Curtis DuBois Fuller was born December 15, 1932, in Detroit, Michigan, to a father who had immigrated from Jamaica and worked at a Ford plant and a mother who had come north from Atlanta. His father died of tuberculosis before Curtis was born, and his mother died when he was nine, after which he spent several years in a Detroit Jesuit orphanage. He attended public school alongside a remarkable run of future jazz names, among them Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, Tommy Flanagan, Thad Jones, and Milt Jackson, and came up in the informal teaching circle around pianist Barry Harris, later counted among Harris's earliest students alongside Byrd, Chambers, Pepper Adams, and Charles McPherson. Fuller took up trombone at sixteen after failing to get his hands on a violin or saxophone; accounts differ on who taught him next, with Discogs's own artist biography naming Detroit trombonist Frank Rosolino and Wikipedia naming J.J. Johnson and Elmer James, but every source agrees the turning point was hearing Johnson perform live alongside Illinois Jacquet, which fixed the instrument in Fuller's mind for good.

Fuller served in the U.S. Army from 1953 to 1955 during the Korean War era, playing in an Army band alongside bassist Paul Chambers and brothers Nat and Cannonball Adderley. On discharge he returned to Detroit and joined tenor saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef's quintet, appearing on Lateef's 1957 Savoy leader debut Jazz Mood alongside fellow Detroiter Hugh Lawson. When Lateef's group relocated to New York in April 1957, Fuller went with it, and what followed was the most productive stretch of his career: by his own account, and per Discogs's artist record, he led or co-led eight albums before the year was out for Prestige, Blue Note, and Savoy. The dated sessions include New Trombone (Prestige PRLP 7107, recorded May 11, 1957, with Sonny Red, Hank Jones, Doug Watkins, and Louis Hayes); Curtis Fuller with Red Garland (New Jazz NJLP 8277, May 14, 1957); a May 18, 1957 Van Gelder date pairing Fuller with pianists Hampton Hawes and Teddy Charles (who also supervised the session for Prestige), Julius Watkins and David Amram on French horn, and Sahib Shihab on alto, first issued as the French-horn half of Prestige's various-artists sampler Modern Jazz Survey 2: Baritones and French Horns and later reissued under Fuller and Hawes's own names as Curtis Fuller and Hampton Hawes with French Horns (Status ST 8305, 1965) - the sampler's other half, a baritone-saxophone date led separately by Pepper Adams and Cecil Payne with John Coltrane and Mal Waldron, was recorded nearly a month earlier, on April 20, and later reissued again under Coltrane's own name as Dakar, so Fuller shares billing with Adams, Payne, Coltrane, and Waldron on one release without having actually shared a bandstand with them that week; The Opener (Blue Note BLP 1567, June 16, 1957, with Hank Mobley and Bobby Timmons); Bone and Bari (Blue Note BLP 1572, August 4, 1957, with baritone saxophonist Tate Houston and pianist Sonny Clark); and Jazz...It's Magic! (Regent RMG 6055, September 5, 1957), co-billed with Sonny Red and Tommy Flanagan. In the middle of that run, on September 15, 1957, Fuller was the trombonist on Coltrane's only leader date for Blue Note, Blue Train, alongside Lee Morgan.

The turn of the decade brought Fuller's most enduring associations. On August 25, 1959, he recorded The Curtis Fuller Jazztet (Savoy MG-12143) with tenor saxophonist Benny Golson, trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist Wynton Kelly, and bassist Paul Chambers, a trial run for the group Golson would soon co-found with trumpeter Art Farmer. Weeks earlier, on May 21, 1959, Fuller had cut Blues-ette (Savoy MG 12141) with Golson, Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Garrison, and Al Harewood, the album that remains his best-known recording as a leader and the source of his original "Five Spot After Dark," a tune that entered the standard repertoire. He also led Sliding Easy (United Artists UAL 4041, 1959), a sextet date with Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers, and Elvin Jones arranged by Golson and Gigi Gryce, and Imagination (Savoy MG 12144, December 17, 1959) with Golson, Thad Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Dave Bailey. When Farmer and Golson formalized the Jazztet in late 1959, Fuller became its first trombonist, recording the group's landmark debut Meet the Jazztet (Argo LP-664, February 1960) with McCoy Tyner in the piano chair; he stayed with the group into 1961. Alongside the Jazztet work he kept his own leader dates going: Images of Curtis Fuller (Savoy MG 12164, June 6-7, 1960, with Yusef Lateef, McCoy Tyner, and Lee Morgan), Boss of the Soul-Stream Trombone (Warwick W 2038, December 1960, with Lateef and Freddie Hubbard), South American Cookin' (Epic LA 16020, 1961, with Zoot Sims and Tommy Flanagan), and Soul Trombone (Impulse! A-13, 1961, with Jimmy Heath, Freddie Hubbard, Cedar Walton, and Jimmy Cobb).

