Tierney Sutton was born June 28, 1963, in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She entered Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, intending to major in Russian language and literature, with no particular plan to sing jazz for a living. Two things changed that. While waitressing at the Heidel House Resort in Green Lake, Wisconsin, she met jazz pianist and vocalist Mary Jaye, an early exposure to the music outside a classroom. Then, on campus, she caught concerts by Betty Carter and Jimmy Heath — performances that, by her own account and Wesleyan's, reoriented her entirely toward jazz and toward singers like Sarah Vaughan alongside instrumentalists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Bill Barron, the jazz saxophonist and composer who then headed Wesleyan's music department, became an early mentor and encouraged her to pursue singing seriously. She graduated in 1986 with her Russian degree intact, then went on to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied under saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi.

In 1994, Sutton moved to Los Angeles and formed the Tierney Sutton Band with pianist Christian Jacob, bassist Trey Henry, and drummer Ray Brinker (bassist Kevin Axt joined the fold not long after, giving the band its now-familiar two-bassist rotation). The unit has stayed remarkably intact for three decades and is structured unlike almost any other vocal-jazz act: it is legally incorporated, and Sutton has described its arranging process as consultative rather than top-down, crediting the approach in part to her Baha'i faith (she has been a Baha'i since 1981) and its emphasis on collective decision-making. The band tours worldwide and has headlined Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Sutton's debut, Introducing Tierney Sutton, appeared in 1997 (Discogs dates the release to 1997; her own site lists it under 1999, and some retailers file it as 1998 — the recording sessions themselves date to August 1995 and April 1996). The following year she entered the 1998 Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Vocals Competition in Washington, D.C., and finished runner-up to the late Teri Thornton in a field that also included Roberta Gambarini and Jane Monheit — both of whom went on to major careers of their own, which gives some sense of the caliber of that particular competition year. Sutton signed with Telarc and released a run of increasingly acclaimed albums: Unsung Heroes (2000), Blue in Green (2001, built around Bill Evans's music and generally considered her commercial and critical breakthrough), Something Cool (2002, her third album in three years, a set of standards rather than a strict tribute despite the June Christy-associated title), Dancing in the Dark (2004, a best-selling Sinatra-associated ballads collection), and I'm with the Band (2006, released August 2005, a live document recorded at Birdland in New York).

Starting with 2007's On the Other Side — billed to the Tierney Sutton Band rather than to Sutton alone, and reportedly built around the concept of happiness — the band settled into the thematic, concept-driven album format that defines the bulk of its catalog. Desire (2009) took materialism as its subject, framing eleven mostly-standard tracks with texts drawn from sacred and spiritual sources. American Road (2011) explored American identity through folk and musical-theater repertoire and earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) — a category the Tierney Sutton Band has been credited as the only vocal-jazz band ever nominated in, a reflection of how central the collective arranging process is to the group's identity. In 2016 the band recorded music for Clint Eastwood's film Sully (music by Christian Jacob, performed by Sutton and the band; Eastwood has called Sutton his favorite singer), the same year it released The Sting Variations, a full album of Sting's songbook radically rearranged in jazz settings, which drew a Grammy nomination of its own. ScreenPlay (2019) — issued first as five sequential digital "Act" EPs before being compiled into the full album — turned the band's arranging lens on movie standards, from Breakfast at Tiffany's to The Wizard of Oz.

Not every project has run through the full band. After Blue (2013), a Joni Mitchell tribute timed to Mitchell's 70th birthday, was Sutton's first album without her regular rhythm section: instead she worked with the Turtle Island Quartet, flutist Hubert Laws, guitarist Serge Merlaud, and drummers Peter Erskine and Ralph Humphrey, with a guest vocal from Al Jarreau. Paris Sessions (2014) paired her intimately with Merlaud, a classically trained Parisian guitarist-arranger; the chemistry proved personal as well as musical; the two married in late 2019, with ceremonies in both Paris and Los Angeles. They returned to that format on Paris Sessions 2 (2022, dedicated to the late lyricist Marilyn Bergman), again joined by bassist Kevin Axt and a remote contribution from Hubert Laws.

Sutton's most recent work has pushed further into original songwriting and cross-genre collaboration. Good People (2024), credited to Tierney Sutton and the San Gabriel Seven, is by some distance her most pointed record: the title track and its accompanying video confront redlining, the racially unequal administration of the postwar G.I. Bill, and the violent destruction of prosperous Black communities in American history, set against expanded horn arrangements. Talking to the Sun (2025), billed as "Tierney Sutton meets Charlier/Sourisse," teamed her with French drummer André Charlier and pianist/organist Benoît Sourisse (with Merlaud again on guitar) for a set blending Brazilian and French influences, and features some of Sutton's most substantial work as a lyricist to date. Spring (2026), a duo recording with pianist Tamir Hendelman drawn from a 2025 tour, is by the count on her own website Sutton's seventeenth album as a leader or co-leader — her first full duo project.

Across a recording career now approaching three decades, Sutton has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards without a win: eight nominations for Best Jazz Vocal Album spanning releases from the mid-2000s through ScreenPlay (2019), plus the American Road arranging nomination. Alongside performing, she taught for more than a decade on the jazz faculty at USC's Thornton School of Music and later spent six years as Vocal Department Head at the Los Angeles College of Music in Pasadena, where her students included singers Gretchen Parlato and Sara Gazarek.

Sutton's musical language was set early by Betty Carter, whose harmonically adventurous, rhythmically elastic approach to standards Sutton encountered live as an undergraduate, and by singers and instrumentalists she cites from the same period of discovery — Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. What she built from those influences, with the Tierney Sutton Band, is less a vocal-plus-rhythm-section format than a genuine collective: the band deconstructs a given standard down to melody and lyric and rebuilds the arrangement — tempo, harmony, form, sometimes even the words — through group consultation rather than a chart handed down from a leader, a process Sutton has connected explicitly to her Baha'i faith. That method, combined with her habit of organizing entire albums around a single unifying theme (happiness, materialism, American identity, a single songwriter's catalog) rather than assembling loose collections of favorites, is what critics and the Recording Academy alike have kept returning to: a "Best Jazz Vocal Album" nomination for nearly every record she released across more than a decade. In the 2020s that same instinct has turned toward writing — first with Good People's pointed original lyrics on American racial history, then with Talking to the Sun — pushing Sutton from song interpreter toward songwriter without abandoning the collaborative arranging DNA that has defined her band since 1994.