Rick Braun was born Richard Carl Braun in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on July 6, 1955. His mother was a self-taught pianist and banjoist. At Dieruff High School he played drums, and he followed his brother onto the trumpet. He went on to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he joined the jazz-fusion band Auracle with keyboardist John Serry, saxophonist and flutist Steve Kujala and vibraphonist Steve Rehbein (later Steve Raybine). Auracle won a competition that gave it the chance to work with the producer Teo Macero, best known for his work with Miles Davis, and Braun has said that watching Macero work was an ear-opening experience. The band's first album, Glider, came out in 1978. Braun co-produced the second, City Slickers (1979), which was made without Serry and Kujala.

His next chapter had little to do with the trumpet. By the early 1980s he was working as a pop singer and songwriter: Gypsy Lady, a vocal record issued in Japan on Overseas Records, dates from 1984, and he wrote for the publishing arm of the television company Lorimar. With Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon he co-wrote "Here With Me," a top-twenty hit for the band in 1988, and he wrote the theme for the NBC drama Midnight Caller. His own website and a 1998 JazzTimes profile also place him on the road and in the studio as a trumpeter for a long list of pop and rock acts, among them War (1982), Glenn Frey (1983), Tina Turner (1984), Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (Southern Accents, 1985), Crowded House (1986), Natalie Cole (1989) and Sade (a 1989 to 1990 tour). The longest of those jobs was with Rod Stewart, whom he toured with on the 1988 to 1989 world tour and again in 1994, about four years in all by his own count.

Braun's solo career began in the early 1990s. Intimate Secrets (Mesa, 1992) was followed by Night Walk, on which he played only muted trumpet and flugelhorn, and a Christmas album in 1994, then Beat Street (1995) and Body and Soul (1997), which produced the adult contemporary radio hit "Notorious." Full Stride (Atlantic, 1998), recorded in his home studio, brought in guitarist Jeff Golub, keyboardist Brian Culbertson, guitarist Peter White and saxophonist Boney James, with Maysa Leak as guest singer. He has twice been named the Gavin Report's artist of the year. In that 1998 interview he was candid about the label on his records: the accurate description, he said, was instrumental R&B, with some improvisation and an occasional straight-ahead line over a funk loop, and he did not mind the name smooth jazz because the format gave instrumentalists like him somewhere to be heard.

The Warner Bros. years made him a radio fixture. Shake It Up (2000) was a joint album with Boney James, and Kisses in the Rain (2001) reached No. 1 on the contemporary jazz charts. By 2002 he was working in the trio BWB with saxophonist Kirk Whalum and guitarist Norman Brown, whose name takes its letters from the three surnames; its debut, Groovin', came out on Warner Bros. in 2002. In 2005 he and saxophonist Richard Elliot started the ARTizen Music Group, later Artistry Music and distributed by Mack Avenue. His own Yours Truly (2005) was a program of nine covers, among them Sade's "Kiss of Life," Simply Red's "Holding Back the Years" and Earth, Wind & Fire's "Shining Star," and R n R (2007), made with Elliot, went to No. 1.

All It Takes (Artistry/Mack Avenue, 2009) reached No. 2 and includes "Freddie Was Here," written the year the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard died, and "Tijuana Dance," a nod to Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. Sings with Strings (2011), arranged and produced by keyboardist Philippe Saisse, was a vocal album of standards and became his first record on the Traditional Jazz Albums chart, peaking at No. 9. BWB made Human Nature: The Songs of Michael Jackson (Heads Up, 2013) and a self-titled album (Artistry/Mack Avenue, 2016), and Braun's own Can You Feel It (2014) went to No. 1. He also made Around the Horn (Shanachie, 2017) and Crossroads (Shanachie, 2019), played on Dave Koz's Summer Horns II: From A to Z (2018) alongside Gerald Albright, Elliot and trombonist Aubrey Logan, and has issued records on his own Brauntosoarus label since the 2012 Christmas album Swingin' in the Snow, including a self-titled album (2022) and Christmas albums in 2023 and 2024.

His most recent project is a tribute to a fellow Eastman graduate. Rick Braun Plays Chuck Mangione came out on March 6, 2026, with Saisse, guitarist Tony Pulizzi and percussionist Lenny Castro in the band and saxophonists Elliot and Tom Scott and guitarist Grant Geissman as guests. Braun and Mangione became friends, and Mangione gave him a mouthpiece that Braun still plays. Venues list Braun's Mangione tribute shows into November 2026.

Braun is a smooth-jazz and contemporary-instrumental trumpeter first, and his career says so plainly: pop singer, staff songwriter, hired horn on arena tours, then a radio act with a long run of format-chart hits. His own description of the music is instrumental R&B rather than jazz. Most of his catalogue is built from funk and soul grooves, ballad features and familiar pop songs, with a muted-trumpet and flugelhorn sound carrying the melody over polished studio rhythm sections. The jazz side is real but narrower. He names Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Chet Baker, Freddie Hubbard, Clark Terry and Dizzy Gillespie as the players he wanted to sound like, with Herb Alpert and Chuck Mangione as the pop-trumpet models. In 1998 he said he hoped to make a standards record and perhaps a straight-ahead one, and Sings with Strings and the Mangione tribute are the nearest he has come on disc. Fusion at Eastman, an apprenticeship under Teo Macero and the Hubbard tribute are the documented jazz credentials, set beside a career spent mostly on pop-leaning instrumental music for radio and the festival circuit.