the autumn of 1962 brought him to the Monterey Jazz Festival, where he was received with great enthusiasm. Sete toured with Gillespie, and in October 1962 he recorded his Fantasy Records debut, Bossa Nova, at RCA Studios in New York, with the bassist Ben Tucker and the drummer Dave Bailey, before settling again in San Francisco.

Fantasy paired him with the San Francisco pianist Vince Guaraldi. Vince Guaraldi, Bola Sete and Friends appeared in January 1964, the first of three albums they made together; Guaraldi's trio had a sixteen-week residency at the Trois Couleurs club in San Francisco, and Sete joined it for the last twelve weeks. From All Sides followed in February 1965, and Live at El Matador in October 1966, Guaraldi's last record for Fantasy, with Sete joining the trio for the closing set. During these years Sete also recorded his own Fantasy albums, including Tour de Force, The Incomparable Bola Sete and The Solo Guitar of Bola Sete, and Down Beat named him guitarist of the year. After a couple of years with Guaraldi he formed his own trio with the Brazilian bassist Sebastião Neto and the drummer Paulinho Magalhães, which played the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966; the live album Bola Sete at the Monterey Jazz Festival (Verve, 1967) reached No. 20 on the Billboard jazz chart. Seattle club tapes of the trio from 1966 to 1968 were issued in 2021 as Samba in Seattle.

After a two-year retirement he came back in 1971 with Shebaba for Fantasy, and he also recorded for Paramount and then Columbia (Goin' to Rio, 1973). He turned toward solo guitar, sometimes on a thirteen-string instrument of his own design that he called the lutar, adapted from a Brazilian folk instrument, the alaude. He also practiced yoga and meditation, performed in the lotus position, and in 1979 played with John Handy's Rainbow band, an American and Indian group that included Ali Akbar Khan, L. Subramaniam and Zakir Hussain. He became a friend of the guitarist John Fahey, an admirer, whose Takoma label issued the solo set Ocean in 1975. His last album in his lifetime, Jungle Suite, was produced by George Winston for Winston's Dancing Cat label and came out in 1985. Sete had been fighting lung cancer through the 1980s, and he passed away on February 14, 1987, at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California, of complications of pneumonia and cancer, at the age of 63. His widow, Anne Sete, started the Samba Moon label for reissues and archival releases, among them a concert recorded at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and, in 2008, Windspell, drawn from his final recordings.

Sete was a bossa nova and samba guitarist who became a jazz musician in the United States, and both halves of that description are part of his story. He arrived as a hotel-lounge bossa nova player and was first heard by American audiences in the 1962 to 1964 enthusiasm for Brazilian music; his jazz standing rests on documented work with Dizzy Gillespie and on his three albums with Vince Guaraldi, a repertoire that ran from Brazilian sambas and choros to Latin-flavored American standards. His approach was a fingerstyle one, with independent lines closer to a pianist's than to a plectrum guitarist's, and AllMusic describes a highly improvisational style that wedded Brazilian idioms to flamenco, classical, jazz, American folk, bossa nova and pop. German Wikipedia names Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Barney Kessel and Oscar Moore of the Nat King Cole Trio among the jazz guitarists who shaped him, alongside the Brazilian choro tradition.

His reputation among other guitarists has outlasted the bossa nova fashion. Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties called him one of the most innovative and eclectic guitarists in jazz history, and Carlos Santana has grouped him with Wes Montgomery and Gábor Szabó as a trinity of guitar greats. John Fahey said that hearing him for the first time changed him. The unaccompanied records of the 1970s and 1980s, especially Ocean, are often cited as forerunners of the New Age solo-guitar music that Windham Hill popularized, and the lutar and the lotus-position performances belong to the same contemplative turn. His early-1970s albums for Paramount and Fantasy, including Workin' on a Groovy Thing, mix his own writing with pop and rock songs by the Beatles, George Harrison, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash and others, and the pop and Latin entertainment side of his career runs alongside the jazz throughout. A Tribe Called Quest sampled his composition "Bettina."