André Hodeir was a Paris-born violinist, composer, arranger and critic who spent his career trying to make written jazz and improvised jazz work as one thing. He was born on January 22, 1921, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, trained as a classical violinist and composer at the Conservatoire de Paris, and studied analysis in Olivier Messiaen's class. He left with three first prizes, in fugue, harmony and music history. While still a student he found jazz, and the questions it raised about musical form stayed with him for the rest of his life.

In the 1940s he played violin on the Paris jazz scene under the name Claude Laurence, and Discogs lists two Swing label records by Claude Laurence et son orchestre from 1942 and 1943. He also wrote about the music: he contributed to the Bulletin du Hot Club de France from 1945, the year his first book, Le Jazz, cet inconnu, appeared with a preface by Charles Delaunay, and he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Jazz Hot from 1947 to 1951. Introduction à la musique de jazz followed in 1948, and Hommes et problèmes du jazz (Flammarion, 1954) was published in the United States in 1956 as Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence. A second collection, Toward Jazz, appeared in 1961. The University of Michigan Press gathered his English-language jazz writing in The André Hodeir Jazz Reader in 2006.

His own composing found its vehicle in 1954, when he founded the Jazz Groupe de Paris, a small band of Paris-based players that included the tenor saxophonist and flautist Bobby Jaspar, the bassist Pierre Michelot and the trombonist Nat Peck. Hodeir wrote its repertoire, a series of pieces he called Essais (essays, in the sense of trials), and the first of them were recorded in Paris on December 13, 1954. A second set of sessions followed on June 26 and 27 and July 2, 1956, with the trumpeter Roger Guérin in the group among others. The band lasted around fifteen years but made very few records.

In March 1957, at the invitation of Savoy's Ozzie Cadena, Hodeir took the Essais to New Jersey and recorded them with American players: Donald Byrd and Idrees Sulieman on trumpets, Frank Rehak on trombone, Hal McKusick and Jay Cameron on reeds, Bobby Jaspar on tenor saxophone and flute, Eddie Costa on vibraphone, George Duvivier on bass and Bobby Donaldson on drums, with Annie Ross singing wordless obbligato on "The Alphabet". That October he conducted his Jazz Group de Paris at the Donaueschingen Music Days in West Germany, on a bill shared with Eddie Sauter's big band and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

In these same years he was also a busy film composer, often working with the guitarist Henri Crolla, on scores that included Une Parisienne (1957), Les Tripes au soleil (1959) and Saint-Tropez Blues (1961), and he built concert works out of some of the film music. The Fontana album Jazz et Jazz (1960) gathered new pieces including Jazz Cantata and Le Palais idéal. In June 1966 he recorded Anna Livia Plurabelle, a large jazz cantata on the Anna Livia Plurabelle episode of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, for two women's voices and a jazz orchestra, and in 1972 he wrote Bitter Ending for the Swingle Singers and a jazz quintet. Martial Solal and his orchestra recorded a program of Hodeir's music in 1984, and in 1993 Patrice Caratini conducted a new recording of Anna Livia Plurabelle for Label Bleu.

By the 1980s he had largely given up composing and turned to literature, publishing the novels Play-back (1983) and Musikant (1987), children's books and two collections of short stories. He passed away in Versailles on November 1, 2011, at the age of 90. Pierre Fargeton's study André Hodeir : le jazz et son double (2016) won the Académie du Jazz's book prize in 2017.

Hodeir wrote jazz that was meticulously scored but built to leave room for improvisation, and he was one of the first to treat the problem as a matter of composition rather than arrangement. His pieces lean on counterpoint, shifting textures and small, carefully weighted ensembles, with melodic lines that often grow out of a few notes. In Les Mondes du jazz (1970) he set out twelve principles for the jazz composer through the invented figure of a Finnish composer named Matti Jarvinen, among them that a composer should write what the player can actually play and that if ten instruments are enough, using twelve is a professional fault. His long-form works, the cantata Anna Livia Plurabelle above all, belong to what critics have called Third Stream music, and his writing on the form shaped how French audiences thought about jazz after the war. AllMusic judges his composing and arranging gifts evident while noting that the Third Stream pieces are not easy listening; the pianist and composer John Lewis, quoted in a 1957 Down Beat piece, credited him with giving other musicians ideas and directions to follow. A reviewer of the 1956 Jazz Groupe de Paris reissue singled out his horn writing and distinctive voice.