Christian Escoudé was a guitarist from Angoulême who carried the Manouche guitar tradition of Django Reinhardt into the jazz life of postwar Paris and beyond. He was born on September 23, 1947, in Angoulême, in the Charente, into a Romani family on his father's side. His father was a guitarist who loved Reinhardt's playing, and he began teaching the boy the guitar when he was ten. Escoudé became a professional musician at fifteen.

From 1969 to 1971 he played in the band of the trumpeter and bandleader Aimé Barelli. In Paris he met the trio of Eddy Louiss, Bernard Lubat and Aldo Romano at the club Jazz In in 1972 and went on to work with them, and he also played in Didier Levallet's Swing Strings System and in the Michel Portal Unit. His first records as a leader came in 1976 with the quintet record Réunion and a duo with the cellist Jean-Charles Capon, Les 4 Éléments. The same year the Académie du Jazz gave him its Prix Django Reinhardt. He then led a quartet with the pianist Michel Graillier, Romano and the bassist Alby Cullaz, who was soon replaced by Jean-François Jenny-Clark, and worked as a freelance guitarist alongside Portal, Slide Hampton, Martial Solal and Jean-Claude Fohrenbach.

The late 1970s and 1980s brought a run of American partners and French small groups. In 1978 he took part in the Nice festival and recorded Mirjana (Ahead) with the pianist John Lewis, and the next year he recorded Gitane with the bassist Charlie Haden. He began a yearly habit of playing the Samois festival, the Reinhardt tribute, in 1978, and in 1979 he went to the Dakar festival as a guest of the trio of René Urtreger, Pierre Michelot and Daniel Humair. In the summer of 1980 John McLaughlin invited him on a duo tour of the United States, Brazil and Japan. In 1981 he joined Martial Solal's big band, and in 1982 he played in a quartet with the drummer Shelly Manne. In 1983 he formed a duo with the violinist Didier Lockwood, joined in 1984 by the guitarist Philip Catherine, and recorded with the harmonica player Toots Thielemans. In 1985 he founded the Trio Gitan with Boulou Ferré and Babik Reinhardt, Django's son, and recorded Three of a Kind.

In 1988 he led a quartet with Jean-Michel Pilc and the brothers François and Louis Moutin, and in 1989 an octet with four guitarists, the accordionist Marcel Azzola, the cellist Vincent Courtois, Alby Cullaz and the drummer Billy Hart; it recorded Gipsy Waltz for Mercury. In 1990 he played the Village Vanguard in New York with Pierre Michelot, Hank Jones and Kenny Washington, and the following year recorded an album of Reinhardt's compositions with a string orchestra. He recorded through the 1990s for the French Verve and EmArcy labels, among them Holidays, In L.A., Cookin' in Hell's Kitchen, At Duc des Lombards and the fusion-leaning A Suite for Gypsies (1998). In 2003, the fiftieth anniversary of Reinhardt's death, he formed a seventeen-piece big band, and in 2004 he organized the New Gypsy Trio with David Reinhardt and Martin Taylor or the guitarist Jean-Baptiste Laya. Ma Ya. Ya (2005) was recorded with his Progressive Sextet.

His later records included a tribute to Georges Brassens, Au bois de mon cœur (2011), with guests including Biréli Lagrène and the violinist Fiona Monbet, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés: The Music of John Lewis (2013). He received the Django d'Or guitar trophy in 2008 and a Victoire d'honneur du jazz in 2022. He passed away on May 13, 2024, in Soyaux, near Angoulême, at the age of 76; France's Culture Minister paid tribute to him two days later. Ancrage, a record made with his Unit Five (the saxophonist and flutist André Villéger, the flutist Ludivine Issambourg, the drummer Simon Goubert and the organist Antoine Hervier), had come out on March 29, 2024, about six weeks before his death.

Escoudé came from the Manouche guitar tradition of Django Reinhardt and never left it, but he built his sound on a wider base: a bebop approach to harmony and line, tinged with the vibrato, portamento and fast runs of Gypsy jazz, and an unusually full, deep tone for the idiom. He was also known for a personal way of using arpeggios across semitone and whole-tone patterns. His working life outside the Gypsy-jazz circuit was spent beside some of the most harmonically demanding players of his time, among them John Lewis, Charlie Haden, Hank Jones and Martial Solal, and he played electric as well as acoustic guitar when a project called for it, as on Holidays (1993). He repeatedly returned to Reinhardt's repertoire, with a string orchestra in 1991 and with a seventeen-piece band in 2003, and to French song with his Brassens tribute. Ancrage (2024) was described on its release as a return to his roots that reflected the influence of Gil Evans, Antonio Carlos Jobim and the arranger Claus Ogerman, and nodded to bebop, West Coast jazz and French chanson. The Académie du Jazz recognized him with the Prix Django Reinhardt in 1976, and the Victoires du Jazz gave him a Victoire d'honneur in 2022.