Kurt Elling was born on November 2, 1967, in Chicago and grew up in Rockford, Illinois, where his father was Kapellmeister at a Lutheran church. He sang in choirs from childhood and played violin, French horn, piano and drums; as a middle-schooler he watched Tony Bennett and the Woody Herman band on television and imagined singing with a band. At Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, where he majored in history and sang in the 70-voice Gustavus Choir, he began listening to Dave Brubeck, Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock and Ella Fitzgerald. He graduated in 1989.

After college he enrolled at the University of Chicago Divinity School to study the philosophy of religion and began playing a jazz gig a week, among them a basement club called Milt Trenier's, where house pianist Karl Johnson became his mentor and teacher. He left in January 1992, one credit short of the master's degree, and worked as a bartender and a mover while singing at weddings and in clubs. Around then he began scatting and writing his own words to improvised solos. The vocalese of Mark Murphy, who also introduced him to the poetry of Jack Kerouac, shaped that approach, and the spare emotion of Chet Baker was a second influence.

In 1995 Elling decided he was ready to record. He had met pianist Laurence Hobgood through saxophonist Edward Petersen's Monday-night sessions at the Green Mill Jazz Club in Chicago, and the two put together a nine-song demo. On the advice of pianist Fred Simon, the cassette went to the Los Angeles manager Bill Traut, who passed it to Bruce Lundvall of Blue Note. The label released it as Close Your Eyes in spring 1995, and it earned a nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance at the 38th Grammy Awards. Made with Hobgood's trio (bassists Eric Hochberg and Rob Amster, drummer Paul Wertico) and the Chicago tenor saxophonists Von Freeman and Edward Petersen, it set Elling's lyrics to Wayne Shorter's "Dolores Dream" and Herbie Hancock's "Hurricane" beside settings of Rilke and Kenneth Rexroth. The Messenger followed in 1997, with Cassandra Wilson as a guest on "Time of the Season," then This Time It's Love (1998), Live in Chicago (with Jon Hendricks, Von Freeman, Eddie Johnson and Edward Petersen as guests), the ballad-centered Flirting with Twilight (2001) and Man in the Air (2003). He won the Down Beat Critics Poll for male vocalist thirteen times, from 2000 to 2012, and served the Recording Academy as a national trustee from 1999 and as vice-chair after his election in 2003.

In August 2006 Elling signed with Concord Jazz, and his first album for the label, Nightmoves, appeared in 2007. Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman (2009) grew out of a 2005 Chicago Jazz Festival commission to revisit the 1963 album by John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman; he and Hobgood reworked the music, recorded it live in January 2009 in the Allen Room at Lincoln Center, and it won him his first Grammy, for Best Jazz Vocal Album, on January 31, 2010. The Gate (2011), produced by Don Was, and 1619 Broadway: The Brill Building Project (2012) were both nominated in the same category. Elling and his family had moved to New York in 2008. In November 2013 he and Hobgood ended their long partnership; after a rotating series of pianists, Gary Versace became his first-call pianist in October 2015 and Stu Mindeman took over the piano chair in August 2016.

Passion World (Concord, 2015) gathered songs from around the world, with guests including accordionist Richard Galliano, trumpeter Till Brönner and the trumpeter Arturo Sandoval. In December 2015 he recorded Upward Spiral with the Branford Marsalis Quartet in New Orleans (released June 10, 2016); it was nominated for the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and he toured with the group. Two albums for Okeh followed, the holiday set The Beautiful Day (2016) and The Questions (2018), which Marsalis co-produced and played on for three songs. Secrets Are the Best Stories (Edition Records, April 3, 2020), made with pianist Danilo Pérez, put new lyrics to music by Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Vince Mendoza and Pérez himself, and won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 63rd ceremony on March 14, 2021, his second win. Elling had returned to Chicago in 2020 after twelve years in New York, according to a Chicago Tribune interview published on his website.

Since then he has kept several projects running side by side. SuperBlue (October 8, 2021) was the first of a series of electric, groove-driven records with guitarist Charlie Hunter, keyboardist DJ Harrison and drummer Corey Fonville, continued by The Iridescent Spree (2023), Guilty Pleasures (2023) and Guilty Pleasures, Vol. 2 (2025). Between 2024 and 2025 he released the Wildflowers series of duo albums with pianists Sullivan Fortner, Joey Calderazzo and Christian Sands; his website lists the first volume as a Grammy nominee. In September 2025 he made his Broadway debut as Hermes in Hadestown. In the Brass Palace, recorded with the WDR Big Band and conducted by Bob Mintzer, came out on February 13, 2026, and an album with the Yellowjackets, Play Weather Report: Alive in Europe, followed on August 28, 2026. He has been nominated for seventeen Grammy Awards in all.

Elling is a baritone with a four-octave range, and he is above all a writer of vocalese, setting his own words to improvised solos and to existing jazz compositions; three editions of his collected lyrics have been published (2007, 2012 and 2020). Poetry runs through the records: Rilke and Kenneth Rexroth on Close Your Eyes, Rumi, Sara Teasdale and Wallace Stevens on The Questions, Franz Wright, Robert Bly and Toni Morrison on Secrets Are the Best Stories. His models were Mark Murphy, Jon Hendricks (whose vocalese tradition he extended), Chet Baker and the Beat poets, and the clarinetist Artie Shaw called him one of the most interesting and innovative jazz singers in years. Reviewers of the debut heard a singer who pushed the vocal-jazz form toward beat poetry and theatrical monologue, and reviewers of Gregory Porter have set that singer's technique beside Elling's. His working method has stayed close to the bandstand: Chicago saxophonists such as Von Freeman, Eddie Johnson and Edward Petersen shaped him, and the Hobgood quartet, then the Mindeman-era band, toured the world for years. The Subgenres above are the nearest standard jazz categories; his records also range into pop songwriting (1619 Broadway), world music (Passion World) and electric groove (SuperBlue), which is why the prose carries more of the description than the tags can.