Florent Nisse was born in Colmar, in Alsace, in 1983, and started on the double bass at six. He kept the instrument through school without ever treating it as the only option: in 2002 he moved to Lyon for an engineering course at the INSA, and carried a full conservatory curriculum alongside it. The year 2007 produced three qualifications at once, an engineering diploma from the INSA de Lyon and two Diplômes d'Études Musicales, one in classical double bass and one in jazz double bass. He was by then working steadily on the Lyon jazz scene, and he chose the music over the engineering.

He passed the entrance competition for the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris in 2008 and joined the jazz department run by the Italian bassist Riccardo Del Fra, graduating in 2011. The move to Paris in 2008 also produced the band he has now played in for the longest. The pianist Maxime Sanchez and the saxophonist Adrien Sanchez, twins, had been working as a trio with the drummer Gautier Garrigue since 2005; they entered the CNSMDP jazz class the same year Nisse did, the trio became a quartet, and the quartet was named Flash Pig. It took first prize at the Siófok international jazz competition in Hungary in 2009 and second prize in the group category at the Sunside trophies in 2010, several years before it recorded anything.

His first appearances on record are Lyon dates and Paris sideman work. The pianist David Bressat's trio, with Charles Clayette on drums, put out French Connection in 2008 and has kept Nisse in the bass chair across four further albums, through Alive (2017), True Colors (2019) and the live Constellation (2022). Frédéric Borey's The Option (Fresh Sound New Talent, recorded March 12 to 14, 2012) put him in a Paris quintet with Camelia Ben Naceur and Inbar Fridman. In November 2012 he recorded La Horde with the trumpeter David Enhco, Roberto Negro on piano and Garrigue on drums, a quartet that stayed together for Layers (2014), Horizons (recorded at the Studios de la Buissonne in December 2016) and Family Tree (2022), the last of these adding Enhco's brother Thomas on piano, Michel Portal on bass clarinet and the Quatuor Voce.

The Israeli saxophonist Shauli Einav built a Paris band around Nisse and the pianist Paul Lay in 2013, and the hub of that group is the pairing the two of them make. Nisse plays bass throughout A Truth About Me (Cristal Records CR218, released October 25, 2013), a set of ten Einav originals with Lay, Louis Moutin on drums, Andy Hunter on trombone and Antonin-Tri Hoang adding alto saxophone and bass clarinet on four of the tracks. He returned for Beam Me Up (Berthold Records BHT4730025, released January 19, 2016), recorded at the Studio de Meudon on June 4 and 5, 2015 and billed to the Shauli Einav Quartet: Einav, Lay, Nisse and Garrigue, with Pierre Durand's guitar on one track of seven.

Two albums appeared on the same October 2014 evening at the New Morning in Paris, launching a musicians' label called Nome: Enhco's Layers and Nisse's own Aux Mages, his first record as a leader after a decade of accompanying. It is a quintet with the American tenor saxophonist Chris Cheek, the Danish guitarist Jakob Bro, Maxime Sanchez and Garrigue, seven of its ten pieces written by Nisse and three by Sanchez. The title is a pun, "aux mages" for "hommages," and the three figures being saluted are Paul Motian, Charlie Haden and Bill Frisell. Writing in the Gazette Bleue on November 1, 2014, Dom Imonk singled out the bass solo on "Image F" and placed the playing in Haden's line of descent.

Flash Pig meanwhile turned into a recording band, with Remain Still (Plus Loin Music, cut on January 19, 2013 and issued in 2014), the self-titled Flash Pig (Nome, recorded at the Studio de Meudon in December 2015, with Emile Parisien, Manu Codjia and Pierre de Bethmann guesting), Year of the Pig (2018), Le plus longtemps possible (Astérie, 2022, also filmed at Le Triton and issued on DVD in 2023) and The Mood for Love (Astérie, 2024), a set built on Shigeru Umebayashi's music for the Wong Kar-wai film, for which Guilhem Flouzat wrote the text. The quartet's own account of its sources runs from Keith Jarrett and Paul Motian to Ornette Coleman, and it has played North Sea, Jazz in Marciac and Jazz à la Villette.

The sideman list since then is long and consistently jazz. He is on both albums by Awake, the Cuoq/Jambon quintet, on the first two volumes of Alexandre Herer's Onze Heures Onze Orchestra, on Aksham (Nome, recorded at the Studio de Meudon on September 27 and 28, 2018) with Marc Perrenoud, Enhco, Frédéric Pasqua and the Albanian singer Elina Duni, and on Seamus Blake's Guardians of the Heart Machine (Whirlwind, taped in Paris in November 2017 with Tony Tixier and Garrigue). Ludovic Ernault's quartet used him on Dreamland (2019) and Live (2021); the Belgian saxophonist Toine Thys's band Orlando, with Maxime Sanchez, made Orlando (2020) and Betterlands (2024); Pablo Held brought him to the Loft in Cologne for the concert series collected on Meet Me at the Loft (2022). Flux (June 2022), ten freely improvised pieces recorded at the Studio Eole in a duo with the guitarist Federico Casagrande, is his second record under his own name and his most exposed. Recent work includes Garrigue's La Traversée (PEEWEE!, recorded September 18 to 20, 2023, where Henri Texier takes the bass chair on two pieces), Adrien Sanchez's trio album Titta (2023) and the Maxime Sanchez Trio's Standards, taped at La Scala Provence in January 2024 with Flouzat on drums.

Nisse is a supporting bassist by temperament, and the French critics who have written about him keep reaching for the same vocabulary: restraint, patience, the sound of the wood. Dom Imonk's Gazette Bleue review of Aux Mages described a deep and generous tone, a controlled parsimony and an omnipresence of the wood in the sound, and put him in Charlie Haden's spirit; Denis Dessassis assembled a portrait out of humility, fineness, restraint and melodic suggestion. The models Nisse names for Aux Mages are the same three all the way through, Paul Motian for the drumming, Charlie Haden for the bass and Bill Frisell for a folk-derived openness, and the record's wide, slow-moving forms are audibly built on them rather than on the walking-bass tradition. He also writes: seven of the ten pieces on Aux Mages, one or two tunes on most Flash Pig albums, "Interspiratio" and "Questions Come Next" on Enhco's Horizons, "Angel de la Guarda" on Toine Thys's Orlando, and a setting of an Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem on Aksham. The range across his own two leader dates is the useful measure of him. Aux Mages is composed, quiet and long-lined, with an American saxophonist and a Danish guitarist hired for exactly the colours they bring; Flux is ten wholly improvised duets with a guitarist and no material at all. Flash Pig, the band he has co-led since 2008, sits between the two, taking arranged pop tunes and film themes as seriously as free playing and putting the whole of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love through a jazz quartet.