Erik Truffaz was born on April 3, 1960, in Chêne-Bougeries, in the canton of Geneva, and grew up just across the border in France, in the Pays de Gex. His father, a saxophonist, introduced him to music and led bands in which he played, and he began on trumpet at six in a local brass band, then joined the orchestra of the Collège Voltaire in Geneva. His father steered him toward the conservatoire in Chambéry, where he discovered jazz and blues, and hearing Miles Davis's Kind of Blue at sixteen set him on the path to jazz study. He went on to the Conservatoire de Genève, combining classical training with jazz workshops run by the Association for the Encouragement of Improvised Music.

In the early 1990s he worked with the Lausanne-based group Silent Majority, with the vocalist Nya, drummer Marc Erbetta, bassist Marcello Giuliani, keyboardist Pierre-Luc Vallet and saxophonist Maurice Magnoni; the band won the special jury prize at the Concours national de jazz de la Défense in 1993. His own first album, Niña Valéria (1992, credited to the Erik Truffaz Quintet), came out on the Swiss label Plainisphare with Giuliani, Erbetta, Vallet and Magnoni. After he signed to the French arm of EMI in 1996, Blue Note issued Out of a Dream (1997), recorded with pianist Patrick Muller, Giuliani, Erbetta and the saxophonist Cyril Bugnon. The next two albums made his name: The Dawn (1998), on which Nya sings and raps on six of eight tracks over a drum-and-bass-influenced rhythm section, and Bending New Corners (1999), which went Silver in France and which the Swiss Federal Office of Culture later credited with making him a major figure in recent jazz. The remix album Revisité (2001) gave his pieces to a range of electronic producers, along with the keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft and the musique concrète composer Pierre Henry.

From Mantis (2001) and Saloua (2005) he led a second line-up built around guitarist Manu Codjia, bassist Michel Benita and drummer Philippe Garcia, with the singer and percussionist Mounir Troudi and Nya as guests on Saloua; that album won the audience prize at the 2005 Victoires du jazz. The earlier quartet returned for The Walk of the Giant Turtle (2003), a more rock-leaning record in which Giuliani's bass and Erbetta's drumming come forward. The double live set Face-à-Face (2006, with a DVD) presents the two bands side by side, and Arkhangelsk (2007) mixes pop songs, French chanson and jazz-groove. In 2008 he released the three-part Rendez-vous project, pairing himself with the singer Sly Johnson (Paris), with Indrani Mukherjee, Apurba Mukherjee and pianist Malcolm Braff (Benares) and with the Mexican electronic musician Murcof (Mexico). He also recorded Istanbul Sessions with the saxophonist Ilhan Erşahin (released in Turkey in 2009 and on Nublu in 2010).

In Between (2010) paired Giuliani and Erbetta with the pianist and organist Benoît Corboz and includes a song co-written with Sophie Hunger; the Erik Truffaz Quartet's El Tiempo de la Revolución (2012) credits three songs to the singer Anna Aaron. A second album with Murcof, Being Human Being, followed in 2014. For Doni Doni (2016) the drummer was Arthur Hnatek, and the guests were the Malian singer Rokia Traoré on four tracks and the rapper Oxmo Puccino on one; Lune Rouge (2019) kept the same four-piece format. He also wrote music for films and television and recorded with many singers and songwriters, among them Christophe, Sophie Hunger and Bertrand Cantat.

In 2023 he released two albums on Blue Note with a new band of Giuliani, pianist Alexis Anérilles, guitarist Matthis Pascaud and drummer Raphaël Chassin: Rollin' (April 7), which reworks the mood of classic film music, and Clap! (October 27). That September he received the Swiss Grand Prix Music, presented by the Federal Office of Culture with a prize of CHF 100,000 at a ceremony in Bern on September 8, where he also performed. His most recent album listed on Discogs is What's My Name (October 3, 2025), a collaboration with CORBAAL.

Truffaz plays in a hushed, lyrical manner that critics regularly set beside Miles Davis's, and AllMusic describes him as building on Davis's electric-jazz example; the comparison has sometimes been turned against him as a charge of imitation, but his records are built differently, with drum-and-bass beats, Fender Rhodes, spoken or rapped vocals and, on the remix and electronic projects, other producers' sound design. The Swiss Federal Office of Culture calls him one of the great crossers of musical borders and lists hip-hop, drum'n'bass, pop and electronica alongside jazz in his work, yet the line-up is always a jazz one, a trumpeter fronting a small band that improvises over written themes, and AllMusic lists his genres as jazz and electronic, with fusion, electric jazz, jazz-funk, post-bop and acid jazz as his styles. His long-running partners Giuliani and Erbetta gave the group its grooves, while singers such as Nya, Rokia Traoré and Sophie Hunger, and electronic artists such as Murcof, shaped its colors. His 2023 album Rollin' turned to film music, and a Zurich concert listing for the project names Ennio Morricone, Alain Romans and Nino Rota as touchstones.