Brian Culbertson was born on January 12, 1973, in Decatur, Illinois. His father, Jim Culbertson, was a trumpeter and the award-winning jazz band director at MacArthur High School, and the house was full of records by Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich, the Brecker Brothers and David Sanborn, alongside the horn-band pop and funk of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Tower of Power and Earth, Wind & Fire. He started piano at eight, added drums at nine and trombone at ten, picked up bass in seventh grade and played euphonium in high school, and his seventh-grade piano recital consisted entirely of his own compositions. By his first year of high school he was building arrangements on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a four-track recorder in the basement, partly because few of his classmates could play the music he was writing. He collected six individual and five group Down Beat student awards.

He moved to Chicago to study music at DePaul University and also wrote commercial jingles in the city's advertising community. In 1994 he signed with the Mesa/Bluemoon label and made his debut album, Long Night Out, in the bedroom of the apartment he shared with three college friends, playing most of the instruments himself with a small group of backing players. The follow-up, Modern Life (March 28, 1995), replaced the one-man approach with a live band of Chicago musicians and brought in saxophonists Gerald Albright, Steve Cole and Mark Colby and guitarist Fareed Haque as guests. After Hours (1996) and Secrets (1997) followed, and Secrets reached No. 15 on Billboard's Contemporary Jazz Albums chart.

Atlantic released Somethin' Bout Love on September 21, 1999, with Wayman Tisdale and Dave Koz among the guests and his father playing trumpet on the record; it reached No. 3 on the Contemporary Jazz chart. Nice & Slow (June 5, 2001) went to No. 1 on that chart and No. 2 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums. He produced it himself and played most of the keyboards, programming and brass. Herb Alpert and Jeff Lorber guested on the opener, "Just Another Day," and Koz, Kirk Whalum, Kenny Lattimore and Trey Lorenz appeared elsewhere. Come On Up (June 24, 2003) was his only album for Warner Bros., with Marcus Miller, Rick Braun, Norman Brown, Steve Cole and Rahsaan Patterson as guests.

He moved to GRP for It's On Tonight (July 26, 2005), which reached No. 1 on the Contemporary Jazz chart and No. 2 on Top Jazz Albums. Boney James, Chris Botti, Patti Austin, Whalum, Ledisi and Will Downing guested, Miller played bass, and Eric Darius took the tenor saxophone part on the opening track. A Soulful Christmas followed in 2006. Bringing Back the Funk (April 29, 2008) was a deliberate turn toward funk: most of it was recorded live over four days in November 2007 at Glenwood Studios in Burbank, Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire was executive producer, and the guests included Bootsy Collins, Larry Graham, Musiq Soulchild, Gerald Albright and Ronnie Laws, who plays the tenor saxophone solo on "The House of Music." The horn section included Tom Scott and Eric Marienthal, and the keyboard players included Larry Dunn. It reached No. 3 on Top Jazz Albums and No. 1 on Contemporary Jazz. The concert album and DVD Live from the Inside (2009), XII (2010, with Earl Klugh among the guests) and Dreams (June 12, 2012, on Verve) kept him at or near the top of the jazz charts. Dreams reached No. 1 on both Top Jazz Albums and Contemporary Jazz and was nominated in the jazz album category at the 44th NAACP Image Awards, held in February 2013.

He has also produced and arranged for other musicians. Discogs credits him as producer of Steve Cole's Stay Awhile (1998) and Between Us (2000), as producer of two tracks on Koz's Saxophonic (2003) and as producer on Koz's Memories of a Winter's Night (2007) and Please Come Home for Christmas (2008). He also has producer credits on tracks by Peter White, Norman Brown and Eric Darius. On Eric Marienthal's Just Around the Corner (2007) he is credited as producer, arranger, engineer and mixer on three tracks and also plays piano, keyboards and trombone, and he is credited as a co-producer on the late Maurice White's Manifestation (2019).

