Eduardo "Ed" Motta was born in Rio de Janeiro on August 17, 1971. His mother, Luzia Motta, was the sister of the singer Tim Maia, which makes the soul and funk pioneer his uncle. He grew up on disco, soul and funk, turned to rock as a teenager, and began as the vocalist of a hard rock band called Kabbalah. The record that redirected him was Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow, which showed him how rock, funk and electric jazz could sit on one album. He left school to pursue music, worked as a club DJ, published a fanzine called Curto Circuito and began the record collecting that has since grown past 30,000 LPs.

In the mid-1980s he met the guitarist Luiz Fernando Comprido, and their rehearsal-room band Expresso Realengo was soon renamed Conexão Japeri. Warner's WEA label released Ed Motta & Conexão Japeri in 1988, and its singles "Manuel" and "Vamos Dançar" were hits. At the 1989 Sharp Brazilian Music Awards he won best male pop and rock singer and best male newcomer. He left the band for a solo career, and Um Contrato com Deus (WEA, 1990), made with his friend and former bandmate Bombom and influenced by Prince's Sign o' the Times, was followed by Entre e Ouça (1992), an album that openly pays homage to the pop-jazz of Steely Dan.

In 1994 he moved to New York City for a year and recorded with the bassist Eddie Gómez, the drummer Bernard Purdie and the bassist Chuck Rainey. An album cut there with American musicians, at the Riversound studio where Steely Dan had recorded, was never released. The stay changed his relationship to Brazilian music, which he had once shunned. He found that foreign artists had recorded it, among them Bill Evans with Francis Hime's "Minha," and that Marcos Valle had worked with the American songwriter Leon Ware. That led him to Chico Buarque, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Edu Lobo, Radamés Gnattali, Wilson Simonal and Cartola, and to a run of songs written with the lyricist Aldir Blanc.

Back in Brazil he wrote the soundtrack for the film Pequeno Dicionário Amoroso (1997) and released Manual Prático para Festas, Bailes e Afins (Universal, 1997), a dance-floor record that earned him his first platinum disc, followed by the gold-certified remix set Remixes & Aperitivos. He performed with Roy Ayers at New York's Central Park, and in 2000 took a show of American and Brazilian standards and new songs on tour with a jazz trio. During the same years he sang Brazilian Portuguese versions of songs for three Disney animated films, released in 1996, 1999 and 2000. In 2001 he sang a guest vocal on "Imagina" on Casa, the Jobim songbook album by Jaques and Paula Morelenbaum with Ryuichi Sakamoto at the piano.

Dwitza (2002) is the record most often called his jazziest. Much of it is instrumental, and its title echoes dwitza, the name he gave to his wordless, scat-like way of singing. Poptical (2003) and Aystelum (Trama, 2005) completed a run that won him critics' attention outside Brazil. Aystelum earned a nomination for Best Latin Jazz/Jazz Album at the 7th Latin Grammy Awards in 2006, a category won that year by Gonzalo Rubalcaba's Solo. The cello on it is played by Jaques Morelenbaum, and Alcione sings on "Samba Azul." The two-disc Ao Vivo (2006) charted in Brazil. Chapter 9 (2008) was his first album sung entirely in English, with every instrument played by Motta himself, and Piquenique (2009) returned to Portuguese and to brighter soul and jazz-pop.

AOR (2013) took its title and sound from the soft-rock and R&B radio of the 1970s and early 1980s. It was released in English and Portuguese versions, and its single "Dondi" featured the former Motown guitarist David T. Walker. It came out through LAB 344 in Brazil, Membran in Europe and Tummy Touch in the United States. In September 2015 he recorded Perpetual Gateways (released early 2016) at No Sound Studios in Pasadena, California, with the producer Kamau Kenyatta and a cast of Los Angeles jazz players: Patrice Rushen on piano and electric piano, Greg Phillinganes on keyboards, the drummer Marvin "Smitty" Smith on every track, Cecil McBee Jr. and Tony Dumas on bass, Rickey Woodard on tenor saxophone, Curtis Taylor on trumpet and Hubert Laws on flute for two pieces, with Motta on vocals and Rhodes piano and arranging the rhythm section and horns. Rolling Stone Brasil ranked it the 12th best Brazilian album of that year. In 2015 he had also sung "Vida (If Not You)" as a guest on Eliane Elias's Made in Brazil, and in 2017 he was the featured vocalist on the saxophonist Timo Lassy's EP When the Devil's Paid. His own Criterion of the Senses followed in 2018, self-produced.

The COVID-19 pandemic took him off the road in 2020, and he returned to the studio in 2022. Behind the Tea Chronicles appeared on October 20, 2023, on his own Dwitza imprint in partnership with the German jazz label MPS, a cinematic soul record with backing singers Paulette McWilliams and Phillip Ingram, Kamau Kenyatta directing the horns and strings from the Czech FILMharmonic Orchestra. Toc-Toc, released on September 25, 2026, is counted by the Brazilian press as his 15th studio album and is his first mostly in Portuguese in 13 years. He produced it with his musical director Michel Limma, who plays keyboards and synthesizer bass on it, recorded it at his Dwitza Studio in Rio de Janeiro, built it largely from keyboards, programmed drums and a bass synthesizer, and described it as a pop album with jazz influences. As of November 2026 it is his most recent release.

His public statements have drawn criticism more than once. During a 2015 tour he disparaged Brazilian concertgoers who requested Portuguese-language songs, and he later apologized. In May 2026 a leaked audio recording of a restaurant dispute drew a fresh round of criticism, and he apologized in a video on Instagram.

Ed Motta is a Brazilian pop, soul, funk and AOR musician with an unusually deep jazz vocabulary, not a jazz pianist in the strict sense, and his catalog shows it: the party records of the 1990s, the soft-rock gloss of AOR and the synth-funk of Toc-Toc all sit in the pop and soul world. The jazz side is real and documented. He has a Latin Grammy nomination in a jazz category, a 2000 stage show of standards with a jazz trio, studio and stage work with musicians such as Roy Ayers, Hubert Laws, Patrice Rushen and Eddie Gómez, an album (Dwitza) that critics treat as a jazz-soul-Brazilian blend, and two most recent albums released in partnership with the German jazz label MPS. His writing leans on extended harmony and the chord colors of the 1970s: Steely Dan, Prince and the fusion of Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow are the influences his biographers cite most, alongside Brazilian songwriters such as Antonio Carlos Jobim, Marcos Valle and Cassiano.

As a singer he mixes lyric singing with the wordless, scat-like approach he calls dwitza, and as an instrumentalist he is a keyboardist first, playing Fender Rhodes and piano and, on records such as Chapter 9, every other part as well. Rolling Stone Brasil placed him 39th on its list of the greatest voices in Brazilian music. His reputation also rests on collecting: his library of rare records, reportedly over 30,000, is the source of the specific era references in his arrangements, and he compiled Too Slow to Disco Brasil (2018), a survey of Brazilian AOR from the 1970s and 1980s.