Lex Korten was born in 1994 and grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in a household where his parents' eclectic record collection — Thomas Dolby, XTC, King Crimson, David Byrne, Prince — sat alongside jazz. His piano teacher was the other jazz enthusiast in his orbit, and it was through that teacher that a twelve-year-old Korten first encountered Jaki Byard, borrowing a copy of Byard's Blues for Smoke that, by his own account, has "kept him company" ever since. Duke Ellington became a similarly formative discovery around the same period — Korten wrote school reports on both Ellington and Thelonious Monk — and Brad Mehldau's records were another early excitement. He studied with several decorated pianists through his teenage years and picked up modest accolades on the national high school competition circuit.

At eighteen, Korten left New York for Ann Arbor to study at the University of Michigan, initially under pianist and composer Geri Allen. Allen's departure from the faculty redirected his mentorship toward Benny Green, with Robert Hurst and Rodney Whitaker — both major figures of the Detroit jazz lineage who were then on Michigan's faculty — and intermittent guidance from trumpeter Marcus Belgrave rounding out roughly four years of apprenticeship inside that Detroit-rooted tradition. He has spoken about a late visit to Allen's office as she cleared it out after a decade of teaching there, a conversation about loss and community in the jazz world that he counts among his most meaningful memories from that period. He completed his BFA at Michigan before returning to New York.

His professional breakthrough came in 2018, when he was appointed to the piano chair of Tyshawn Sorey's newly formed sextet, "Unfiltered.," alongside vibraphonist Sasha Berliner, saxophonists Nathan Reising and Morgan Guerin, and bassist Nick Dunston. The band toured and recorded intermittently over the following four years; its sole release, the two-hour, three-part digital suite Unfiltered ., was recorded at Firehouse 12 Studios in New Haven in November 2019 and self-released in March 2020. Korten had already spent time in South Africa by then: in January 2016 he performed at the 13th UNISA International Piano Competition in Pretoria, a set later issued as the free digital download Live In South Africa. He returned in January 2020, at twenty-five, and won first prize outright in the jazz division of the 14th UNISA International Piano Competition, performing the final round alongside South African rhythm players Marc Duby (bass) and Kevin Gibson (drums). He documented that competition trip the following year with Foreword, a self-released, twelve-track solo live recording he described as a simple introduction of himself to the wider world as a pianist.

Korten's first appearance on record as a bandleader in the conventional sense was actually a co-led date: A Way Out, released in February 2021 on bassist Massimo Biolcati's Sounderscore Records and billed collectively to the quartet's four surnames — Eshed, Korten, Biolcati, Kim. Recorded in 2019 at East Side Sound in New York with guitarist Yoav Eshed and drummer Jongkuk Kim, it is a genuine co-led group record rather than a Korten leader album, though Discogs and Spotify both credit him on every track. Through the pandemic years and after, Korten built one of the most active sideman careers of his generation, working as pianist for bandleaders including Joel Ross, Melissa Aldana, Mike Moreno, Jaleel Shaw, Robert Hurst, Ari Hoenig, Caroline Davis, Dayna Stephens, and Clarence Penn, and appearing on a run of recorded dates that includes Linda Sikhakhane's An Open Dialogue (2020), Ben Tiberio's Rare Peace (2021), Biolcati's own Momenta (2021), Karl Henrik Ousback's Confluence (2023), Hannah Marks's Outsider, Outlier (2023), Alfredo Colón's Blood Burden (2024), Simon Moullier's Elements of Light (2024), and, in 2025 alone, Alex Hitchcock's Letters From Afar, Sasha Berliner's Fantome, and Zoh Amba's Sun, plus a composing credit on Nicole Glover's Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He also returned to the Sorey fold on the two-disc Members… Don't! (Pi Recordings), recorded in June 2025 and released in May 2026.

Korten stepped out as leader of his own working ensemble for the first time only in 2025, with Canopy (Sounderscore Records, released September 19, 2025). Recorded at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn in April 2024 and produced by Lee Meadvin and Korten with Eliana Fishbeyn, the album pairs Korten's piano and Fender Rhodes with vocalist Claire Dickson, alto saxophonist David Leon, guitarist Tal Yahalom, and drummer Stephen Boegehold — a bassless quintet built, by his own description, out of a years-long search for a way to draw on his trove of sideman experience. He wrote much of the material away from the instrument, on subway rides and in unfamiliar rooms, working under self-imposed compositional constraints, and closed the album's extended edition with a cover of Thomas Dolby's "Mulu the Rain Forest" — a nod back to the record collection that started it all. Canopy drew widespread critical acclaim on release, landing on year-end best-of lists at The Wire, WNYC, PopMatters, JazzTimes, and DownBeat, and Korten was subsequently ranked in DownBeat's Rising Star poll for piano.

Korten continues to lead the Canopy quintet alongside a separate quartet featuring alto saxophonist Nicola Caminiti, bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Miguel Russell, performing regularly at New York rooms including The Jazz Gallery, Smalls, Mezzrow, The Django, and Lincoln Center, and teaching privately and through The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Two further singles, "Stuck" and "when is it ever really smp / smp 4 me," appeared in 2026, suggesting new material is already in progress. His public profile has grown accordingly: he has been written up in Vogue and The New York Times, and outlets from DownBeat to The Wire have singled him out for what one reviewer called a "charismatic, vulnerable" improvisatory approach — a description that, as much as any single record, captures why he has become one of the most closely watched pianists of his generation.

Korten's playing draws on two lineages that rarely overlap this cleanly: the Detroit-rooted mainstream tradition he absorbed at the University of Michigan under Geri Allen, Robert Hurst, Benny Green, and Rodney Whitaker, and a set of formative non-jazz and left-field touchstones — Thomas Dolby's art-pop, King Crimson and XTC from his parents' shelves, Jaki Byard's genre-scrambling pianism, Weather Report's group-composition instincts, and Butch Morris's conduction system — that push his own writing away from conventional song form. He has also named vocalists Betty Carter and Jeanne Lee as key influences on how he pairs voice with ensemble, a thread that runs directly through Canopy's use of Claire Dickson's largely wordless vocals as another instrumental voice rather than a lead melody. Reviewers describe Canopy's sound as sitting at the intersection of exploratory jazz, chamber jazz, ambient music, and alternative rock, drawing comparisons to Mary Halvorson, Donny McCaslin, Nels Cline, and Patricia Brennan — artists similarly uninterested in jazz as a fixed genre. The result, in one reviewer's words, is a debut that "doesn't sound like the bands he has been playing in," built through self-imposed compositional constraints (writing away from the piano, on the subway, in unfamiliar spaces) and abstract, seasonally-imaged song titles that work impressionistically rather than narratively.