Etienne Charles was born on July 24, 1983, in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, into a family already saturated with music. His mother played records constantly at home, his father performed with Phase II Pan Groove, the steel orchestra led by arranger Len "Boogsie" Sharpe, and the young Charles started in a school choir at five or six before moving to recorder at Bishop's Junior School. He asked an uncle in Toronto for a saxophone and received a trumpet in the mail instead, around the age of nine, and that accident decided the rest. He toured Venezuela with the Trinidad Brass Institute at twelve, attended Fatima College in Port of Spain, and by 2002 was arranging horn parts for the Trinidadian rock band Orange Sky as its youngest member.

Charles left for the United States in 2002 to study at Florida State University, where he was a Brautlecht Scholar of the College of Music and fell in with the pianist Marcus Roberts, then on the faculty. Roberts pushed him to keep Trinidad audible in his writing rather than file it away as local color, advice that has organized every record Charles has made since. He graduated from FSU in 2006, took first place in the jazz division of the National Trumpet Competition that year, and released his self-produced debut, Culture Shock, with Roberts at the piano, Ralph MacDonald on percussion and Boogsie Sharpe playing steelpan. That autumn he entered The Juilliard School on a full scholarship for a master's degree, finishing in 2008 as the recipient of the William Schuman Prize.

A run of thematic albums followed, each built on field research rather than library work. Folklore (2009) set the douens, La Diablesse, Papa Bois and other figures of Trinidadian folk belief for a band including Ralph MacDonald, Jacques Schwarz-Bart and Obed Calvaire. Kaiso (2011) took the calypso repertoire seriously as jazz material, with Lord Superior singing on two tracks and Monty Alexander sitting in at the piano on four. Creole Soul (2013) folded reggae and Haitian vodou song into the mix, reached number one on the JazzWeek chart for three weeks and finished the year as JazzWeek's third-ranked jazz album. San Jose Suite (2016) traced three places sharing the name San José, in Trinidad, Costa Rica and California, and closed with the sociologist Harry Edwards narrating the story of the San Jose State sprinters who raised their fists in Mexico City. Carnival: The Sound of a People Vol. 1 (2019) centered on the five-part "Black Echo" suite, which follows the British colonial ban on the skin drum in Trinidad through to the invention of the steelpan.

In June 2012 Charles was written into the United States Congressional Record for his contribution to the music of Trinidad and Tobago. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition in 2015, the Michigan State University Teacher-Scholar Award and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Millennial Swing Award in 2016, and a Creative Capital Award. He produced, co-wrote and arranged strings and horns for the vocalist Somi's Petite Afrique (Okeh, 2017), his first work as a producer, which won Outstanding Jazz Album at the 2018 NAACP Image Awards. He joined the SFJAZZ Collective in 2018 alongside Matt Brewer, Miguel Zenón, David Sánchez, Robin Eubanks, Warren Wolf, Edward Simon and Obed Calvaire, contributing arrangements of two Antônio Carlos Jobim pieces and an original, "Sketch," to the octet's 2018 live recording.

The largest of his commissions arrived in October 2022, when San Juan Hill: A New York Story opened the renovated David Geffen Hall. Co-presented by Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic and performed by the orchestra with Charles's band Creole Soul, it was the first music heard in the rebuilt room, and its subject was the Black and Caribbean neighborhood that Lincoln Center was built on top of. Two further leader records came out of the same period: Traces (2023), a chamber quartet recorded live in February 2019 with the French cellist Vincent Ségal, the Venezuelan cuatro player Jorge Glem and the Israeli bassist Or Bareket, and Live in San Francisco Vol. 1 (2023), cut over four nights at the Black Cat with Godwin Louis on saxophone. Creole Orchestra (2024), a big-band project a decade in the planning with René Marie singing on four tracks, was named JazzWeek's top album of the year and drew an NAACP Image Award nomination.

Charles taught at Michigan State University's College of Music from 2011, earning tenure there in 2016, and is now professor of studio music and jazz at the University of Miami's Patricia L. Frost School of Music, where he directs the Frost Studio Jazz Band. In November 2024 the French Ministry of Culture named him Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in January 2025 he received the Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence in Arts and Letters. His eleventh album, Gullah Roots (2025), turned to the Gullah Geechee communities of the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, co-produced with the Charleston drummer Quentin E. Baxter. At home he has led Carnival bands through the streets of Woodbrook and Port of Spain since 2017, most of them fronted by a full brass band on a moving truck.

Charles plays with a broad, singing tone and a strong preference for melody over display, and the rhythmic vocabulary underneath him comes from the panyard rather than the bebop line: he credits Boogsie Sharpe's arrangements with teaching him harmonic substitution years before he studied European composers, and he doubles on cajón, congas, cuatro and double-second pan on his own records rather than hiring the parts out. His compositional method is research-led, built on travel, interviews and participation in the rituals he is writing about, which is why his albums read as suites with arguments rather than sets of tunes. The straight-ahead half of his playing traces to Marcus Roberts and the Florida State years, and his repertoire choices keep the two halves in contact: Thelonious Monk's "Green Chimneys" and Bob Marley's "Turn Your Lights Down Low" sit side by side on Creole Soul, and Creole Orchestra runs Joe Henderson's "A Shade of Jade" against Lord Kitchener's "Ten to One Is Murder." Reviewing Carnival for DownBeat, Ammar Kalia described him as a deeply expressive voice worth hearing for his forebears as much as for his own story, and singled out the "Black Echo" suite's movement from subdued intimacy to joyous defiance.