Kenny Werner was born November 19, 1951, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Oceanside, Long Island. He began performing as a small child and, by age eleven, had already appeared on television; he studied classical piano formally but was equally drawn to whatever he heard on the radio. He entered the Manhattan School of Music as a classical piano major before transferring to Berklee College of Music in 1970, where he studied under the revered teacher Margaret "Madame" Chaloff. A trip to Brazil with saxophonist Victor Assis Brasil, during which he studied with pianist João Assis Brasil, further widened his harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary. His first jazz recording, the 1978 solo-piano LP The Piano Music of Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, James P. Johnson (Finnadar Records), was a set of interpretations of those four composers rather than original material.

In 1981 Werner formed his first working group, a trio with bassist Ratzo Harris and drummer Tom Rainey. The band matured for fourteen years, touring the United States and Europe, before documenting itself on four albums for Sunnyside: Introducing the Trio (1989), Press Enter (1992), Gu-Ru (1994), and Live at Visiones – Standards (1995). In the mid-1980s he also became pianist for the Mel Lewis Orchestra — the big band now carrying on as the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra — where Mel Lewis and valve trombonist/composer Bob Brookmeyer challenged him to start writing for the ensemble. That push produced his first jazz-orchestra compositions and arrangements and led to commissions from European radio big bands, including the Cologne, Danish, and Stockholm jazz orchestras.

Werner's longest-running musical partnership has been with saxophonist Joe Lovano, a recording and performing relationship that stretches from Lovano's 1986 date Tones, Shapes and Colors through Village Rhythm (1989), Landmarks (1991), Universal Language (1993), Rush Hour (1995), Celebrating Sinatra (1997), and on to 2016's The Mezzo Sax Encounter. Werner also built a long sideman relationship with singer/actress Betty Buckley, serving as her musical director and recording with her, including 1994's With One Look and 2001's Stars and the Moon: Live at the Donmar.

Werner's own catalog as a leader runs to more than twenty albums. A one-off 1997 session for RCA Victor, A Delicate Balance, paired him in an all-star trio with Dave Holland on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums; 1998's Unprotected Music (Double-Time Records) put him in a working trio with Marc Johnson and Joey Baron. In 2000 he formed a new trio with drummer Ari Hoenig and bassist Johannes Weidenmueller — a partnership that, by Werner's own account, has now run for more than two decades and produced six albums: Form and Fantasy (2001) and Beat Degeneration (2002), both drawn from a November 2000 live run at Paris's Sunset/Sunside club; Peace: Live at the Blue Note (2004); With a Song in My Heart (2008, recorded for the Japanese label Venus Records); The Melody (2015); and Animal Crackers (2017). Ari Hoenig, profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com, is the drummer across that entire run.

Werner also recorded extensively with harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans, most notably a 2001 live duo album, Toots Thielemans & Kenny Werner, recorded before an audience in Kalmthout, Belgium. Its track "Inspiration," composed by Werner, earned both musicians a nomination for Best Instrumental Composition at the 45th Annual Grammy Awards in 2003.

In 2007 Werner made his Blue Note Records debut with Lawn Chair Society, a quartet/quintet date featuring Scott Colley, Brian Blade, Chris Potter, and Dave Douglas. His most personal work followed: after the 2006 death of his daughter, Katherine, in a car accident, Werner spent several years composing No Beginning No End, a large-scale meditation on loss, transition, and renewal scored for over seventy musicians and featuring Joe Lovano and vocalist Judi Silvano. The piece earned him a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. He followed it with Balloons (2011, live at the Blue Note, with John Patitucci, Antonio Sánchez, David Sánchez, and Randy Brecker) and Coalition (2014, with Lionel Loueke, Miguel Zenón, Benjamin Koppel, and Ferenc Nemeth).

Beyond performing, Werner is the author of the influential 1996 book Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within, which draws on his own struggles with self-doubt and stage fright to lay out a psychological and meditative approach to musicianship; it comes packaged with a CD of guided meditations and has become a widely assigned text for improvising musicians well beyond jazz. He later expanded on those ideas in a second book, Becoming the Instrument. Werner serves as founding musical director of the Effortless Mastery Institute at Berklee College of Music, and Discogs credits him as a performer on several devotional recordings connected to the Siddha Yoga movement, consistent with the meditation practice that shaped the book. His other honors include four National Endowment for the Arts grants (1985, 1987, 1993, 1995) and a Distinguished Artist Award for Composition from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Werner's playing sits at the intersection of a rigorous classical foundation — instilled by Margaret Chaloff at Berklee — and a deep post-bop harmonic language absorbed alongside Joe Lovano and through his years as house pianist for the Mel Lewis/Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, where Bob Brookmeyer's mentorship pushed him into large-ensemble composition. Time spent studying in Brazil left a rhythmic and melodic openness that runs through his small-group writing. What distinguishes Werner most, though, is the explicitly psychological and meditative framework he has built around improvisation: Effortless Mastery treats technical fluency as inseparable from a performer's relationship to fear and ego, and that philosophy — worked out over decades of touring trios (Rainey/Harris, then Hoenig/Weidenmueller) and monumental orchestral statements like No Beginning No End — has made him as influential as a teacher and author as he is as a pianist.