Steve Cole was born in Chicago on August 17, 1970, the son of a semi-professional clarinet and saxophone player. He started on clarinet, moved to tenor saxophone in high school, and has said that his father taught him to name players by ear from records long before he took the instrument seriously. At Northwestern University he studied classical saxophone alongside a degree in economics, and he later earned an MBA from the University of Chicago. According to AllMusic it was at Northwestern that his attention moved from the classical repertoire to jazz, funk, blues and R&B. He won the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's annual young artists competition, and on the Chicago club circuit he became a first-call sideman, playing with the blues harmonica player Junior Wells and with Bob Mamet, and he came to wider notice alongside the Chicago keyboardist Brian Culbertson.

Culbertson produced his debut, Stay Awhile (Mesa/Bluemoon with Atlantic, 1998), with Paul Jackson Jr. on guitar, Lenny Castro on percussion and Richard Patterson on bass. The record produced two No. 1 radio singles, "Say It Again" and "When I Think of You," and a No. 5 single in "Where the Night Begins," and it peaked at No. 13 on Billboard's Top Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. At the 2000 Oasis Smooth Jazz Awards it won Cole the Prism Award for Best New Artist. His first live performance as a recording artist was at the 1998 Goodwill Games in New York, followed the next day by a rained-on set at the Taste of Cleveland. Between Us (Atlantic, 2000), again produced by Culbertson, brought the No. 1 single "Got It Goin' On," plus "From the Start" and a cover of TLC's "Waterfalls." Cole said later that with an executive producer assigned to select songs he felt he was being handled, and that for Pulse in 2013 he wanted to get back to the instinct of the first album.

In 2001 he joined Regina Belle and George Duke on "Just the Two of Us," the Grover Washington Jr. and Bill Withers song, for Jason Miles's tribute album To Grover, With Love, which reached No. 4 on the Top Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. NY LA followed on Warner Bros. in March 2003 with Culbertson again featured, along with the saxophonist David Mann, the vocal duo Sonic Soul, bassist Will Lee and Jackson. That year he also guested on Culbertson's own Come On Up, co-writing and playing tenor on "Say What?" AllMusic describes him in this period as an in-demand sideman for Dave Koz, Marc Antoine, Peter White, Rick Braun and Larry Carlton, and Discogs credits him on Carlton's Fingerprints (Warner Bros., 2000), where he plays saxophone on two tracks, and on Braun's Kisses in the Rain (Warner Bros., 2001), where he takes the tenor solo on "Simplicity."

He moved to Narada Jazz for Spin (April 26, 2005), whose single "Thursday" reached the radio Top 20, and True (November 21, 2006). He is a founding member of the trio The Sax Pack with the saxophonists Jeff Kashiwa and Kim Waters. Their first album, The Sax Pack (Shanachie, March 18, 2008), delivered "Fallin' for You," which reached No. 1 on Billboard's Smooth Jazz Songs chart. They followed it with The Pack Is Back (September 29, 2009) and The Power of 3 (April 14, 2015). Between the Sax Pack records he returned to solo work with Moonlight (Artistry Music, 2011), an orchestral set of ballads and covers that includes songs by James Taylor, Burt Bacharach, Sarah McLachlan and Paul McCartney, with the Yellowjackets pianist Russell Ferrante and the bassist Steve Rodby among the players.

Since Moonlight his albums have appeared on Artistry Music, with Mack Avenue Records named in the copyright and distribution lines from Pulse (September 17, 2013) onward. Pulse, which AllMusic calls funk- and smooth jazz-oriented, was co-produced with the saxophonist David Mann, with whom he wrote eight of its ten songs, and Mann has since produced or co-produced Turn It Up, Gratitude, Smoke and Mirrors and Sleight of Hand. The album was followed by Turn It Up (July 15, 2016), with the single "Mirage"; Gratitude (July 26, 2019), which AllMusic links to a renewed sense of purpose after a health scare in his family; and Smoke and Mirrors (June 18, 2021), which features the bassist Mark Egan and the trumpeter Trevor Neumann. For Without a Doubt (October 6, 2023) he worked for the first time with the guitarist and producer Adam Hawley, with whom he co-wrote all ten tracks. His newest album, Sleight of Hand, came out on June 5, 2026, preceded on May 22 by the single "Maceology" with guitarist Cory Wong, and also features Will Lee, the keyboardist Ricky Peterson and Mann.

Alongside the recording career Cole teaches. He is clinical faculty in music business and saxophone at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches music industry and entrepreneurship, and his official site lists him as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the City of Prague Orchestra and as a performer with Buddy Guy, Boz Scaggs, Jeff Lorber, Jim Peterik, Freddie Cole, Cyrus Chestnut and the industrial band KMFDM. He still tours, and his site lists two shows at the Loews Chicago O'Hare Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, on November 21, 2026, on a bill where he and Kim Waters each play their own set.

Cole is a tenor player first, with soprano and alto on some tracks, and his singles are built around short, singable melodies in a crossover sound that AllMusic says draws on the R&B, pop and blues of his hometown. His own account is that he grew up on a mix of bebop and pop radio, playing along with the radio and adding saxophone solos to songs that had none, and that he later studied bebop through Cannonball Adderley and soul jazz through Stanley Turrentine. In a 2013 interview he described a practice routine of scales, etudes and repertoire that can include a Charlie Parker transcription. The records themselves sit squarely in smooth jazz and its funk and soul fringes, with radio-length arrangements and, on several albums, programmed drums, and he has charted repeatedly at smooth jazz radio. The jazz side of his reputation rests on the saxophone voice, his sideman and guest appearances with players such as Cyrus Chestnut, Freddie Cole and Larry Carlton, and records like Moonlight, which sets him in orchestral arrangements of ballads and standards.