Didier Lockwood was born in Calais on February 11, 1956, into a family of musicians. His father, Yves Lockwood, was a schoolteacher and violin teacher, and his older brother Francis became a jazz pianist. The paternal family came from Birmingham and had settled in Calais at the end of the nineteenth century. He began on the violin at six, joined the orchestra of the Calais municipal theatre at thirteen, and in 1972 won first prizes at the Calais conservatoire and in a Sacem contemporary-music competition for a piece for prepared violin. Francis steered him toward jazz, and hearing Jean-Luc Ponty on King Kong, Ponty's album of Frank Zappa's music, made him take up the amplified violin. Instead of sitting the entrance examination for the Paris Conservatoire he joined the band Magma at the end of 1974, and he is heard on its live album Live/Hhai (1975), where he is credited under the Kobaian name Stöht Malawëlëkaahm.

After Magma he worked in the big band of Michel Colombier and was noticed by Stéphane Grappelli, who took him on tour; Dave Brubeck also invited him to play. His own records began at the end of the 1970s: Thank You Friends, a duo with the pianist and keyboardist François (Faton) Cahen (Atlantic, 1978), the electric group record Surya (recorded in 1977 and issued in 1979 under the group name), and New World (MPS, 1979), recorded in Stuttgart on February 20 to 22, 1979 with the pianist Gordon Beck, the bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and the drummer Tony Williams. Live in Montreux was recorded at the Casino Montreux on July 16, 1980, with the saxophonist Bob Malach and the keyboardist Jan Hammer, and Fusion (1981) was a reunion with the Magma drummer Christian Vander. On July 23, 1982 he played at Montreux in a one-off band with the guitarist Allan Holdsworth, the drummer Billy Cobham, the bassist and singer Jack Bruce and the keyboardist David Sancious.

Through the 1980s he led the Didier Lockwood Group, mostly on the JMS label, with records including Fasten Seat Belts, The Kid, Out of the Blue (1985) and 1.2.3.4. AllMusic describes him as the violinist who, in that decade, was seen as the next in line after Grappelli and Ponty. Out of the Blue, recorded in New York in 1985 with Gordon Beck, the bassist Cecil McBee and the drummer Billy Hart, won a Victoire du jazz for instrumental jazz album of the year, and in 1986 he was named jazz musician of the year at the same awards. He recorded Rhythm & BLU (1986) with the violinists John Blake and Michał Urbaniak and a rhythm section that included the bassist Marcus Miller and the drummer Lenny White, and the live album Absolutely Live (1986) at the Paris Olympia with the Québec fusion group Uzeb. A trio with the guitarists Christian Escoudé and Philippe Catherine produced Trio (JMS, 1983), and in the 1990s he made Solal Lockwood with the pianist Martial Solal and led an eleven-piece violin ensemble on Onztet de violon jazz (1994).

In 1994 he moved to New York for two years. There he recorded New York Rendez-Vous, made at East Hill Studio in January 1995 with the bassist Dave Holland, the drummer Peter Erskine, the pianist David Kikoski, the saxophonist Dave Liebman and, on one track, the guitarist Mike Stern, and then Storyboard (Dreyfus, 1996). Back in France he made 'Round About Silence (Dreyfus, 1998) and, in 2000, Tribute to Stéphane Grappelli, a homage with the guitarist Biréli Lagrène and Pedersen that remained one of his best-known albums. Omkara (2001) crossed his violin with the Indian dancer and vina player Raghunath Manet, and Globe-Trotter (2003) marked thirty years of his career and included his solo piece Les Mouettes, a showcase of electronic effects imitating seagulls and other sounds. He recorded Waltz Club (2006) with the accordionist Marcel Azzola and the guitarist Martin Taylor, and For Stéphane (2008) for Grappelli's centenary, with guests including Dee Dee Bridgewater, Toots Thielemans, Martial Solal and Daniel Humair.

Teaching and public service ran alongside the records. In 2001 he founded the Centre des musiques Didier Lockwood, an improvisation school in Dammarie-les-Lys, and his improvisation method Cordes et âmes won a Sacem prize in 2002. He toured for four years in the stage show Le Jazz et la Diva with the soprano Caroline Casadesus, then his wife, and wrote about thirteen film scores between 2009 and 2014 after the success of his music for the animated film Les Enfants de la pluie (2003). He was named Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2003, became vice-president of the Haut conseil de l'éducation artistique et culturelle in 2005, delivered a report to the culture minister in January 2012, served as deputy mayor for culture of Dammarie-les-Lys from 2014 to March 2016, and was made Commandeur of the Ordre national du Mérite in 2016.

His last albums were Apesantar (Frémeaux & Associés, 2016) and Open Doors (2017), a quartet record with the pianist Antonio Faraò, the bassist Darryl Hall and the drummer André Ceccarelli, with the soprano Patricia Petibon as a guest singer. He passed away suddenly in Paris on February 18, 2018, of a heart attack, at the age of 62, and was buried at the Montparnasse cemetery. The Festival des Puces, a Gypsy-jazz festival he co-founded at the Saint-Ouen flea market, was renamed the Festival Didier Lockwood after his death.

Lockwood was a classically trained player who took up electric violin and made the instrument's electronic effects part of his language, and he was known for sound imitations such as seagulls and trains, the idea behind his solo Les Mouettes. His acknowledged models were Ponty, who showed him the amplified violin, Grappelli, with whom he toured and to whom he returned in 2000 and 2008, and the Polish violinist Zbigniew Seifert. AllMusic places him in fusion and post-bop, and his career moved through rock with Magma, jazz-rock and fusion, acoustic swing and Gypsy jazz, large-form writing for orchestra, and improvisation teaching. The range makes any single tag partial, and the three used here are the ones his catalogue most clearly supports.