Rita Payés Roma was born on September 26, 1999, in Vilassar de Mar, a coastal town near Barcelona, into a family of musicians. Her mother, Elisabeth Roma, is a classical guitarist, and her father and brother are trumpeters; her brothers Eudald (trumpet) and Pere (guitar) both appear on her records. She started on piano at school and took up the trombone at nine.

At 13 she joined the Sant Andreu Jazz Band, the youth program that the Barcelona bassist and saxophonist Joan Chamorro has directed in the city's Sant Andreu district since 2006. She played in it until 2018 alongside the trumpeter and singer Andrea Motis, Magalí Datzira, Alba Armengou and Eva Fernández, and it was there that she began to sing. She later graduated in jazz trombone from the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) in Barcelona.

Chamorro produced her first records. Joan Chamorro Presenta Rita Payés (Jazz to Jazz) was recorded at Barcelona venues including the Jamboree jazz club in 2014 and released in 2015, when she was 15. It sets her trombone and voice in front of a mainstream-jazz rhythm section with Ignasi Terraza on piano and guests including Scott Hamilton, Scott Robinson, Dick Oatts and Andrea Motis, and it won the 2015 Enderrock Award for best new jazz project. Lua Amarela (2016), co-billed with Chamorro, followed. In September 2017 she played the Tanjazz festival in Tangier with the Motis Chamorro Quintet, and she appears on 2017 releases by the Voodoo Children Collective and the Martín Leiton Big Band.

In 2019 she made two kinds of record. Imagina, recorded in November 2018 and issued on May 17, 2019, is a duo album with her mother that mixes Latin American and Brazilian songs such as "Alfonsina y el mar" and "Carinhoso" with a few standards. The other two were jazz-standards dates for the Japanese label Venus Records, built around the Italian pianist Massimo Faraò's trio: My Ideal (April 2019), with the tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton, and In New York (December 2019), recorded in New York on April 13 and 14, 2019, with the tenor saxophonist Jerry Weldon and the drummers Jimmy Cobb and Louis Hayes.

Como la piel (April 16, 2021), again with her mother and produced by the drummer Juan Berbín, centers on original songs with Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese lyrics. NPR Music picked its opening track, "Nunca vas a comprender," as a staff favorite and called her voice angelic. In June 2021 the Acadèmia Catalana de la Música gave her its Alícia Prize for emerging talent, and that summer she and Roma played Jazz Baltica in Germany and the INNtöne festival in Austria. She also sang on "La gent que estimo," a 2021 track by the Catalan pop band Oques Grasses.

In 2022 the career showed both sides. In February she sang "Te venero" with the rapper and singer C. Tangana on live television at the 36th Goya Awards in Valencia, and in August she played two concerts called The Spanish Trombone with the WDR Big Band in Cologne. She recorded the single "Vida" with her husband, the musician Pol Batlle, for a Colors show in Berlin. In 2023 she is credited as a featured artist on "My Heart," from Jon Batiste's album World Music Radio (Verve).

De camino al camino (Sony Music, July 12, 2024) was built around songs she wrote, with guests including Silvia Pérez Cruz, Lau Noah and the arranger Toni Vaquer. It took her to festivals including the Barcelona Jazz Festival and the Grec Festival, and NPR's Tiny Desk series published her set, with her mother and Batlle in the band, on October 1, 2024. On September 18, 2026 she released Rueda eterna, a joint album with the Barcelona pianist and singer Lucía Fumero, with Juan R. Berbín as producer. The European tour for it began on October 14, 2026, with dates announced into June 2027. She lives outside Barcelona.

Rita Payés is a jazz-trained trombonist and a deep-voiced singer, and the record is clear that she is not only a jazz artist. Her albums since 2019 mix jazz standards with bossa nova, Latin American and Spanish folk song, boleros and her own acoustic singer-songwriter material, and her highest-profile mainstream appearances, with C. Tangana at the Goya Awards and with Oques Grasses, sit in Spanish pop. One concert reviewer described her live repertoire as jazz and bossa nova with lounge and Americana color, and AllMusic files her under jazz.

The jazz credentials are specific: seven years in a jazz youth program, a degree in jazz trombone, a debut recorded in her mid-teens with Scott Hamilton, Scott Robinson and Dick Oatts, two Venus Records standards dates, the second with the veteran drummers Jimmy Cobb and Louis Hayes, and two concerts with the WDR radio big band. Her father, a trumpeter, introduced her to jazz, and the trombone and voice remain the center of her sound. Because her recent work leans toward song and folk, only one genre tag applies in the header, and the rest of the picture is in the prose.