Cyrille Aimée Daudel was born August 10, 1984, in Samois-sur-Seine, a small town near Fontainebleau, France, to a French father and a mother from the Dominican Republic. Samois-sur-Seine hosts an annual festival honoring Django Reinhardt, who is buried in the town, and as a teenager Aimée would climb out of her bedroom window at night to sit in with the gypsy-jazz musicians who gathered there, an experience she has cited as the root of her love of jazz and of a musical life built around travel and improvisation. She spent stretches of her childhood and teenage years in the Dominican Republic as well as France, and by the time she was twenty she had lived on four continents.

Aimée moved to New York to study at the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music, performing nightly in Manhattan jazz clubs while attending classes by day, and graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies. In July 2007, while still a student, she won first prize and the audience prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival's international vocal competition, using the prize money to help finance her self-produced 2008 debut, Cyrille Aimée and the Surreal Band. She followed it with two duo albums alongside Brazilian guitarist Diego Figueiredo, Smile (2009) and Just the Two of Us (2010, released in Japan on Venus Records), pairing her voice with his solo nylon-string guitar across jazz standards, Brazilian songbook staples, and French chanson. She was a finalist in the 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocals Competition and won first prize at the 2012 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition.

In 2011, SmallsLIVE released Cyrille Aimée & Friends: Live at Smalls, recorded at the Greenwich Village club with Roy Hargrove on trumpet and Joel Frahm on tenor saxophone, produced by the club's own pianist and owner, Spike Wilner. The following year she sang with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra under music director Jeff Lindberg at Chicago's Mayne Stage, released in 2013 as Burstin' Out on Origin Records.

Aimée signed to Mack Avenue Records for her major-label debut, It's a Good Day (2014), produced by Fabrice Dupont and co-produced by Aimée alongside guitarist Michael Valeanu, who became her regular musical partner from this point forward. That partnership is also the point where the connection to bassist Or Bareket becomes documented rather than a bare press-bio claim: on September 30, 2014, Valeanu, Aimée and Bareket played a trio set together at Mezzrow, the SmallsLIVE Foundation's second Greenwich Village room, billed as "Michael Valeanu w. special guest Cyrille Aimée." SmallsLIVE's own event archive lists all three names and instruments for that date. No commercial recording of the three of them together has been found on Discogs or anywhere else; the connection is real but is a single documented live date, not a shared record. Aimée followed It's a Good Day with Let's Get Lost (2016) and, in 2019, Move On: A Sondheim Adventure, a song cycle built from Stephen Sondheim's catalog that drew praise from Sondheim himself; her recording of "Marry Me a Little" from that album, arranged jointly with Diego Figueiredo, earned Aimée a nomination for Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards in 2020.

Aimée relocated to New Orleans in 2017. There she recorded Petite Fleur (2021, Storyville Records) with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra under conductor Adonis Rose, and released I'll Be Seeing You (2021) as a duo album with Michael Valeanu on her own Daudel Records imprint. Beginning in 2020 she also built a large audience outside the jazz club circuit through a series of duo videos with pianist Emmet Cohen posted to his long-running "Live from Emmet's Place" YouTube channel; their version of "La Vie en Rose" has been viewed more than seven million times. In 2021 she bought land in Costa Rica and built a house there, splitting her time between the country and her touring schedule. Her most recent album, À Fleur de Peau (2024, Whirlwind Recordings), produced by Jake Sherman, moves further into a personal blend of jazz, pop and Caribbean rhythm reflecting her mixed French and Dominican heritage; it earned her a second Grammy nomination, for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2025, a second nomination that several secondary sources, including the English Wikipedia article on Aimée, omit in favor of counting only the 2020 nomination.

Aimée's singing grew directly out of Django Reinhardt-style gypsy jazz, absorbed as a teenager at the festival in her own hometown, but her recorded catalog moves well past that starting point: French chanson, Brazilian bossa nova and samba, American musical theater (the entire Sondheim-repertoire album Move On), and, on her most recent record, Caribbean rhythms drawn from her mother's Dominican heritage. She is known for agile, wordless scat improvisation and for a looping technique, using a Boss RC-505 loop station on her 2018 live album to build multi-part vocal arrangements onstage by herself. She has spoken and written about improvisation as a guiding idea beyond music, the subject of a 2015 TEDx talk in France, "Osez l'improvisation" ("Dare to Improvise"), delivered with Michael Valeanu accompanying her.