Django Bates was born Leon Bates on October 2, 1960, in Beckenham, then in Kent and now part of Greater London. His father collected jazz records along with South African and Romanian folk music, and Bates credits that mix for the range of his own writing. He went to Sedgehill School, attended the Centre for Young Musicians in London from 1971 to 1977, where he studied trumpet, piano and violin, and spent 1977 and 1978 at Morley College. He enrolled at the Royal College of Music in 1978 to study composition and left after two weeks. In 1979 he founded the band Human Chain, which later recorded two albums with the drummer Steve Argüelles.

In the 1980s he became one of the central figures of a new British jazz generation. He played with the South African saxophonist Dudu Pukwana's group Zila and with Tim Whitehead's Borderline, and he joined the co-operative that grew from a jazz workshop run by Graham Collier in 1983 and took the name Loose Tubes. The band, which averaged about 21 players, made its first London appearance in 1984; Bates and the bassist Steve Berry brought in much of its early original music, and the trumpeter Chris Batchelor was another main writer. Its albums were Loose Tubes (1985), Delightful Precipice (1986) and Open Letter (1988, produced by Teo Macero). In 1987 it became the first jazz orchestra to play at the Proms, and readers of The Wire named it best UK band in 1989; the magazine voted Bates best UK jazz composer in 1987 and again in 1990. Loose Tubes broke up in 1990, largely because so large a co-operative was hard to finance and run. In 1986 he had also joined the drummer Bill Bruford's new quartet, Earthworks, with the saxophonist Iain Ballamy and bassist Mick Hutton, playing keyboards, tenor horn and trumpet on Earthworks (recorded October 1986, released 1987), Dig? (1989) and All Heaven Broke Loose (1991), and he stayed until a final date in September 1993. In the same decade he recorded for ECM with First House, the band of the saxophonist Ken Stubbs, and with the singer Sidsel Endresen.

After Loose Tubes he turned to his own writing. Music for The Third Policeman, credited to his Powder Room Collapse Orchestra and recorded in January and February 1990 for the small label Ah Um, was a score based on Flann O'Brien's 1969 comic novel. In 1991 he formed Delightful Precipice, a 19-piece band drawn largely from Loose Tubes veterans, and made three albums for the JMT label that are named for the seasons: Summer Fruits (and Unrest) (recorded June 9 to 13, 1993), the solo-piano Autumn Fires (and Green Shoots) (recorded February 15 and 16, 1994, at Electric Lady Studios in New York), and Winter Truce (and Homes Blaze) (recorded February 1 to 9, 1995, with the singer Christine Tobin). He won the Jazzpar Prize in 1997 and the same year recorded Like Life with the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra, released on Storyville in 1998. His 1998 Screwgun album Quiet Nights turned to standards such as "Speak Low" and "Over the Rainbow" with Ballamy and the singer Josefine Cronholm. He also wrote on commission for classical and dance forces, among them Dream Kitchen for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Fine Frenzy for the Shobhana Jeyasingh Dance Company, and a piano concerto for Joanna MacGregor and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. In 2004 he was the first artistic director of the FuseLeeds festival, where he commissioned the first orchestral piece by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and organized Premature Celebration for the saxophonist Evan Parker's 60th birthday, a piece quilted from one bar each by sixty composers, among them John Zorn, Laurie Anderson and Gavin Bryars, and performed by the London Sinfonietta.

Teaching became a second career. He tutored at the Banff Centre jazz programme in 2002 with Jim Black and Dave Douglas, was professor of rhythmic music at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen from 2005 to 2011, was named visiting professor of jazz at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2010, and became professor of jazz at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) in Switzerland in September 2011. His own website and the university's staff page both still list him there as of November 2026. In Copenhagen he put together a trio with the Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and the Danish drummer Peter Bruun, an outgrowth of a 2005 Charlie Parker celebration at the Copenhagen Jazz House, and the trio, billed as Django Bates' Belovèd, recorded Belovèd Bird (Lost Marble, 2010), a set of rearranged Charlie Parker pieces on which Bates plays only acoustic piano, and Confirmation (2012), which added originals and, on some tracks, the singer and trombonist Ashley Slater, his Loose Tubes colleague. Lost Marble is his own label; it also issued You Live and Learn... (Apparently) (2004), Spring Is Here (Shall We Dance?) (2008) and the live Loose Tubes sets Dancing on Frith Street (recorded 1990, released 2010, with Bates as producer and mixer), Säd Afrika (2012) and Arriving (2015). Loose Tubes reunited in 2014 for its 30th anniversary.

A BBC Proms commission in 2013 led to the trio's next record. The Study of Touch, produced by Manfred Eicher and recorded in June 2016 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, came out on ECM in 2017 (ECM 2534); the commissioned work had won a British Composer Award for contemporary jazz composition in December 2014. The ECM connection brought him into the quartet of the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem, alongside Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, on Blue Maqams (recorded May 2017 in New York, released October 13, 2017). In July 2017 Edition Records issued Saluting Sgt. Pepper, recorded in October 2016 with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band to mark the Beatles album's 50th anniversary. The Ivors Academy gave him its Ivors Jazz Award in 2019. Tenacity (Lost Marble, October 2020) returned to the Parker material with the Norrbotten Big Band, and during the pandemic he wrote a new suite for solo piano, Distilled, which he performs in concert. In 2025 he rejoined Brahem and Holland, with the cellist Anja Lechner, for After the Last Sky (ECM 2838, released in March 2025, recorded in May 2024 in Lugano). His own website lists a Barbican date with Brahem on November 15, 2026, and two NDR Big Band concerts of his music in Hanover on November 27 and 29, 2026.

Bates writes and plays with a mix of rhythmic intricacy, quotation, parody and sudden changes of scale that reviewers have long called humorous and idiosyncratic: AllMusic described the big-band writing of Summer Fruits as full of breezy humor and unconventional swing, and a Winter Truce reviewer praised its unfettered idiosyncrasy. He names Charlie Parker as his childhood hero, and his Parker projects, from Belovèd Bird to Tenacity, keep the lines but stretch them: the trio spins "Ah Leu Cha" out to nearly 20 minutes, and his Parker-based originals reuse the rhythmic and harmonic habits of the bebop tunes they sit beside. The same method shaped Saluting Sgt. Pepper, which, in one reviewer's account, kept the Beatles melodies while changing textures and tempos. Other threads include his father's South African and Romanian records, Dudu Pukwana's township jazz (he now teaches a Bern ensemble devoted to Pukwana's music), the Loose Tubes co-operative ethic, and a long record of commissioned concert-hall writing. One reference work calls him among the most gifted musicians Britain has produced, with a range that runs from early jazz and bebop through free jazz to jazz-rock.