Wallace Roney was born May 25, 1960, in Philadelphia, the grandson of Philadelphia musician Roosevelt Sherman and the older brother of saxophonist Antoine Roney, who would go on to play in Wallace's own bands for most of both their careers. Roney was identified as having perfect pitch at around age four, and his father set him transcribing the solos of Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie while he was still a child. He began formal trumpet study at Philadelphia's Settlement School of Music, studying for three years with Sigmund Hering of the Philadelphia Orchestra, then continued at Washington, D.C.'s Duke Ellington School of the Arts under Langston Fitzgerald of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He made his recording debut at fifteen, went on to study at both Howard University and the Berklee College of Music, and by nineteen and twenty had already won DownBeat's award for Best Young Jazz Musician of the Year in both 1979 and 1980 — an early signal of a player being talked about well before he had a record of his own.

The relationship that would define Roney's career began almost by accident. In 1983, at a tribute concert to Miles Davis at the Bottom Line in Manhattan, Roney met his idol in person; the story, retold in nearly every account of his life, has Davis asking what horn the young trumpeter played, and on learning Roney didn't own a good one, handing him one of his own. From 1985 until Davis's death in 1991, Roney studied directly with him — a relationship close enough, and rare enough, that Roney is generally described as the only trumpeter Miles Davis personally mentored. It shaped everything that followed: critics and Davis's own surviving bandmates alike came to regard Roney as heir to Davis's modal vocabulary, even as his own playing kept traces of Clifford Brown and Woody Shaw underneath.

The mentorship ran alongside real bandstand apprenticeships. In 1986, Roney succeeded Terence Blanchard in the trumpet chair of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers — whose own long run under Blakey is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — with Kenny Garrett joining on alto around the same time. From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s he was also the front-line trumpeter in drummer Tony Williams's quintet, appearing on a run of Williams's albums for Blue Note that stretched from Foreign Intrigue (1985) through Tokyo Live (1993); that partnership, too, is covered in full in Tony Williams's JazzProfiles.com profile. Roney's own leader debut, Verses, arrived on Muse Records in 1987, cut at Rudy Van Gelder's storied Englewood Cliffs studio with a band built around pianist Mulgrew Miller; it was the first entry in a run of Muse albums — Intuition (1988), Brilliant Corners (1989), The Standard Bearer (1990), Obsession (1991), Seth Air (1991, the first to feature Antoine Roney), and Munchin' and Crunchin' (both 1993) — that established him as a serious hard-bop and post-bop leader in his own right, distinct from his role as Davis's protégé.

The single performance most often singled out from these years came on July 8, 1991, at the Montreux Jazz Festival, where Quincy Jones conducted a recreation of Miles Davis's old collaborations with the late Gil Evans — material from Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain — with the Gil Evans Orchestra and the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band. Davis, whose health was visibly failing, needed help with the more demanding passages of his own old book; Roney and Kenny Garrett were brought in as the featured added soloists, playing Davis's parts alongside Davis himself. It was Roney's only public performance of that material with Davis present, and one of Davis's own last public appearances — he died a little over two months later, in September 1991. The concert was eventually released as Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux (Warner Bros., 1993) and won Davis a Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.

Roney's own catalog moved to Warner Bros. for the rest of the 1990s — Mistérios (1994), arranged with pianist Geri Allen and Gil Goldstein; The Wallace Roney Quintet (1996), produced by Miles Davis's longtime producer Teo Macero; and Village (1997), which brought in Chick Corea as a guest on Fender Rhodes. Roney married Allen in 1995; the couple had two daughters and a son — trumpeter Wallace Roney Jr., a distinct player from his father and today an active presence on the New York jazz scene in his own right — and divorced in 2008, though they went on collaborating on record for years afterward, with Allen appearing as a sideman on several more of Roney's own albums into the 2000s. Also in 1994, Roney joined the surviving members of Davis's celebrated Second Great Quintet — pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams — taking the trumpet chair Davis himself had once occupied on A Tribute to Miles, a live-and-studio recording that won all five musicians the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Individual or Group.

By his 40th birthday in 2000, Roney had appeared on more than 250 recordings as leader and sideman combined. His later career settled at HighNote Records, where he released Prototype (2004), Mystikal (2005), Jazz (2007), the live If Only for One Night (2010), Home (2012), Understanding (2013), and A Place in Time (2016), consistently pairing himself with younger sidemen even as his own reputation solidified as one of the music's living links to Davis. His final studio album, Blue Dawn – Blue Nights (2019), pointedly built its band around musicians decades younger than himself, including his teenage nephew Kojo Odu Roney — Antoine's son — on drums. Roney died March 31, 2020, in Paterson, New Jersey, of complications from COVID-19, at age 59 — one of the first major, widely mourned losses jazz suffered to the pandemic, and a death that came only three years after Geri Allen's own passing in 2017.

Roney's playing carried a warm, often plaintive tone and a lithe, unhurried improvisational style, and critics almost universally reached for the same comparison: heir to Miles Davis's modal legacy, a status cemented not just by reputation but by the literal fact of standing in for Davis, with Davis's blessing, on A Tribute to Miles and at the 1991 Montreux Gil Evans concert. But the foundation under that Davis influence was built earlier and from different material. As a teenager transcribing Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie solos at his father's insistence, and later studying directly with Gillespie, Clark Terry, and Woody Shaw, Roney by his own account was, at seventeen, playing closer to Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, and Freddie Hubbard than to Davis. The turn toward Davis's vocabulary came in his early twenties, and Roney was explicit about tracing his own version of it back through Woody Shaw: "I admired Woody Shaw, who basically came from Freddie Hubbard, who was the first to play those fourths and pentatonics on the trumpet, trying to play like John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy." That lineage — Coltrane and Dolphy's harmonic reach filtered through Hubbard and Shaw, then bent toward Davis's spacing and restraint — is the real anatomy of Roney's sound, even when the shorthand "the only trumpeter Miles Davis mentored" is the label that stuck.