Cindy Lynn Bradley was born on December 11, 1977, in North Tonawanda, New York, in the Buffalo area. She started on piano at six. She tells the story of how she became a trumpeter by accident: in fourth grade the school band program required a second instrument, she forgot her permission slip, and the teacher had her circle one at random. She circled the trumpet. At twelve she was playing professionally with Sugar and Jazz, a Buffalo-area youth band of players aged twelve to seventeen that modeled itself on the big bands of the 1940s.

She earned a bachelor's degree in jazz studies and music education at Ithaca College, then a master's degree in jazz trumpet performance at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she has named John McNeil, Bob Brookmeyer, Jerry Bergonzi, George Russell and Steve Lacy among her teachers. She later added a master's degree in educational leadership. After the conservatory she moved to the New York City area and worked as a sideman in funk, Top 40, R&B, fusion and straight-ahead groups. She played third trumpet on the DIVA Jazz Orchestra's 2005 Tommy Newsom tribute, led by Sherrie Maricle, toured as a featured soloist with Pieces of a Dream, and by the time of her label debut was playing around New York with the Sly Geralds Band, whose namesake bassist also worked with Maceo Parker.

Her first album, Just a Little Bit, came out in 2007 on her own CB Jazz Music imprint, recorded at CBJazz Studios in Rutherford, New Jersey. It has eight tracks, mostly her own writing, and it closes with "Mr. Magic," the tune by Ralph MacDonald and William Salter that Grover Washington Jr. recorded as the title track of his 1975 album Mister Magic. In 2009 she signed with Les Cutmore's Trippin' N' Rhythm Records, a label devoted to smooth jazz, and made Bloom (released June 23, 2009) with the producer and keyboardist Michael Broening, who recorded much of it in the Phoenix area. Broening has produced and co-written most of her records since.

Unscripted (June 21, 2011) brought the breakthrough. Its single "Massive Transit," written by Bradley and Broening, entered Billboard's Smooth Jazz Airplay chart in May 2011 and reached No. 1 on the chart dated September 10, 2011, holding the top spot for four weeks. The album reached No. 19 on Billboard's Jazz Albums chart in July 2011. It also shows the jazz-trained side of her playing: between the originals sit Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" and the standard "You Don't Know What Love Is," each about seven minutes long. In 2009 and 2010 she won debut and new-artist honors from the Catalina Island JazzTrax Festival, the American Smooth Jazz Awards and Smooth Jazz News, and in 2011 Jazziz magazine named Unscripted a Critics' Choice.

Bliss (2014), Natural (2017) and The Little Things (2019) followed on the same label, and AllMusic reports that they reached the Top Five, No. 6 and No. 4 respectively on Billboard's Jazz Albums chart. Her radio singles have been steadier than her album sales. By Wikipedia's count she has had eleven No. 1 singles on Billboard's Smooth Jazz Airplay chart between 2011 and early 2025, among them "Button Legs" (2015), "Category A" (2017, featuring Chris Standring), "Everyone but You" (2018), "Wind Chill Factor" (2019, four weeks), "Snack Grouch" (2020), "Daydreams" (2022, with the keyboardist Randy Scott) and "Drive" (2022). In 2022 she also put out a promotional single of Justin Bieber's pop hit "Love Yourself."

Her seventh album, Promise, was released on July 7, 2023, again on Trippin' N' Rhythm. Its opening track "A Little Moxie" was No. 1 on Smooth Jazz Airplay for two weeks, on the charts dated February 22 and March 1, 2025, and a second single from it, "Night Flight," charted from March 2026 and peaked at No. 4 on the chart dated May 23, 2026. Her website lists 2025 festival and club dates in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Alongside performing she has worked as a public elementary school band teacher in New Jersey and has led jazz workshops at schools and colleges across the United States. She is a longtime vegan and animal rights advocate.

Bradley is a smooth jazz artist, and the records are built that way: Broening's programmed drums, keyboards and bass lines, a few live guitarists and saxophonists, hooks written to fit radio, and a trumpet or flugelhorn carrying the melody in a clean, warm tone. The sound sits closer to R&B, funk and instrumental pop than to the bebop she studied, and she has said she came out of school with equal enthusiasm for straight-ahead playing and for funk, Top 40 and fusion. She names Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan and Blue Mitchell as her trumpet influences.

Critical reception has been friendly but measured. AllMusic's biography calls her a successful artist and educator with a bent toward smooth jazz and instrumental pop. In an All About Jazz review of Bliss, Jeff Winbush found the album enjoyable but formulaic by the genre's standards, singled out its reading of "Squeeze Me" as the one moment where she played with real jazz bite, and called her a dedicated student of the idiom with room to take more risks. The jazz repertoire on Unscripted, her conservatory training and her years in New York sideman bands are the evidence of the straight-ahead player behind the radio hits.