Christophe Panzani was born December 23, 1975, in La Tronche, a suburb of Grenoble in France's Isère department, and got a classical grounding on saxophone as a child at a small local music school. Active professionally since 1999, he plays tenor and soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, and concert flute, and works as a composer and arranger across an unusually wide range — funk, Brazilian and African music, hip-hop and electronic production, and straight-ahead and contemporary jazz all sit inside his catalog rather than at its margins. Discogs credits him under artist ID 1108268, with the occasional print-catalog misspelling "Crystophe Panzani" trailing him through some older releases.

His entry point into international jazz came through one of the music's most distinctive bandleaders: since 2002, Panzani has held the tenor saxophone chair in Carla Bley's Big Band, sitting alongside Andy Sheppard, bassist Steve Swallow, and drummer Billy Drummond. The band's 2008 live album Appearing Nightly — recorded over two nights at Paris's New Morning club in July 2006 and released on Bley's own WATT label through ECM — won the Jazz Journalists Association's 2009 Album of the Year, a credential that carried Panzani's name well beyond the Paris scene where he was building his own career.

That Paris scene is where most of his own projects took root. In 2007 he founded Le Pasta Project — a tribute to his own surname and his family's Italian roots — originally with accordionist Vincent Peirani, guitarist Pierre Perchaud, bassist Chris Jennings, and drummer Mathieu Chazarenc; the lineup later shifted to Bruno Schorp on bass and Antoine Paganotti on drums, with Peirani and Perchaud remaining. In 2009 the group collaborated with the Orchestre symphonique Gradus Ad Musicam de Nancy on a new commissioned work premiered at the Salle Poirel, the first of several orchestral and chamber-music partnerships that would recur throughout his career. The project has not, to date, yielded a widely distributed studio album under its own name.

A year after founding Pasta Project, Panzani started The Drops with Italian guitarist Federico Casagrande. Their debut, Falling From the Sky, was recorded in Brooklyn in September 2009 with drummer Ted Poor and released on Hyenas Records in November 2010; the follow-up, Spray (2013, recorded during a tour through Italy and France with drummer Ferenc Nemeth), was well received by French jazz critics, and a 2015 live album at the New Morning in Paris brought in guests Eric Legnini on Fender Rhodes and 20Syl on beats and turntables.

The American side of his career opened up in 2010, when Panzani and New York bassist Keith Witty won matching grants from Chamber Music America and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation to develop a joint project. That became Thiefs, a jazz-hip-hop trio rounded out by drummer/vocalist Guillermo E. Brown; their self-titled debut was recorded in New York in March 2011. Thiefs expanded substantially in 2015 for a commission from the Metz venue BAM called UP-Rooted/Re-Rooted, bringing in MCs Gaël Faye, Edgar Sekloka, and Mike Ladd alongside pianist Aaron Parks; the results were eventually released as Graft (La Greffe) in January 2018 on the Jazz&People label, with Witty producing and Panzani credited on saxophone, woodwinds, electronics, and cover artwork.

Panzani's most personal work as a leader has taken the form of extended duo projects. Les Âmes Perdues (2016, Jazz&People) is a set of seven tenor-and-piano duos, each recorded at a different pianist's home — Yonathan Avishai, Édouard Ferlet, Laia Genc, Leonardo Montana, Tony Paeleman, Guillaume Poncelet, and Dan Tepfer each get one track. He returned to that format with Les Mauvais Tempéraments (Jazz&People, released November 2019), whose title plays on both meanings of "temperament" — mood, and, more literally, historical tuning systems: several tracks are built around the Werckmeister III well temperament rather than modern equal temperament. French radio station FIP named it an Album of the Week, and the record became part of the citation when Panzani shared the Victoires du Jazz "Révélation" (Discovery) prize with pianist Macha Gharibian in 2020 — his most significant individual honor to date.

The 2015-16 season also brought a residency at the Arsenal de Metz alongside the Quatuor Voce string quartet and the wind quintet Arte Combo, built around 20th-century French piano repertoire by Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, and Olivier Messiaen. That collaboration produced Les Correspondances (Outnote Records, October 2020), billed to the Christophe Panzani Quintet with Quatuor Voce and Arte Combo, mixing his own compositions with arrangements of the three composers' piano works; a shorter follow-up with Quatuor Voce, the EP Les neuf mers, appeared on The Drops Music label in December 2024.

Panzani's other working bands read as a map of the Paris "indie-jazz" underground of the 2010s and 2020s. The Watershed — with keyboardist Tony Paeleman, guitarist Pierre Perchaud, and drummer Karl Jannuska — released Inhale/Exhale in January 2016 and gave rise to Shed Music, an artist-run label and collective the four co-founded. Panzani and Paeleman also work as the electronic-leaning duo Dalvaard, whose EP Dreaam / Escaape / Mind Traavel appeared on Shed Music in July 2020. Since 2015 he has also played in RXRA Group, film composer Éric Serra's jazz band, and he has been a member of the hip-hop/funk collective Hocus Pocus, led by 20Syl, since 2008 — a relationship that resurfaced in 2024 on Sula Bassana, a full-length duo album with 20Syl blending jazz woodwinds with electronic production, featuring guest vocals from La Chica and Yaël Naim and pianist Eric Legnini. More recently, the 2023 trio album Free Fall, with bassist Bruno Schorp and drummer Stefano Lucchini, returns to jazz standards — Monk, Joe Henderson, Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Ellington — recorded direct in two days with almost no post-production; his newest release, the 2026 duo record Warp & Weft with drummer Ziv Ravitz, features the Quatuor Kaija string quartet on several tracks.

Beyond his own bands, Panzani remains a frequent sideman across the Paris scene: multiple albums with drummer Anne Paceo (Fables of Schwedagon, Bright Shadows, Circles Live, S.H.A.M.A.N.E.S) and with pianist Florian Pellissier's quintet (from 2012's Le Diable et Son Train through 2025's Pacifiques Biches), plus recordings with Electro Deluxe, Gaël Faye, and Fayçal Salhi's quintet, among others.

Panzani's catalog resists a single genre tag by design: the funk, Brazilian, African, and jazz bands he moved between from childhood show up directly in how differently his projects sound from one another, from Le Pasta Project's Italian-inflected chamber jazz to Thiefs' hip-hop collaborations to Dalvaard's electronic duo work. What holds the catalog together is a recurring pull toward close collaborative pairing over big-band density: the tenor-and-piano duo records (Les Âmes Perdues, Les Mauvais Tempéraments) and the duo album with 20Syl (Sula Bassana) all strip his sound down to a single conversational partner, where the six years he's spent inside Carla Bley's more orchestral writing — precise voicings, dry wit, structural patience — surfaces instead as restraint and space rather than density. Les Mauvais Tempéraments is the clearest evidence of a genuinely idiosyncratic compositional mind: building tracks around a 17th-century well temperament to reframe how "in tune" a saxophone and piano can sound together isn't drawn from any single influence, but from the same instinct, visible across his string-quartet and wind-quintet collaborations (Les Correspondances, Les neuf mers), for bringing 20th-century French concert music — Milhaud, Satie, Messiaen — into direct contact with improvised jazz vocabulary.