Since 2014 his records have come out on his own label, BCM Entertainment, Inc. Another Long Night Out (February 25, 2014) rebuilt his 1994 debut with a professional budget and the kind of players who had shaped his early listening: Lee Ritenour, Chuck Loeb, Marienthal, Rick Braun, Steve Lukather, Russ Freeman, Candy Dulfer, Jonathan Butler and Ray Parker Jr. guested, Nathan East, Jimmy Haslip and Will Kennedy were among the rhythm players, and David Benoit wrote most of the string arrangements. It was No. 1 on the Contemporary Jazz chart for five weeks. Funk! (2016) was a second all-out funk record, which he describes as modeled on P-Funk and Prince. Colors of Love (February 14, 2018) was an instrumental album about romance built around acoustic piano. Winter Stories (October 4, 2019) is an acoustic piano-trio recording with bassist Steve Rodby, long a member of the Pat Metheny Group, and drummer Khari Parker; his own site calls it his first traditional-sounding jazz album, and it reached No. 3 on Top Jazz Albums.

XX (April 10, 2020) marked his twentieth studio album, and the same year he began The Hang, a live-streamed show on YouTube. He wrote about thirty songs while streaming and shaped them with feedback from the chat, then released them as three albums: The Trilogy, Part 1: Red (September 24, 2021), Part 2: Blue (January 14, 2022) and Part 3: White (May 6, 2022). The seventy-show Trilogy Tour ran from March 2023 in Providence, Rhode Island, to March 2024 in Detroit, and the final show was released as The Trilogy Tour: Live from Detroit on April 11, 2025. He also hosts the Napa Valley Jazz Getaway, a multi-day festival he launched at the Napa Valley Opera House on June 7 to 10, 2012, with later editions in other cities; the 14th Napa edition is announced for June 9 to 12, 2027. His wife, Michelle, who performs as Micaela Haley, sang on some of his early records and is credited as an executive producer on his recent albums.

Day Trip, released September 26, 2025, is a deliberately live record: he has said it uses no programmed tracks or backing tracks and was inspired by the jazz-fusion albums of the late 1970s. Marcus Miller and Sheila E. play on the single "On the Road," Branford Marsalis on "U-Turn," Mike Stern on "The Winding Path," Randy Brecker and Marienthal on "A Hundred Miles," and Whalum on "In the Vines," with a core band of Nicholas Cole, East, drummer Lil' John Roberts, percussionist Lenny Castro, guitarist Paul Jackson Jr. and Marienthal. A national tour with a ten-piece band followed in the fall of 2025. His official site lists a new album, The Midnight Tapes, for release on February 5, 2027, with a first single, "'76 Monte Carlo," due on November 27, 2026. He wrote, produced and played all of it himself, on 44 instruments, and it includes a cover of Bootsy Collins' "I'd Rather Be with You."

Culbertson's records are smooth jazz, R&B and funk first, and his chart life reflects it: his albums sit on Billboard's Contemporary Jazz and Top Jazz Albums charts, his radio singles on the Smooth Jazz Airplay chart (his official biography counts 41 No. 1 singles), and a few releases have also reached the R&B albums chart. The sound is built largely on his own multitracking, with keyboards, programmed drums, synth bass and layered brass, plus vocal guests and horn-section funk in the line of Earth, Wind & Fire, Tower of Power and Prince. Wikipedia, citing a 1994 Chicago Tribune profile, lists Sting, the Yellowjackets, George Duke, David Foster, Marcus Miller, David Sanborn, Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire among the artists he grew up listening to, and AllMusic adds the Brecker Brothers and Maynard Ferguson.

The jazz side is documented rather than incidental. He grew up in a jazz-educator's household, won Down Beat student awards as a teenager, studied music at DePaul, and has drawn on working jazz and fusion players throughout his career, among them Gerald Albright, Marcus Miller, Randy Brecker, Mike Stern, Branford Marsalis, Lee Ritenour and Chris Botti. Winter Stories is an acoustic piano-trio album and Day Trip a live fusion record, though most of the catalogue is groove-driven contemporary jazz rather than improvised small-group jazz. AllMusic's biography calls Bringing Back the Funk an acclaimed album credited with bringing new life to urban jazz.