Till Brönner was born May 6, 1971, in Viersen, West Germany. His parents taught at a German school in Rome, and the family lived there for five years during his early childhood before returning to Germany. He discovered the music of Charlie Parker at thirteen, took his Abitur in 1990 at the Aloisiuskolleg in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, and enrolled to study jazz trumpet at the Hochschule für Musik Köln, where his principal teachers were Malte Burba and the American jazz trumpeter Bobby Shew. After three semesters he turned professional, joining the RIAS Tanzorchester (soon renamed the RIAS Big Band) in Berlin in 1991 as its featured soloist under conductor Horst Jankowski.

In 1993 Brönner released his debut album, Generations of Jazz, a hard bop-rooted session recorded with bassist Ray Brown, drummer Jeff Hamilton, pianist Frank Chastenier, and saxophonist Grégoire Peters. It won both the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik and the Preis der Deutschen Plattenindustrie. He followed it with My Secret Love (1995) and German Songs (1996), the latter arranging classic German film themes for a jazz quartet, featuring bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Jorge Rossy, set against the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. The same year's Midnight pushed toward jazz-funk, built around a rhythm section of Dennis Chambers and Anthony Jackson and featuring an extended tenor saxophone appearance by Michael Brecker.

Love (1998) marked Brönner's first release for Verve and his debut as a vocalist. Two years later, Chattin' With Chet (2000) paid direct tribute to Chet Baker, cementing a comparison to the American trumpeter and singer that has followed Brönner's career since. He scored the 2001 documentary Jazz Seen, about photographer William Claxton, then teamed with Japanese producer Samon Kawamura on the electronica-inflected Blue Eyed Soul (2002), which also featured vocalist Mark Murphy. A 2003 tour with soul singer Joy Denalane preceded his commercial breakthrough, That Summer (2004), which reached number 16 on the German pop albums chart and made him, by multiple accounts, the best-selling jazz artist in German recording history. The same year he scored Pepe Danquart's cycling documentary Höllentour.

Brönner's mid-2000s work kept mixing jazz credibility with crossover ambition. Oceana (2006), produced by Larry Klein, brought in guest vocalists including Madeleine Peyroux and Carla Bruni. In 2007 he produced and played trumpet on bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff's jazz album Watch What Happens, which won a European Echo Award, and released his own The Christmas Album. Rio (2008) was an all-star bossa nova tribute featuring Kurt Elling, Melody Gardot, Sergio Mendes, Milton Nascimento, and Annie Lennox. In 2009 Brönner earned his sole Grammy nomination, for Best Jazz Performance, for his flugelhorn solo on "Seven Steps to Heaven," a Miles Davis arrangement on Take 6's album The Standard featuring Al Jarreau and Jon Hendricks. That same year he was named professor of jazz trumpet at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, a chair he has held since the 2009-10 winter semester.

Alongside recording, Brönner built a public media profile in Germany: he hosted and performed in the Talkin' Jazz concert-interview series at the Bonn Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle from 2004 to 2010, and served as a judge and mentor on the RTL/VOX talent show X Factor in 2010 and 2011, winning both seasons with his own contestants before stepping back to focus on music. He began a parallel career in photography in 2010, publishing the portrait collection Faces of Talent (2014) and later exhibiting the Ruhr-region project "Melting Pott" at Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg (2019). In April 2016 he was the only jazz musician from the German-speaking world invited by President Barack Obama to the White House to perform in the all-star ensemble marking UNESCO's International Jazz Day, appearing alongside Herbie Hancock, Sting, Aretha Franklin, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Marcus Miller, and Dianne Reeves. The following month he ended a fifteen-year relationship with Universal to sign with Sony Masterworks.

Brönner's more recent recordings have leaned back toward straight-ahead settings: The Good Life (2016) paired him with John Clayton, Jeff Hamilton, and Larry Goldings; Nightfall (2018), an intimate duo album with bassist Dieter Ilg, went platinum in Germany; and On Vacation (2020) was made with Bob James. He also guested on drummer Günter "Baby" Sommer's Baby's Party (2018) for the Swiss free-jazz label Intakt. He was awarded the Verdienstorden des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2019, publicly campaigned against COVID-19 lockdown restrictions on German cultural institutions in 2020 and 2021, and continues to record and tour. He had guested as a vocalist and trumpeter on two albums by Italian producer/guitarist Nicola Conte, Other Directions (2004) and Rituals (2008), before Conte in turn produced Brönner's own most recent studio album, Italia (2025). He lives in Potsdam, has kept a second home in Los Angeles since 2013, and has a son and a daughter.

Brönner's playing and singing draw explicitly on Chet Baker's cool, vocal-toned trumpet lyricism, a debt he made literal with an entire tribute album and that critics and fans shorthand as "the German Chet Baker." AllMusic describes him as "a hugely popular and acclaimed German trumpeter/vocalist known for balancing the jazz tradition with contemporary sounds," and that balancing act defines his catalog: hard bop and cool jazz session work sits alongside orchestral pop, bossa nova, Christmas albums, and vocal standards, often produced with the same polish as mainstream pop records. That crossover instinct made him Germany's best-selling jazz artist and a fixture of national television, while his teaching post in Dresden, his 2009 Grammy nomination, and his place in the 2016 White House UNESCO Jazz Day ensemble reflect standing within the jazz world itself, not just commercial success outside it.