In 1961 Fuller left the Jazztet to join Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, remaining through 1964 as part of the sextet expansion alongside Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, and pianist Cedar Walton, a frontline widely cited as the group's creative peak. The band cut Mosaic (Blue Note BLP 4090, recorded October 2, 1961), Caravan (Riverside RM 438, 1962, the group's first release after Blakey signed with the label), Buhaina's Delight (Blue Note BLP 4104, recorded November and December 1961, released 1963), and Free for All (Blue Note BLP 4170, recorded February 10, 1964, released 1965), often singled out as the hardest-driving studio session the Messengers ever made. After leaving Blakey, Fuller worked through the 1960s and 1970s as an in-demand section trombonist in big bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, Gil Evans, Lionel Hampton, and, from the mid-1970s, Count Basie, appearing on Basie Big Band (1975), I Told You So (1976), and Prime Time (1977). He kept leading his own dates too, among them Smokin' (Mainstream MRL 370, 1972, with Jimmy Heath, Cedar Walton, and Billy Higgins) and, in 1978, Four on the Outside (Timeless SJP 124), a quintet co-led with Pepper Adams, his most substantial studio reunion with Adams since the 1957 Prestige sampler, with pianist James Williams rounding out the band. Fuller became a mainstay of pianist Cedar Walton's Eastern Rebellion group across the 1970s and 1980s, recorded on Eastern Rebellion 3 (Timeless SJP 143, 1980) with tenor saxophonist Bob Berg, Sam Jones, and Billy Higgins.

Fuller married Catherine Rose Driscoll in 1980; she died of lung cancer in 2010, and he recorded The Story of Cathy and Me (Challenge Records, 2011) as a tribute, following I Will Tell Her (Capri, 2010) and preceding Down Home (Capri, 2012). He received an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music in 1999, was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2007, and taught at the New York State Summer School of the Arts' School of Jazz Studies. Curtis Fuller passed away May 8, 2021, in Detroit, at 88, survived by eight children, nine grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren. For decades after his death was first reported, some obituaries and reference sources gave his birth year as 1934 and his age at death as 86; Discogs's own artist file notes the correction explicitly, and this profile uses the verified December 15, 1932 date.

Fuller belongs to the generation of hard-bop trombonists who translated J.J. Johnson's bebop vocabulary - fast, cleanly articulated lines on an instrument built for something slower - into a broader, darker, more blues-and-gospel-inflected voice; NPR's obituary headline called him simply "the leading trombonist of jazz's Detroit wave," grouping him with the same Detroit cohort of Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, and Pepper Adams that came through the same schools, bands, and mentors before scattering to New York in the mid-1950s. As a composer he contributed directly to the working book of the Jazztet and to his own record, most durably with "Five Spot After Dark" from Blues-ette. He was also one of the most reliable section trombonists of his era, holding chairs in big bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, Gil Evans, and Count Basie into the 1970s and 1980s, a versatility that kept him working steadily even as his own leader dates thinned out after the mid-1960s. His reputation rests less on innovation within the instrument's vocabulary than on consistency and centrality: few trombonists of his generation appear on as many acknowledged classic albums by other leaders, from Coltrane's Blue Train to Blakey's Mosaic, while still maintaining a personal, immediately identifiable sound.