Thaddeus Joseph Jones was born March 28, 1923, in Pontiac, Michigan, to Henry and Olivia Jones, in a family of ten that produced three major jazz musicians: Thad, his older brother the pianist Hank Jones, and his younger brother the drummer Elvin Jones. He taught himself the trumpet and was working professionally by sixteen, playing in the Arcadia Club Band and, in 1941, in Connie Connell's group. He served in U.S. Army bands from 1943 to 1946, including a stint connected to the Army's School of Music, then worked with Charles Young's band in the late 1940s and with territory outfits around Des Moines, Iowa, and Oklahoma City. Back in Detroit he led his own quintet and, from 1952 to 1954, held down the bandstand at the Blue Bird Inn, the club where baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams joined him in 1953 and eventually became the group's music director.

Two things happened to Jones in 1954. Charles Mingus put him on his own Debut Records label, cutting The Fabulous Thad Jones at Van Gelder Studio on August 11 with Mingus on bass, Hank Jones on piano, Frank Wess on tenor and flute, and Kenny Clarke on drums. In May of the same year Jones joined the Count Basie Orchestra, where he stayed for nine years. He was the featured soloist on "April in Paris," "Shiny Stockings," and "Corner Pocket," but his more lasting contribution to Basie was written rather than played: close to two dozen arrangements and originals, among them "The Deacon," "H.R.H." (written for the band's command performance in London), and "Counter Block." His hymn-like ballad "To You" was the piece the Basie band played alongside the Duke Ellington orchestra on the only record the two bands made together, and the 1959 album Dance Along with Basie is filled almost entirely with his uncredited charts.

The Basie years overlapped with a run of leader dates that still rank among his best playing. Blue Note recorded him three times: Detroit-New York Junction on March 13, 1956, with Billy Mitchell, Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, Oscar Pettiford and Shadow Wilson; The Magnificent Thad Jones on July 14, 1956, with Barry Harris, Percy Heath and Max Roach; and The Magnificent Thad Jones Volume 3 in 1957. Prestige built two All Stars sessions around him in 1957, Olio (February 16) and After Hours (June 21), both with Frank Wess and Mal Waldron. On March 24, 1958, at Beltone Studios, he recorded Keepin' Up with the Joneses for MetroJazz with Hank on piano, Elvin on drums and the unrelated Eddie Jones on bass, cutting the tune he then called "Three and One." The following year he played cornet on Thelonious Monk's 5 by Monk by 5, alongside Charlie Rouse, Sam Jones and Art Taylor.

Jones left Basie in 1963, worked briefly as a staff arranger at CBS, and settled into freelance work in New York. In 1965 he and drummer Mel Lewis, who had come up through Stan Kenton's band, pulled together an ensemble out of the late-night jam sessions that New York's best studio players were holding among themselves. The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra played its first Monday night at the Village Vanguard on February 7, 1966, a date preserved on the archival release All My Yesterdays (Resonance, 2016), and the Monday residency has continued at the club ever since under successive names. Jones fronted the band for twelve years, writing most of its book, and it became the most decorated big band of the 1970s: DownBeat readers voted it band of the year from 1972 through 1977 and the critics from 1974 through 1978, and Live in Munich, recorded at the Domicile Club on September 9, 1976, won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band. The band toured the Soviet Union in 1972. Dee Dee Bridgewater was its lead vocalist in the early 1970s, Pepper Adams held the baritone chair for the whole of Jones's tenure, and Lew Tabackin passed through its saxophone section. Alongside the orchestra, Jones and Adams co-led a quintet that recorded Mean What You Say in April and May 1966 with Duke Pearson, Ron Carter and Lewis.

His most widely played composition came out of that band. Pianist Roland Hanna had been improvising a tune between sets at the Vanguard over several weeks in 1969; Jones wrote it down, arranged it, and brought it in as "A Child Is Born." Alec Wilder heard the band play it and went back to the Algonquin Hotel to write a lyric for it. The recording appeared on Consummation, cut at A&R Studios in January and May 1970, and the song has been recorded by hundreds of musicians since. Jones also taught at William Paterson College in New Jersey during this period; his manuscript scores are now held there in the Living Jazz Archives.

In January 1979 Jones left New York for Copenhagen without warning his bandmates, married a Danish woman named Lis, and started over. He took over the Danish Radio Big Band, which he had already recorded with live at the Jazzhus Montmartre on March 21 and 22, 1978 for By Jones, I Think We've Got It, and built it into a first-rank orchestra. In July 1979 he formed a second band, Eclipse, whose studio album was cut in Copenhagen on September 17 and 18, 1979 with Horace Parlan, Sahib Shihab, Tim Hagans, Jesper Lundgaard and Ed Thigpen, and on which Jones played valve trombone rather than a brass instrument he could no longer manage: a lip injury had by then cut into his playing, though not his writing. He taught jazz at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and studied composition formally for the first time in his life. In February 1985 he returned to the United States to take over the Count Basie Orchestra, ten months after Basie's death, fronting it on tour and writing arrangements for dates with Caterina Valente and the Manhattan Transfer before ill health forced him to step down in 1986. He went home to Copenhagen for his last months and passed away on August 20, 1986, at Herlev Hospital, aged 63. He is buried in the city's Vestre Kirkegård, and a street in southern Copenhagen, Thad Jones Vej, carries his name.

Jones was an unpredictable soloist inside conventional forms: he built lines out of wide intervals and displaced accents that kept sidestepping the obvious resolution, and he moved between trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn depending on how much weight a line needed, favoring the flugelhorn's rounder sound once he was leading the big band. Trumpeter Scotty Barnhart, who later directed the Basie orchestra, has ranked him among the greatest jazz trumpet soloists of any era. The writing carried the same signature at full-orchestra scale, and it is why the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis book still functions as a standard repertoire for big bands: dense, brass-heavy voicings, unresolved harmonies borrowed from small-group bebop, and section writing that leaves the soloists room rather than boxing them in. Richard Cook and Brian Morton put Consummation in the core collection of the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, calling it "one of the best big-band records of its day." His compositional legacy runs wider than any single record: "A Child Is Born" became a jazz standard, "Three and One," "Little Pixie," "Groove Merchant," "Tiptoe" and "Kids Are Pretty People" remain in circulation, and Tommy Flanagan named Jones alongside Duke Ellington, Monk and Tadd Dameron among the songbooks he most liked to draw on.