Dianne Reeves was born October 23, 1956, in Detroit, Michigan, and raised largely in Denver, Colorado, after her father died when she was two. Her mother played trumpet, her uncle Charles Burrell was a bassist in the Colorado Symphony who introduced her to jazz, and her cousin was keyboardist George Duke, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. While attending Denver's George Washington High School, she sang in a big band that performed at a National Association of Jazz Educators convention, where trumpeter Clark Terry discovered her and became a mentor.

In Los Angeles she studied with vocal coach Phil Moore and performed with Caldera's Eddie del Barrio, pianist Billy Childs, and George Duke. She toured internationally with Sergio Mendes starting in 1981, then spent 1983 to 1986 as lead vocalist with Harry Belafonte, who introduced her to West African and West Indian rhythms. In 1987 she signed with Blue Note Records, and had George Duke produce the first of many of her albums for the label.

Reeves has won five Grammy Awards from nine nominations, including an unprecedented run of three consecutive wins for Best Jazz Vocal Performance/Album, for In the Moment: Live in Concert, The Calling: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan, and A Little Moonlight, a first in any vocal category. She added a further Grammy for her work on the soundtrack to George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and another in 2014 for Beautiful Life. She was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2018.

Reeves's voice, a superior interpreter of lyrics and a skilled scat singer, draws on an unusually wide range of influences absorbed directly from her career: gospel and jazz from her family, Latin rhythms from Sergio Mendes, and West African and West Indian rhythms from her years with Harry Belafonte, a genuinely global vocal vocabulary applied to a straight-ahead jazz foundation.