Antoine Hervé is a Paris-born pianist, keyboardist, composer and arranger who directed the Orchestre national de jazz from 1987 to 1989, when he was twenty-eight. He was born on January 20, 1959, in Paris, and is the nephew of the composer Daniel Lesur. At the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique he studied piano with Pierre Sancan and composition with Marius Constant, among other teachers, and he also took up classical percussion and conducting; his studies there ran until 1982. Through Serge Lazarévitch he met modern jazz, the electric piano and synthesizers, the Berklee School and the Real Book.

His first record came from a piano and vibraphone duo with Andy Emler, a partnership that began around 1980: Horizons (Philoé Music, recorded in February 1982). In 1983 he formed a thirteen-piece band, later named Bob 13, which played the Paris Jazz Festival and can be heard on Live in Paris (Philoé Music, 1983, from a Radio France recording) and on Tutti, recorded live on April 13, 1985, with the bassist Michel Benita, the drummer André Ceccarelli, the guitarist Marc Ducret and Emler on keyboards. He also formed a trio with Benita and the drummer Peter Gritz, whose first record was made in February 1985. That year the Académie du Jazz gave him its Prix Django Reinhardt; he had also been among the laureates of the Concours national de jazz de La Défense.

In 1987 the Orchestre national de jazz, created the year before under François Jeanneau, passed to Hervé. He gave more than a hundred concerts at its head, with guests including Quincy Jones, Gil Evans, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Toots Thielemans, Peter Erskine, Didier Lockwood and Randy Brecker. The sleeve of ONJ 87 names Bridgewater, Evans, Éric Le Lann and Lockwood as the guests on that record, and the band's second album, African Dream (Label Bleu, 1989), covers the 1988-89 seasons. The orchestra's players included the guitarist Nguyên Lê, the trumpeter Antoine Illouz, the saxophonist and clarinetist Laurent Dehors, the bassist François Moutin and the drummer André Ceccarelli. In the same years he wrote for choreographers: the ballet Tutti for Philippe Découflé (1988) and Le Melon Royal for Andy De Groat at the Centre Pompidou (1989).

After the orchestra he founded the Hexameron association in 1990 to concentrate on improvisation; its disc Invitent (Erol Records, 1990) puts Hervé on keyboards with the pianist Patrick Scheyder, the clarinetist Louis Sclavis, the trombonist Vinko Globokar and the composer György Kurtág on synthesizer. His quintet recorded Paris-Zagreb live on April 13, 1991, with the Bulgarian singer Yildiz Ibrahimova and Dehors, and made Now! (Hexameron and Virgin, 1993). In 1995 he recorded Fluide (Label Bleu) in a trio with the Moutin brothers, the bassist François and the drummer Louis Moutin, a group that went on to record Summertime (made in March 1999, issued by Nocturne in 2002) and Cornerstone (Atelier Sawano, 2001). With the German trumpeter Markus Stockhausen he led a quintet whose live recording of November 1997 at the Duc des Lombards in Paris, first issued as Instantanés, appeared on Enja in 2001 as Invention Is You. Alongside the jazz groups he wrote for the stage and the concert hall: L'Opéra des Pékins (1992); Concerto da Camera for jazz quintet and string quartet, premiered at Radio France in 1994; Transit, a homage to Frank Zappa commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain (1994); a trumpet concerto written as a homage to Miles Davis; the score for Éric Rochant's film Un monde sans pitié; and Mozart, la nuit (1997), a staging by Laurent Pelly with 120 singers and a jazz quartet that became a record.

In 2002 the Cité de la musique commissioned Absolute Dream for a quintet and seventeen strings. The solo piano record Inside followed in 2003. Road Movie (Nocturne, 2006) set his writing for strings, brass, percussion, bombarde and bagpipes beside the saxophonist and clarinetist Michel Portal, Stockhausen and the drummer Ari Hoenig. A solo tribute to Thelonious Monk, I Mean You, was recorded at the Cité de la musique on December 13, 1997, and released in 2010. From 2007 he worked with the pianist Jean-François Zygel on the France 2 television programme La Boîte à Musique, co-produced Le Cabaret de France Musique on France Musique in 2008 and 2009, and recorded the duo album Double Messieurs (Naïve, 2011). His lecture-concert series La Leçon de Jazz, begun in 2007 in Paris and taken to other cities in France and overseas, covers about forty subjects, among them Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Monk, Dave Brubeck, McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett and Wayne Shorter; it has produced DVDs, including a box set on pianists, on his own label, RV Productions.

On the same label he released PMT QuarKtet (2012), a quartet record that joins jazz with acousmatic electronics, made with his wife Véronique Wilmart, the saxophonist Jean-Charles Richard and the drummer Philippe Garcia, and Complètement Stones (2015), a trio tribute to the Rolling Stones recorded in November 2014 with François Moutin and Garcia. He was made an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2019. As of late 2026 his own website sells online piano courses and sheet music, and announces piano jazz workshops and concerts at Ménilles.

Hervé describes himself as a pianist, composer, conductor, producer and publisher who plays and writes mainly jazz and contemporary music, and his path joins a classical conservatoire training to a jazz career. In the trio records with the Moutin brothers he plays standards and tunes by Monk and Miles Davis (Fluide includes "Caravan", "All Blues", "Well You Needn't" and "Rhythm-a-Ning"), and pieces dedicated to Monk and to Gil Evans turn up on Tutti and on a 1989 recording made at L'Usine Éphémère. In his larger works he combines jazz with other forms: a string quartet in Concerto da Camera, Bulgarian and Turkish classical song in Paris-Zagreb, a choir in Mozart, la nuit, electronics in PMT QuarKtet and rock repertoire in Complètement Stones. He treats teaching as part of the work, through La Leçon de Jazz, the DVD sets and his online courses. Citizen Jazz named PMT QuarKtet one of its chosen records, and the Académie du Jazz gave him its top prize for a French musician in 1985.