Daniel Humair was born in Geneva on May 23, 1938, and has been one of the busiest drummers on the Paris scene since he settled there in 1958. He started on clarinet and drums at the age of seven, and at about fourteen, after hearing a record by Tommy Ladnier and Mezz Mezzrow, he decided to concentrate on jazz drumming. He was largely self-taught and was playing professionally with local jazz and dance bands in his teens. Prizes at the Zurich Jazz Festival led to work with Don Byas, Guy Lafitte, Jacques Pelzer and Floris Nico Bunink, and then to Paris, where Barney Wilen invited him to move. French sources describe him as based in France for more than half a century, and his career has run through Paris studios, clubs and festivals ever since.

In his first Paris years he worked with Lucky Thompson, Oscar Pettiford, Bud Powell and the vibraphonist Michel Hausser. His first record under his own name, Hum!, appeared on Vega in 1960 with the pianist René Urtreger and the bassist Pierre Michelot, the trio that became known as HUM. He also joined the pianist Martial Solal's trio, and between 1958 and 1965 his main bands were the Solal trio and a quintet led by Hausser. Sessions followed with Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Stéphane Grappelli and Barney Kessel.

In the mid-1960s he formed a close partnership with the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and the organist Eddy Louiss, heard on Jazz Long Playing (Philips, 1964) and Sunday Walk (SABA, 1967) and in the HLP trio, whose name takes the first letters of the three players and which recorded at the Paris club Le Caméléon in 1968. In 1968 he began about four years with the saxophonist Phil Woods and his European Rhythm Machine, recording live dates at Montreux and other European festivals. In 1972 he issued Jazz Trio with the pianist Gordon Beck and the bassist Ron Mathewson, and played on the soundtrack of Last Tango in Paris with Gato Barbieri. Through the 1970s he also appeared in several editions of Michel Portal's Unit.

At the end of the 1970s he formed a trio with the saxophonist François Jeanneau and the bassist Henri Texier, which AllMusic credits with helping steer the French scene toward a local repertoire that stayed rooted in jazz tradition but sat some distance from the American model. Humair Jeanneau Texier and Triple Hip Trip (with the vibraphonist David Friedman) came out on Owl in 1979, and Akagera followed in 1980. In the mid-1980s he began a trio with the pianist Joachim Kühn and the bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clark, which recorded Easy to Read (1985), From Time to Time Free (1988), Carambolage (1992), Usual Confusion (1993) and Triple Entente (1998) and lasted until Jenny-Clark's death in 1998. The all-star concert album 9-11 p.m. Town Hall (1988) united him with Michel Portal, Martial Solal, Kühn, Jenny-Clark and Marc Ducret. He also recorded Scratch (Enja, 1985) with Kenny Barron and Dave Holland.

Honors came steadily. He was named Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1986 and Officier in 1992. In 1987 he received the Grand Prix du jazz from Sacem, the Prix Charlie Parker of the Académie du Disque and a career award from the Académie Charles-Cros, and in 1997 the Académie du Jazz named him European Musician of the Year. The HUM trio reformed in 1999 for an album on Sketch, and it won a Victoire de la Musique in 2000. Humair is also a painter: his first solo exhibition was in Basel in 1965, he has had more than 150 exhibitions, and he described his own style as narrative abstraction.

Since 2000 he has kept leading small groups. Baby Boom (Sketch, 2003) was made with the guitarist Manu Codjia, the bassist Sébastien Boisseau and the saxophonists Christophe Monniot and Matthieu Donarier, Pas de dense (Zig Zag, 2010) paired him with the saxophonist Tony Malaby and the bassist Bruno Chevillon, and Sweet & Sour (Laborie, 2012) was recorded with the saxophonist Émile Parisien, the accordionist Vincent Peirani and the bassist Jérôme Regard. Seasoning (Intuition, 2017) was recorded live at Theater Gütersloh in Germany. In the trio Helveticus, with the trombonist Samuel Blaser and the bassist Heiri Känzig, he made 1291 (2020) and Our Way (2024). With the bassist Stéphane Kerecki and the saxophonist Vincent Lê Quang he recorded Modern Art (2017), Drum Thing (2020, Frémeaux & Associés) and Prismes à l'eau (2024, Le Triton). A biography by the critic Julien Le Gros was published by Frémeaux & Associés in 2026, and in April of that year Humair discussed it with the author at the Médiathèque musicale de Paris. He is 88.

Humair is a largely self-taught drummer whose style AllMusic calls sophisticated and swinging. His records show a player equally at home in the bebop-derived trio language of Hum!, the open exchanges of the Kühn and Jenny-Clark trio and the written pieces and textures of his later quartets and trios, and AllMusic notes that as his painting developed in the 1990s his drumming took on more textures and a deeper sense of group interplay. He often records with horn players and pianists from several countries, which has made him a link between the French scene and American, Italian, German and Swiss players. French reference works have called him without doubt one of the best drummers in the world. Because his work spans straight-ahead trio sessions, open collective improvisation and written projects, a single genre tag only partly describes it.