Frank Wellington Wess was born January 4, 1922 in Kansas City, Missouri, to two schoolteachers. The family moved to Sapulpa, Oklahoma in 1932, where he took up alto saxophone at ten and played in his father's amateur band, and settled in Washington, D.C. in 1935 when he was thirteen. He went to Dunbar High School, graduating in 1937, and studied theory and composition there with Henry Grant, the same teacher who had coached the young Duke Ellington. He enrolled at Howard University intending to study dentistry, switched to the music conservatory, and stayed a year. Hearing Lester Young pushed him from alto to tenor, and he worked his way through Washington's dance bands and the Howard Theatre house band, then went on the road with vocalist Blanche Calloway.

Wess was in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1945, serving as assistant bandleader and clarinet soloist. His unit was posted to North Africa, playing Dakar, Casablanca, Monrovia, Tlemcen and Algiers, and he led a 17-piece band that backed Josephine Baker on concert tours for Allied troops. After the war he joined Billy Eckstine's orchestra on tenor, the band that had introduced bebop to the big-band format and that at various points carried Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon and Art Blakey. The Eckstine band folded in 1947. Short stints with Eddie Heywood, Lucky Millinder and Bull Moose Jackson followed, and by 1949 Wess had had enough of one-nighters and Jim Crow touring. He went home to Washington and enrolled at the Modern School of Music as a flute major, taking a Bachelor of Music degree in 1953. That degree, not the saxophone, is what reshaped his career.

Count Basie had been trying to hire him for years on Eckstine's recommendation, and in 1953 Wess finally accepted. He stayed eleven years, until 1964, and became one of the architects of the so-called "New Testament" band: he personally brought in Thad Jones, Bill Hughes, Eddie Jones, Al Aarons and Eric Dixon, and he wrote for the book, including "Segue in C," "Blue on Blue" and "Swingin' at the Waldorf." His arrival also created the front line the band was sold on: the two-tenor pairing with Frank Foster that Basie billed as the Two Franks, Wess the rounder and more lyrical of the pair, Foster the harder driver. When Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis joined the reed section in 1957, Wess moved over to alto, and he went on doubling all three horns for the rest of his tenure. "Segue in C" is his composition and his flute feature on First Time! The Count Meets the Duke, the one studio meeting of the Basie and Ellington orchestras, cut July 6, 1961 and issued by Columbia in 1962.

The flute is why he matters most. Jazz flute before Wess was largely a doubler's novelty, a color a saxophonist reached for on a ballad. Wess treated it as a primary horn, soloed on it night after night in front of the loudest band in the country, and made it carry through a full brass section. Neal Hefti wrote for that sound directly: "Cute," from 1958's Basie Plays Hefti, is a flute-and-brushes feature that became one of the band's most requested numbers. Away from Basie he recorded flute-led dates for Savoy, including the all-flute Opus in Swing (1956), and he made three albums with harpist Dorothy Ashby between 1957 and 1958 that are among the odder and more durable small-group records of the decade. From 1959 through 1964 he won the DownBeat critics' poll on flute six years running.

Leaving Basie in 1964, Wess settled into a New York freelance life that lasted almost fifty years. He played Broadway pits (Golden Boy, Chicago, Annie, Sugar Babies), worked as a staff musician for ABC Television, and sat in the bands for The David Frost Show from 1969 to 1972, The Dick Cavett Show and Saturday Night Live, all while cutting jingles and records. He was in Clark Terry's Big Bad Band from 1967 to 1970, held the first tenor chair in the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band for ten years, and turned up in the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra alongside Lew Tabackin, in Philly Joe Jones's Tadd Dameron repertory band Dameronia, in the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band, in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and in Jaco Pastorius's Word of Mouth Big Band. His sideman list between 1964 and 2011 runs to roughly 150 different leaders and ensembles. From the mid-1970s he co-led the New York Jazz Quartet with pianist Roland Hanna, a co-op group that recorded six albums for Salvation, Enja, Sonet and Bee Hive with Ron Carter and later George Mraz on bass.

He kept making leader records into his nineties. The 1980s brought two reunions with Frank Foster, Two for the Blues (Pablo, 1984) and Frankly Speaking (Concord, 1985); the turn of the 1990s brought two Basie-alumni big bands under his own name, Dear Mr. Basie (1990, co-fronted with trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison) and Entre Nous (1991). He recorded two albums with Hank Jones, Hank and Frank (2006) and Hank & Frank II (2009), and led a nonet on Once Is Not Enough (2009). The National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master in 2007. At 89 he cut the sessions that became Magic 101 and Magic 201 with pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Kenny Davis and drummer Winard Harper, both issued in 2013. His last public concert was in April 2013 at 54 Below in New York. Frank Wess passed away on October 30, 2013, at 91.

Wess built his tenor sound on Lester Young: light-footed, behind the beat, more interested in a shapely line than in volume, which is exactly what made him the foil rather than the mirror of Frank Foster in Basie's two-tenor set pieces. His alto, which he played from 1957 on, was drier and more clipped. But the flute is the instrument that changed because of him. He refused to treat it as a doubler's toy, gave it a broad centered tone with almost no vibrato, and phrased on it like a saxophonist rather than a classical player, which is what let it survive inside a shouting big band instead of being confined to ballad features. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz credits him with establishing the flute as a legitimate jazz instrument, and the six consecutive DownBeat critics' poll wins from 1959 to 1964 show how fast the profession agreed. Herbie Mann, Yusef Lateef and Eric Dolphy took the instrument in other directions, but Wess got there first inside the mainstream, and every big-band reed player asked to pick up a flute since is working in a space he opened.