Olu Dara was born Charles Jones III on January 12, 1941, in Natchez, Mississippi. His mother, Ella Mae Jones, came from Canton, Mississippi, and his father, Charlie R. Jones, was a traveling musician who sang with a vocal quartet called the Melodiers. As a child he took piano and clarinet lessons. He has told interviewers that his first horn came from a man who said to blow into it as if inflating a balloon, and that he was soon picking out cartoon themes by ear. He studied at Tennessee State University, starting as a pre-med major and switching to music theory and composition, and from 1959 to 1964 he was a musician in the U.S. Navy, a posting that took him to Africa and the Caribbean and that he has called a priceless education.

In 1964 he moved to New York City and took the name Olu Dara, Yoruba for "The Lord is good." By his own account he barely played for years, getting by in Brooklyn and listening to other people's bands, and he bought a horn again around 1970. He worked in rhythm and blues bands first, then moved toward jazz with help from the saxophonists Bill Barron and Sam Rivers. In the early 1970s he toured with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, a job he has said he took without ever having played bebop and left because the form bored him. He reportedly began singing on a Blakey tour of Spain, improvising words to fill the space.

The loft-jazz scene of the mid-1970s was where he became a fixture. He played on Oliver Lake's Heavy Spirits and Carlos Garnett's Let This Melody Ring On in 1975, then on trumpet on David Murray's debut as a leader, Flowers for Albert (India Navigation, 1976), and on Frank Lowe's Doctor Too-Much (1977). In the 1980s he became a regular in the bands of Murray and Henry Threadgill: Ming (Black Saint, 1980) and Home (1982) with Murray's octet, the two Murray big-band volumes of Live at Sweet Basil (1984), and Threadgill's Sextett on cornet for When Was That? (About Time, 1982) and Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket (1983). He recorded with James Blood Ulmer on Are You Glad to Be in America? (cut in one day, January 17, 1980) and Free Lancing (1981), with Julius Hemphill on Flat-Out Jump Suite (1980), with Cecil McBee on Flying Out (1982), with James Newton on The African Flower (Blue Note, 1985) and with Don Pullen on The Sixth Sense (1985). He also played in Bill Laswell's group Material, on Memory Serves (1981) and The Third Power (1991). AllMusic's Chris Kelsey described him in this period as a daring, roots-bound soloist with a modern imagination and a big, burnished tone in the manner of Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge, and JazzTimes credited him as a mentor to the M-Base circle around Steve Coleman.

Alongside the sideman work he led his own groups, the Okra Orchestra and the Natchezsippi Dance Band, and wrote for the theater. JazzTimes lists him as composer and musical director for several August Wilson plays, among them Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson, and as a collaborator of the choreographer Dianne McIntyre. He wrote a musical melodrama, From Natchez to New York, that was broadcast on NPR and staged at the Smithsonian. He played on Cassandra Wilson's Days Aweigh (JMT, 1987) and Blue Light 'Til Dawn (Blue Note, 1993). In 1994 he played cornet on "Life's a Bitch," a track on Illmatic, the debut album of his son, the rapper Nas. He also appeared in Robert Altman's 1996 film Kansas City.

He did not record under his own name until he was 57. Nas had been urging him to make a record, and when Atlantic called, Dara said yes. In the World: From Natchez to New York, produced by Yves Beauvais and Dara and released on February 17, 1998, was a set of his own songs on which he sang and played cornet, trumpet and guitar, and it reached No. 19 on the Billboard Traditional Jazz Albums chart. Stereophile named it Recording of the Month for May 1998. Nas rapped on "Jungle Jay." The follow-up, Neighborhoods (Atlantic, February 20, 2001), added Dr. John on organ and electric piano and Cassandra Wilson on "Used to Be." Reviews split. Robert Christgau liked it better than the debut, while AllMusic's Scott Yanow called it mostly outside jazz and disappointing. He has released no studio album under his own name since.

He kept appearing on other people's records through the 2000s: Cassandra Wilson's Belly of the Sun (2002), the Dirty Dozen Brass Band's Medicated Magic (2002), Corey Harris's Downhome Sophisticate (2002) and Daily Bread (2005), and Ulmer's No Escape from the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions (2003). On his son's God's Son (2002) he plays on "Dance," and on "Bridging the Gap" from Street's Disciple (2004) he delivers the hook and a spoken account of his own path, a single that peaked at No. 94 on the Billboard Hot 100. Time Out New York listed a tribute show uptown in March 2012 with Cassandra Wilson and Amiri Baraka among the performers, and the Festival of New Trumpet Music gave him its 2025 Award of Recognition. Real Gone Music reissued In the World: From Natchez to New York on green vinyl on February 6, 2026. Dara turned 85 on January 12, 2026.

Dara is a jazz cornetist by training and a blues and folk songwriter by temperament, and he says so plainly: AllMusic noted that his 1998 debut was only tangentially related to his free-jazz work, and Time Out called him a cornetist by trade, a bluesman by default and a griot because storytelling is his calling. His records mix Delta blues and country-blues guitar with Ghanaian highlife, Caribbean calypso and soca, funk, reggae and New Orleans second-line rhythm, over lyrics about food, women, street vendors and Harlem. He half-speaks rather than sings, and he gives his bands wide room to improvise. On the horn he has a big, burnished tone, often muted with a Harmon mute used as a plunger, which critics have compared to Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge and, at other times, to Hugh Masekela, and he has been called an heir to Don Cherry. He says he never practices, plays old Olds Ambassador cornets and a Gibson ES-125 guitar. His jazz credentials rest on the loft-era records with David Murray, Henry Threadgill, James Blood Ulmer and Julius Hemphill and on his work with Cassandra Wilson, while the work that made his name on his own is mostly blues, funk and folk.