Christian Azzi was a Paris-born pianist who became the keyboard voice of French New Orleans-style jazz in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was born in Paris on December 1, 1926, and studied piano at the Schola Cantorum. He discovered jazz during the Second World War through the V-Discs that American forces had pressed for their troops, and he became known as a stride pianist rooted in the New Orleans tradition.

In 1946 he joined the orchestra of the clarinetist Claude Luter, which played regularly at the Caveau des Lorientais, one of the best-known jazz cellars of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés years. In February 1948, at the urging of the critic Hugues Panassié, Luter's band represented France at the first jazz festival in Nice and was an immediate success; the group also took part in the soundtrack of the film Rendez-vous de juillet. He is the pianist on the Luter band's Paris session of June 23, 1948, and on its later records for Vogue and Ducretet Thomson.

His best-known association began in 1949, when Sidney Bechet, then living in France and looking for a band to build a career around, chose Luter's orchestra. Azzi became Bechet's pianist, and the group played at the Vieux-Colombier club in Paris, an engagement that made the line-up celebrated. He is the pianist on the Blue Note session recorded in Paris in October 1949 that produced The Onions and Buddy Bolden's Story, and on five of the six tracks of the Salle Pleyel concert recordings of January 31 and March 12, 1952, later issued as Jazz Festival Concert, Paris 1952. Azzi left Bechet in 1953. English Wikipedia counts about a hundred titles recorded with Bechet and about sixty with Luter.

Outside the Bechet band he recorded with the saxophonist Don Byas, the clarinetist and bandleader Maxim Saury and the Paris trad group Watergate Seven, and his name appears on a Vogue 78 billed beside Luter's orchestra. He also headed the Poumi Arnaud and Christian Azzi sextet. In 1999 he and the drummer Poumy Arnaud, who had played with Bechet, founded the Sidney Bechet Memory orchestra, drawing on former Bechet musicians to revive pieces such as "Petite Fleur" and "Dans les rues d'Antibes". Their CD Sidney Bechet Memory appeared on Cordiboy Records in 2003. In 1992 the Académie du Jazz gave him an honorary Prix Sidney Bechet. He was photographed at the Juan-les-Pins festival in July 2005, aged 78. Azzi passed away in Paris on November 21, 2020, at the age of 93.

Azzi was known as a stride pianist working in the New Orleans tradition, the style that Luter's band brought to postwar Paris. He came to jazz through American V-Discs during the war, studied piano at the Schola Cantorum, and spent the years of his best-known work in the rhythm section behind Bechet's soprano saxophone. His reputation rests on that partnership and on the Luter band's records rather than on albums under his own name, and with Poumy Arnaud he later carried the Bechet repertoire forward through the Sidney Bechet Memory orchestra, which revived pieces such as "Petite Fleur".