Jeremy Pelt was born November 4, 1976, in Los Angeles, California. He began on classical trumpet as a child and turned toward jazz after playing in his high school's jazz ensemble, going on to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston. He arrived in New York in 1998, and his first professional jazz engagement, a chair in the Mingus Big Band, put him almost immediately in front of the city's working jazz establishment. Through the band and the sessions it led to, Pelt built connections that shaped the next two decades of his career, working and recording with Jimmy Heath, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Ravi Coltrane, Vincent Herring, Ralph Peterson, Lonnie Plaxico, Nancy Wilson, Cedar Walton, the Roy Hargrove Big Band, the Duke Ellington Big Band, the Lewis Nash Septet, and Louis Hayes's Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band, among many others, according to his own artist biography.

Pelt released his debut as a leader, Profile, on the Spanish label Fresh Sound New Talent in 2002, backed by a band of similarly rising New York players: Jimmy Greene on tenor saxophone, Jaleel Shaw on alto, Robert Glasper on piano, Mike Moreno on guitar, Gerald Cannon on bass and Ralph Peterson on drums. He moved to the MAXJAZZ label for a run of three albums across the following decade, opening with Close to My Heart (2003), a ballad-heavy quintet-plus-strings date featuring pianist Mulgrew Miller and bassist Peter Washington, followed by Identity (2005) and the live Shock Value: Live at Smoke (2007), the latter recorded at the Harlem club with vocalist Becca Stevens as a guest. November (2008) closed the MAXJAZZ run and introduced tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen, pianist Danny Grissett, bassist Dwayne Burno and drummer Gerald Cleaver as a working quartet, a lineup he carried into his move to HighNote Records.

That quartet with Allen, Grissett, Burno and Cleaver became the vehicle for a string of acclaimed HighNote albums beginning with Men of Honor (2010, recorded at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey) and continuing through The Talented Mr. Pelt (2011) and Soul (2012). AllMusic praised The Talented Mr. Pelt for Pelt's "ear for late-'60s Miles Davis and '70s Woody Shaw" and his "ability to pick musically sympathetic and daring sidemen," while Jazzwise gave the album a five-star review, suggesting that history could remember the Jeremy Pelt Quintet "as one of the most important and creative bands to emerge in jazz since Miles' mid-1960s group." Pelt has stayed on HighNote ever since, releasing a new studio album at a steady pace nearly every year: Water and Earth (2013), Face Forward, Jeremy (2014), Tales, Musings and Other Reveries (2015), #Jiveculture (2016), Make Noise! (2017), Noir en Rouge, Live in Paris (2018), Jeremy Pelt the Artist (2019), The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 1 (2020), Griot: This Is Important! (2021), Soundtrack (2022), The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 2: His Muse (2023), Tomorrow's Another Day (2024), Woven (2025) and Our Community Will Not Be Erased (2026). He also co-led Jubilation! Celebrating Cannonball Adderley (2018, Savant) with saxophonist Jim Snidero, a quintet tribute date with pianist David Hazeltine, bassist Nat Reeves and drummer Billy Drummond.

Alongside his recording career, Pelt built a distinctive parallel body of work as an oral historian of jazz. Beginning in 2021 he conducted more than one hundred interviews with a multigenerational cohort of Black jazz musicians, publishing them across five self-published volumes under the title Griot: Examining the Lives of Jazz's Great Storytellers. Subjects across the series include Warren Smith, Eddie Henderson, Larry Willis, René Marie, Lewis Nash, Wynton Marsalis, Peter Washington, J.D. Allen, Robert Glasper, Bertha Hope, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Ambrose Akinmusire. The New York Times noted that while jazz literature is full of artist interviews conducted by journalists and critics, "examples of musicians speaking with their peers on the record are relatively rare." Pelt released the studio album Griot: This Is Important! alongside the first volume, its compositions inspired directly by conversations from the book. He continues to record for HighNote, tour internationally with his working groups, and teach; he has been named a Rising Star on trumpet by DownBeat magazine and the Jazz Journalists Association for five consecutive years.

In 2007, early in his HighNote-era rise, Pelt appeared as a sideman on guitarist Roni Ben-Hur's Motéma Music leader album Keepin' It Open, playing trumpet across the entire record alongside pianist Ronnie Mathews, bassist Santi Debriano, drummer Lewis Nash and percussionist Steve Kroon.

Pelt is a postbop trumpeter whose playing draws audibly on late-1960s Miles Davis and 1970s Woody Shaw, tempered by a subdued, self-assured tone that critics have also traced back to Freddie Hubbard and to the lyrical, sonorous phrasing of Booker Little. His compositions carry an identifiably enigmatic, mood-driven character rather than pure blowing-session harmonic display, and his longest-running quartet and quintet lineups have been built around musicians who match that sensibility rather than simply trade solos. On Woven (2025) and other recent HighNote albums, he has folded electronic textures, synthesizers and vocals into an otherwise straight-ahead postbop frame without abandoning the acoustic quintet format that anchors most of his catalog. Beyond the bandstand, his Griot interview project has made him one of the more prominent chroniclers of his own generation's jazz history, a role that runs in parallel with, rather than instead of, his identity as a working trumpeter and bandleader.