Kenneth Daniel Ball was born on May 22, 1930, in Ilford, Essex. He left school at 14 to work as a clerk in an advertising agency and began taking trumpet lessons at about the same time. For several years he played as a semi-professional sideman while also working as a salesman and at the agency, and he turned professional in 1953. He played trumpet in bands led by Sid Phillips, Charlie Galbraith, Eric Delaney and Terry Lightfoot before forming his own trad jazz group, Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen, in 1958. The trombonist John Bennett was a founder member, and the clarinetist Dave Jones was in the original lineup.

Lonnie Donegan heard the band, helped it into a recording contract with Pye, and booked it on his television show; a Frankfurt residency at the Storyville club in 1959 and 1960 hardened the group's sound. Its first LP, Invitation to the Ball (Pye, 1960), was a Dixieland set with Bennett, Jones, the banjoist Diz Disley, the bassist Vic Pitt and the drummer Ron Bowden. The 1961 follow-up Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen carried the billing "Lonnie Donegan presents" on its sleeve and closed with "Samantha," a Cole Porter song that became the band's first hit single (Pye 7NJ.2040, released in February 1961).

The big hits came within a few months. "Midnight in Moscow," recorded in November 1961 to an arrangement the Dutch bandleader Jan Burgers had made for his New Orleans Syncopators, went to number two on the British singles chart in January 1962 and to number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 in March, held out of the top spot by Bruce Channel's "Hey! Baby," and it sold more than a million copies. The next single, "March of the Siamese Children" from The King and I (February 1962), reached number one on the New Musical Express chart on March 9, 1962. Ball charted 14 top-40 singles in Britain, all on Pye, with "Sukiyaki" and "The Green Leaves of Summer" among the others. In the United States the Jazzmen's records came out on Kapp, which issued the live album Recorded Live! (taped at the Empire Theatre, Liverpool, on April 1, 1962) and a Midnight in Moscow album that reached number 13 on the US album chart. Ball appeared with the band in Richard Lester's film It's Trad, Dad! (1962) and in Live It Up! (1963), and in July 1962 shared the cover of the New Musical Express with Cliff Richard, Brenda Lee and other pop stars of the moment.

The trad boom's biggest night, at Alexandra Palace in January 1963, billed Ball with Acker Bilk, Chris Barber, Alex Welsh, Ken Colyer, George Melly and others, and in 1963 he was made an honorary citizen of New Orleans. In 1968 the band appeared with Louis Armstrong on his last European tour. On September 10, 1968, it played a public concert at the Friedrichstadt-Palast in East Berlin that was recorded and issued by the East German label Amiga as two LPs, with Fontana releasing a selection as King of the Swingers in Britain. His last chart single was a version of the Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four" in 1967. The Jazzmen guested on every edition of the first six series of the BBC's Morecambe and Wise Show, played "Midnight in Moscow" on the BBC's Pop Go the Sixties on December 31, 1969, and were the resident band on BBC1's Saturday Night at the Mill from 1976 to 1981. Ball later called the reception for the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer the peak of his career. His joint album with Barber and Bilk, The Best of Ball, Barber and Bilk, reached number one on the British album chart.

Ball kept the band on the road for the rest of his life, with Bennett in the trombone chair into the 2010s and his son Keith in the group as bandleader and vocalist. In 2001 he joined Bilk, Humphrey Lyttelton, John Dankworth, George Melly, Don Lusher and John Chilton and the Feetwarmers on the Decca album British Jazz Legends Together. His last scheduled concert, with Bilk and Barber, was at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester on February 21, 2013. He passed away on March 7, 2013, at Basildon Hospital in Essex, where he was being treated for pneumonia, at the age of 82. Since 2018 a show called Kenny Ball's Greatest Hits, produced by the trombonist Ian Bateman, has presented the band's repertoire with musicians from Ball's later lineups, according to English Wikipedia.

Ball was a Dixieland and trad lead trumpeter, an occasional vocalist, and the front man of a seven-piece band of trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, banjo, bass and drums. AllMusic's Scott Yanow described him as the most durable commercial success of the early-1960s trad boom, and the band's records show why: alongside New Orleans and Chicago staples such as "Muskrat Ramble," "Tin Roof Blues," "Maple Leaf Rag" and "When the Saints Go Marching In," it turned pop songs, show tunes, film themes and a Russian romance into compact trad arrangements that fit a three-minute single. Its live albums from Liverpool (1962) and Berlin (1968) carry the traditional repertoire at length, while 1970s LPs such as Let's All Sing a Happy Song lean toward medleys of current pop songs. His closest peers were Chris Barber, who led from the trombone with a wider blues and skiffle brief, and Acker Bilk, the clarinetist whose "Stranger on the Shore" shared the charts with the Jazzmen's hits; the three toured together and shared compilation albums as "the 3Bs."