Kenny Garrett was born October 9, 1960, in Detroit, Michigan. His father, a carpenter by trade, played tenor saxophone as a hobby, and Garrett picked up the instrument himself as a child, coming up through Detroit's public-school jazz program and Mackenzie High School before turning professional as a teenager.

His break came in 1978: Garrett won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music but turned it down after Mercer Ellington, then leading the orchestra his father Duke had built, invited the teenager to join the Duke Ellington Orchestra instead. Garrett stayed with the Ellington band roughly three and a half years, then moved into New York's working big-band and small-group scene — playing the Thad Jones book in the Mel Lewis Orchestra and the Charles Mingus repertoire in the Dannie Richmond Quintet — alongside freelance dates that built his reputation as a versatile, in-demand altoist through the first half of the 1980s.

Garrett had already begun recording as a leader before the decade was out: Introducing Kenny Garrett, cut with a quintet featuring trumpeter Woody Shaw, pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist Nat Reeves, and drummer Tony Reedus, appeared on the Dutch Criss Cross label in 1985 (commonly cited elsewhere as a 1984 recording, though Discogs dates both the LP and CD pressings to 1985). The album was billed to the "Kenny Garrett Quintet Featuring Woody Shaw" rather than to Garrett alone.

In September 1986, Garrett joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers for the Delos album Feeling Good, recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley alongside trumpeter Wallace Roney, tenor saxophonist Jean Toussaint, trombonist Tim Williams, and pianist Donald Brown; Garrett wrote the album's title track. It placed him, briefly, among the decades-long line of Messengers alumni who went on to lead their own bands — a lineage covered in more depth in Art Blakey's own JazzProfiles.com profile.

The following year brought the association that defined his early career. In February 1987, Miles Davis saw a video of Garrett taking a guest spot with Dizzy Gillespie, called him that same night, and offered him a place in the band. Garrett joined that spring and remained with Davis's studio and touring groups until August 1991 — five years that put him on Davis albums including Amandla (1989) and the Dingo film soundtrack (1991), plus live recordings such as Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux and the posthumously issued Live Around the World.

Garrett kept recording as a leader throughout the Davis years. Garrett 5 followed in 1989 on the German Bellaphon label, cut the previous September with Wallace Roney again in the trumpet chair. The bigger commercial move came via Atlantic Records: Prisoner of Love (1989) and African Exchange Student (1990) were both made while Garrett was still touring with Davis, and Prisoner of Love notably brought Davis himself into the studio as a guest soloist on Garrett's own record — a reversal of the usual mentor-sideman relationship, with a supporting cast of Marcus Miller, Darryl Jones, and Foley on bass and a large vocal ensemble that included Garrett's own daughter, Sayydah, on clarinet.

His 1992 signing to Warner Bros. produced Black Hope, a charting, critically praised label debut featuring pianist Kenny Kirkland and a guest turn from tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. It opened a decade-long run for the label that included the trio record Triology (1995, dedicated to "the living legends of the tenor saxophone"), the tribute album Pursuance: The Music of John Coltrane (1996, featuring guitarist Pat Metheny), Songbook (1997), Simply Said (1999, also with Metheny), Happy People (2002) — whose sessions were scheduled to begin on September 11, 2001, and which Garrett dedicated to that day's victims after the band chose to continue recording — and Standard of Language (2003).

Garrett moved to Nonesuch Records for Beyond the Wall (2006), built around Chinese instrumentation (erhu player Wang Guo-Wei) and strings alongside guests Pharoah Sanders and Bobby Hutcherson; it earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 49th Grammy Awards. In 2008 he moved to Mack Avenue Records, where he has remained since. Sketches of MD: Live at the Iridium (2008) — its title an homage to Miles Davis — again featured Sanders; Seeds from the Underground (2012) drew two Grammy nominations, including Best Improvised Jazz Solo for the track "J. Mac"; Pushing the World Away (2013) added a further Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Album; and Do Your Dance! (2016) and Sounds from the Ancestors (2021) followed. In 2024 he released Who Killed AI?, his first electronic record, made in collaboration with vocalist-producer Svoy.

Beyond his own catalog, Garrett was a member of the all-star Five Peace Band alongside Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Christian McBride, and Vinnie Colaiuta; the group's Five Peace Band Live won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album in 2010 — the sole Grammy win of Garrett's career to date, earned as a featured member of a collaborative band rather than as a leader in his own right.

Garrett's honors reflect a career now spanning more than four decades. He has won DownBeat's Readers Poll for alto saxophone repeatedly, including as recently as the magazine's 89th annual poll in 2024. In 2011, Berklee College of Music awarded him an honorary doctorate and had him deliver the commencement address to its largest-ever graduating class — the same school he had turned down as a teenager to join Duke Ellington's orchestra. In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts named him an NEA Jazz Master, and the French Ministry of Culture made him a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Garrett's alto sound carries the hard-bop lineage of his native Detroit, but it was his tenure in Miles Davis's final touring bands — and, before that, the discipline of Ellington's and Thad Jones's big-band books — that shaped him into one of the defining post-Davis saxophone voices. His tone is often described by critics as a "cry": urgent, blues- and gospel-inflected, and equally at home stating a melody plainly or tearing through it at Coltrane-influenced intensity, a debt made explicit on his 1996 tribute album. That range has let him move fluidly between idioms across his own catalog — the electronic textures he absorbed from Davis on Prisoner of Love, Chinese instrumentation and orchestral strings on Beyond the Wall, Afro-Cuban rhythm on Sounds from the Ancestors, and, most recently, a full turn toward electronic production on Who Killed AI? — without ever losing the blues-and-church foundation he traces back to Detroit.