Patti Austin was born in Harlem on August 10, 1950, the daughter of Gordon Austin, a trombonist who worked in big bands. Two of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century American music, Quincy Jones and Dinah Washington, described themselves as her godparents. She sang at the Apollo Theater at the age of four, and RCA signed her to a recording contract at five. The contract produced a real artifact: an RCA Victor seven inch issued in 1956, catalog numbers DJ-24 and 47-6580, pairing her "Super-Cala-Faga-Listic (Es-Piala-Docius)" with a Dylan Todd side.

A run of singles for Coral followed between 1965 and 1967, cut while she was still a teenager, then singles for ABC, United Artists and Columbia through 1973. None of them made her a star. What made her indispensable was the work happening around them.

On the recommendation of Valerie Simpson, Austin moved into New York's commercial session world in the late 1960s and became one of the most recorded voices of the following decade. She sang jingles for Almay, Avon, Burger King, Impulse, KFC, Maxwell House, McDonald's, Meow Mix, Stouffer's and the United States Army, work that earned her the trade nickname "Queen of the Jingles." In parallel she became a first-call backing vocalist on records that defined the era. She is credited on Roberta Flack's Feel Like Makin' Love (1975), Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years (1975), Joe Cocker's Stingray (1976), Billy Joel's The Stranger (1977), Quincy Jones's Sounds...And Stuff Like That!! (1978) and Steely Dan's Gaucho (1980), where she sings behind three of the album's tracks. On Michael Jackson's Off the Wall (1979) she is credited with lead and backing vocals on track nine, "It's the Falling in Love," a duet with Jackson written by Carole Bayer Sager and David Foster and produced by Quincy Jones. On George Benson's Give Me the Night, released August 9, 1980 on Qwest and Warner Bros., she is again among the backing vocalists. In total, Discogs credits her on 1,710 releases.

Her own recording career as a leader began when Creed Taylor signed her to CTI. End of a Rainbow (CTI 5001, 1976) put her in front of the label's house band, with Eric Gale on guitar, Richard Tee on keyboards, Steve Gadd on drums, Ralph MacDonald on percussion and Michael Brecker on tenor saxophone, mixed by Rudy Van Gelder with a Pete Turner cover. Havana Candy (1977) followed, produced and arranged by Dave Grusin with Larry Rosen engineering, then the concert album Live at the Bottom Line (1979) and Body Language (1980).

In 1981 Quincy Jones signed her to Qwest, the label he had just started. Every Home Should Have One was recorded at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles and Mediasound in New York between March 16 and May 31, 1981, and released on September 28 of that year. Jones produced, Rod Temperton wrote and arranged, and the session personnel included Greg Phillinganes, David Foster, Bob James, Steve Lukather, Eric Gale, Anthony Jackson, John Robinson, Richard Tee and Ralph MacDonald, with Bruce Swedien engineering. Austin is credited alongside Jones and Temperton for the album's vocal arrangements. The record reached No. 36 on the Billboard 200 and No. 16 on the R&B chart.

The album's duet with James Ingram, "Baby, Come to Me," written by Rod Temperton with Michael McDonald on background vocals, was released as a single in April 1982 and peaked at No. 73 on the Hot 100. It found its audience by an unusual route. ABC's daytime serial General Hospital adopted the song as the love theme for the character Luke Spencer, viewers contacted the network in enough numbers to prompt a second release, and Warner Bros. reissued the single in October 1982. On the chart dated February 19, 1983 it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, along with No. 1 Adult Contemporary and No. 9 R&B. In the same period she sang lead on "Razzamatazz" from Quincy Jones's The Dude, which reached No. 17 R&B and brought her a Grammy nomination in 1982.

Two further Qwest albums followed, Patti Austin (1984) and Gettin' Away with Murder (1985), before The Real Me (1988) turned her toward the standards repertoire. She moved to GRP, the label built by Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen, for Love Is Gonna Getcha (1990), Carry On (1991), the live album Live (1992) and That Secret Place (1994), then recorded for Concord, Intersound and Warner Bros. through the end of the decade.

The jazz records are the ones that finally won. For Ella (Playboy Jazz / Concord, 2002), her first Ella Fitzgerald tribute, was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Avant Gershwin (Rendezvous Entertainment, March 6, 2007) was recorded between March 31 and August 26, 2006 in Cologne, Dortmund and Los Angeles with the WDR Big Band Köln, produced, arranged and conducted by Michael Abene, with Dave Koz among its executive producers. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Traditional Jazz Albums chart and won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album on February 10, 2008. Austin was 57, and the award came 53 years after RCA signed her at five. Sound Advice (Shanachie, 2011) was produced by Greg Phillinganes, the keyboardist from Every Home Should Have One three decades earlier. For Ella 2, released April 21, 2023 with Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band, brought a further Best Jazz Vocal Album nomination at the 66th Grammy Awards. Her Grammy record stands at one win and seven nominations across R&B, pop, jazz and arranging.

One event outside the music is part of her public story because she has told it herself. Austin was booked on United Airlines Flight 93 for September 11, 2001 and moved to an earlier flight after her mother suffered a stroke. Speaking to the American Red Cross and to NBC Bay Area, she said of the change, "That's what saved my life," and added, "I felt that my life had been saved for some specific reason."

She continues to record and perform.

Austin's instrument is a flexible, precisely pitched mezzo that moves between R&B phrasing, pop delivery and jazz time without changing its core sound, which is exactly why producers hired her across genres for four decades. The discipline came from the session floor: intonation reliable enough to be cut in one pass, and a reading ability that let her be handed an arrangement and deliver it.

Her jazz lineage runs directly through Dinah Washington, her godmother, and through Ella Fitzgerald, whose repertoire she has recorded twice, in 2002 and 2023. Her commercial lineage runs through Quincy Jones, whose production aesthetic she worked inside from Sounds...And Stuff Like That!! in 1978 through Every Home Should Have One and beyond. The CTI records of 1976 to 1980 sit between the two: Creed Taylor and Dave Grusin arrangements, an electric rhythm section drawn from the same New York players who defined the label's sound, and a singer treating pop material with jazz phrasing.

What separates her from the pop-vocal category she is sometimes filed under is that she arranged. Her credit for vocal arrangement on Every Home Should Have One, sitting next to Quincy Jones and Rod Temperton, is the clearest evidence that she was a musician shaping the record rather than a voice hired to finish it.