Ibrahim Maalouf was born on November 5, 1980, in Beirut and left Lebanon as a child during the civil war. He grew up in the Paris area with his parents and his older sister Layla, finished school at the lycée Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire in Étampes, in the Essonne, with a scientific baccalauréat at seventeen, and has lived and worked in France ever since. His father Nassim Maalouf is a trumpeter, a former pupil of Maurice André, and the developer of a four-valve trumpet that can play the quarter tones of Arabic maqam music; his mother Nada is a pianist. Ibrahim began trumpet at seven with his father and toured Europe and the Middle East with him as a teenager. He took a first prize at the Paris regional conservatoire in 2000 and graduated from the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris in 2003, and he won several international trumpet competitions, among them the Concours Maurice André in Paris.

Around 2003 he decided to make music his profession, and in 2006 he founded his own production company, Mister Ibé, which has issued most of his records. From 2006 to 2017 he taught trumpet and improvisation at conservatories in the Paris region. His first album, Diasporas (2007), was followed by Diachronism (2009), a double album that includes Jacky Terrasson at the piano on two tracks and the guitarist and singer -M- (Matthieu Chedid) on another. In 2010 he received the Victoire du jazz for instrumental revelation of the year. Diagnostic (2011) was the third part of what he called his Dia trilogy, a box set titled Dia appeared in April 2013, and in 2011 he played at Jazz in Marciac, a festival he would return to.

Wind (2012), dedicated to Miles Davis, is the record that placed him most squarely in the American jazz tradition. It is a quintet date with the pianist Frank Woeste, who also did additional arrangements, and three American jazz players: Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, Larry Grenadier on double bass and Clarence Penn on drums, with Maalouf credited on the quarter-tone trumpet. Illusions (2013) turned to a funk-and-electric band with a trumpet section and won the Victoire de la musique for world music album in 2014, the year he also received the Grand prix Sacem du jazz. In 2013 he took the Victoire du jazz for French instrumental artist or formation of the year, and he was made a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite in 2015.

On September 25, 2015 he released two records on the same day: Kalthoum, a quintet reading of Oum Kalthoum's Alf Leila wa Leila with the same Turner, Grenadier, Penn and Woeste lineup as Wind, and Red & Black Light, an electric band record arranged with the pianist Eric Legnini, the drummer Stéphane Galland and the guitarist François Delporte. A tenth-anniversary live set followed, and the touring show took him to the Zénith in Paris and to the AccorHotels Arena in December 2016, an evening issued in 2018 as 14.12.16 Live in Paris. Film scores became a large part of his work: his music for Yves Saint Laurent (2014) was nominated for a César in 2015, and his score for Dans les foréts de Sibérie (2016) won the César for best original music and a Lumières award in 2017. In 2017 he also released Dalida by Ibrahim Maalouf, a set of songs by Dalida with guest singers including Melody Gardot, and Quincy Jones, who heard him at the Montreux Jazz Festival that year, became his manager.

His later records range widely. Levantine Symphony N°1 (2018) is a score for the Paris Symphonic Orchestra and a children's choir with his own band; on July 27, 2018 at Jazz in Marciac his group joined that of Wynton Marsalis and about a dozen other trumpeters to premiere a piece written for the occasion. S3NS (2019) is a Latin-tinged horn-section album with Legnini and Woeste on Fender Rhodes, 40 Mélodies (2020) pairs his trumpet with Delporte's guitar, and Queen of Sheba (2022), with the singer Angélique Kidjo, brought a Grammy nomination, which made him the first Lebanese instrumentalist nominated. Capacity to Love (2022) is a hip-hop-leaning production with guests including Gregory Porter, and Trumpets of Michel-Ange (2024), a multi-volume project built around the T.O.M.A. trumpet, features the trombonist Trombone Shorty and the kora player Toumani Diabaté; its second volume appeared in June 2026, and in September 2026 he released À la française with the singer Hiba Tawaji. He holds both French and Lebanese nationality and is a living, active musician.

Maalouf's sound is built on the quarter-tone trumpet his father developed. The extra valve lets him bend notes into the intervals of Arabic maqam music, so a jazz solo can pass through scales that a standard trumpet cannot reach, and his writing joins those scales to jazz harmony, funk and electric textures, hip-hop, West African music and orchestral writing. Reference works place him accordingly: French Wikipedia lists his genres as jazz, jazz fusion and ethno-jazz, and AllMusic files him under contemporary jazz, electric jazz, jazz-funk, modern jazz and trumpet jazz, alongside its international and classical headings. The balance shifts from record to record. Wind, Kalthoum and Red & Black Light are band jazz played with and arranged for New York and Paris improvisers, Illusions and S3NS lean on funk and Latin rhythm, and Capacity to Love sits closer to soul and hip-hop, while his film scores and orchestral works are written for other forces entirely. His jazz credentials rest on the Victoires du jazz of 2010 and 2013, the Grand prix Sacem du jazz of 2014 and repeated appearances at Jazz in Marciac, and the classical trumpet training he received from his father, a pupil of Maurice André, is a second root of his playing.