Bernard Lubat is a French drummer, pianist, singer, vibraphonist, accordionist and percussionist, born on July 12, 1945 in Uzeste, a village in the Gironde in south-west France. He grew up in a musical family (his father played trumpet) and studied at the Bordeaux conservatoire and then at the Paris Conservatoire, which French Wikipedia says he left in 1963 with a first prize in percussion. He turned 81 in July 2026.

His first jazz engagements came in the mid-1960s. He worked with the bandleader Jef Gilson in 1964 and 1965, and Discogs credits him on the Gilson big band's Jef Gilson A Gaveau (1965) and on the Jef Gilson Nonet's New Call From France (1966), where AllMusic lists him on vibraphone and percussion. In 1965 he sang with the vocal group Les Double Six, and in the same years he drummed for the Paris Jazz All Stars, for the trumpeter Roger Guérin and for the Swingle Singers, whose Bach albums such as Jazz Sébastien Bach, Volume 2 (1968) list him on drums. AllMusic also credits him on vibraphone on the recording of André Hodeir's Anna Livia Plurabelle (1966) and on marimba, xylophone and percussion on Brigitte Fontaine's 1968 album. He worked as a session musician, including for Hubert Rostaing, and played behind French variety stars such as Dalida, Charles Aznavour, Claude François, Yves Montand and Sacha Distel.

From 1969 he began a long association with Michel Portal and moved toward freer idioms, while continuing to work in mainstream settings with, among others, Dexter Gordon, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and René Thomas. Stan Getz's Dynasty (Verve, 1971) credits him on drums, and Discogs lists him on live recordings of the Stan Getz Quartet and the Stan Getz-René Thomas Quartet from 1971. He is credited on drums on Martial Solal's Locomotion (1974). In the early 1970s he also led the group on Bernard Lubat and His Mad Ducks (1971) and played with the organist Eddy Louiss and the guitarist Claude Engel in the Lubat, Louiss, Engel Group, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1972. That year he was awarded the Prix Django Reinhardt.

His own records of the 1970s show how wide his range was. For the Paris library label Tele Music he made vibraphone and keyboard sets such as Vibraphone (a 10-inch record dated 1969 on Discogs) and Vibrations, Volume 2 (1975), which Discogs files under jazz and fusion. Café L'Estaminet (Musica, 1976) is a solo record made on July 12 and 13, 1976, on which he plays piano, accordion, synthesizer, clavinet, guitar, bass, drums and percussion himself, and which Discogs classifies as free jazz. Engatsse ! (Marge, 1979), a trio with the saxophonist Hervé Bourde and the bassist Barre Phillips, belongs to the same improvising side of his work. Throughout he accompanied the singer Claude Nougaro, a collaboration French Wikipedia describes as long-running; AllMusic credits him on drums and percussion on Nougaro's Sur scène Olympia 85. It also lists him on vibraphone, as soloist, on Eric Demarsan's music for Jean-Pierre Melville's film Le Cercle rouge (1970).

In 1977 he founded the Uzeste Musical festival in his home village (a date given by French Wikipedia and consistent with the festival's own count of editions), and with it the Compagnie Lubat, a collective that has gone by the names Compagnie Lubat de Gasconha and Compagnie Lubat de Jazzcogne. From the 1980s French Wikipedia has him working with the Gascon thinker Félix Castan and singing in Occitan alongside his jazz work. The company's label, Labeluz, issued Conversatoire (1999, billed as Piano Lubat Solo), Vive l'amusique (2005), Chansons enjazzées (2008) and Poïésiques (2012, with the writer Bernard Manciet), and its Bandcamp page also lists the Compagnie's Scatrap jazzcogne. Other later records include the trio album Vander Michelot Lubat (Owl, 1985) with the pianist Maurice Vander and the bassist Pierre Michelot, a Nougaro tribute, Ô Toulouse... Hommage à Claude (Futur Acoustic, 2004), with Louiss, Vander and Luigi Trussardi, then Improvisions (2015), Intranquille (2016, a duo with the guitarist Sylvain Luc), Impuls (2018, a duo with Louis Sclavis) and Artisticiel (Cyber-improvisations) (2021, with Gérard Assayag and Marc Chemillier). A film of a duo with Martial Solal, In & Out, directed by Thierry Augé, is dated 2014 by French Wikipedia and was issued on DVD.

Lubat has been honoured several times: the Prix Django Reinhardt in 1972, the prize of the Académie Charles-Cros in 1994, the Grand prix de la Sacem in 2004, and a Victoires du Jazz award in 2009 in the category of French vocal artist or ensemble. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2012. His son Louis is also a drummer.

Lubat describes himself as a "malpoly-instrumentiste", and his work is hard to file under one heading. French Wikipedia says he plays mainly drums and piano, with accordion, vibraphone and percussion as further voices, that he is known above all as a formidable scat singer, that he has played contemporary music by Varèse, Xenakis and Berio, and that he took an active part in free jazz. Library-music fusion, Occitan song and spoken-word collaborations with writers such as Bernard Manciet sit beside that. His partners range from American visitors such as Getz and Dexter Gordon to the French improvisers around Michel Portal and Louis Sclavis, and the Uzeste festival he founded has been described by Gironde tourism as a festival of jazz and improvised music kept going for more than forty years.