Martin Taylor was born on October 20, 1956, in Harlow, Essex, into a musical family with a Gypsy tradition. His father, the jazz bassist William "Buck" Taylor, who had only taken up music at the age of 30, gave him his first guitar when he was four and played him records by the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which made Django Reinhardt his first model. By eight he was playing in his father's band, and at 15 he left school to become a professional, joining the Oo-yah Band led by the drummer Lennie Hastings, who had played with Alex Welsh. At 17 he took a job in the band on the ocean liner QE2, which was based in New York.

Back in Britain he worked dates in and around London, where he met the guitarist Ike Isaacs, who became his mentor and worked with him as a duo, and who helped him develop his jazz harmony and fingerstyle technique. He made his first recording in 1978 with the bassist Peter Ind, and his earliest records under his own name followed, Taylor Made (1979) and Triple Libra (1981). Isaacs introduced him to Stéphane Grappelli, the violinist who had co-founded the Hot Club quintet with Reinhardt. When a member of Grappelli's group was injured, Taylor was asked to play a few European dates, and he was then invited to join full time. He stayed from 1979 to 1990, filling the guitar chair once held by his idol Reinhardt, touring North America regularly and recording more than twenty albums with the violinist; Together at Last (1987), made with the fiddler Vassar Clements, was nominated for a Grammy Award. Alongside the Grappelli work he recorded his own Skye Boat for Concord Jazz (1982) and a series of British dates with the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco (from 1984) and the tenor saxophonist Spike Robinson.

To avoid depending on other musicians for his income, Taylor began performing as a solo act, and after a few years he stopped touring with Grappelli. He moved to Scotland, where a recording contract with Linn Records, a maker of high-end audio equipment that found his clear, intimate sound a good test of its systems, let him concentrate on his own career. Linn issued the solo and quartet albums Don't Fret! (1990) and Change of Heart (1991), then Artistry (1992), produced by the guitarist Steve Howe, which launched his international solo career, and Portraits (1996), a collaboration with Chet Atkins. In 1991 a solo spot on the Australian television show Hey Hey It's Saturday led the guitarist Tommy Emmanuel to contact him, and the two became friends and frequent collaborators; their duo album The Colonel & The Governor appeared in 2013. In 1994 he formed Spirit of Django, a group inspired by Reinhardt and the Hot Club, which recorded for Linn and won the Best Small Group award at the 1997 British Jazz Awards. In 2012 he and the trumpeter Guy Barker played their Spirit of Django orchestral suite at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall.

At the end of the 1990s Taylor signed with Sony, which released Kiss and Tell (1999) and Nitelife (2001), and he then recorded for P3 Music, whose catalog includes Solo (2002) and The Valley (2004), the latter with guest appearances by the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and the singer Sacha Distel. He has made duo and ensemble records with the mandolinist David Grisman, the guitarists Steve Howe and Gordon Giltrap, the saxophonist Alan Barnes, and the singer Alison Burns, with whom he made 1:AM (2008), I'll Be Home for Christmas (2014) and Songs for Nature (2024), the last released on P3 Music in June 2024 with a UK and US tour. Beyond jazz he has appeared on records by Yehudi Menuhin, Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings, Karl Jenkins's Adiemus project and Prefab Sprout. In 2010 he launched an online guitar academy, he also hosts guitar retreats, and he has written an autobiography, Martin Taylor: Autobiography of a Travelling Musician. In February 2026 The Guitar Label released his solo album Standards, Vol. 1, and he toured the UK and Ireland that year with a solo show, Standards, built on Great American Songbook arrangements.

Taylor was appointed MBE in 2002 for services to music. He received honorary doctorates from the University of the West of Scotland (1999) and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2010), the BBC Radio 2 Heart of Jazz Award (2007) and a record 14 British Jazz Awards as a guitarist, and he was given the Freedom of the City of London in 1998.

Taylor is best known for solo fingerstyle playing in which a single guitar supplies the melody, the chords and a walking bass at once, with syncopated chordal stabs standing in for a horn section and fuller harmony than most guitarists attempt alone. His earliest influence was Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club, and other formative figures were his mentor Ike Isaacs, Ted Greene, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass; he has said he relates more to pianists than to guitarists, above all Art Tatum, whose music he honored on his album A Tribute to Art Tatum. His set lists mix Great American Songbook standards with his own pieces, and his arrangements borrow from the writing of Nelson Riddle and Duke Ellington. He considers melody the most important part of an arrangement. His years with Stéphane Grappelli gave him a thorough grounding in the swing and Hot Club repertoire, which he returned to with Spirit of Django, and he has also worked with other guitar masters of the previous generation, among them Tal Farlow, Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis. Pat Metheny and Jeff Beck have both praised his solo playing publicly.