Errol Parker was the working name of Raphaël Schecroun, a pianist, organist, drummer and bandleader born in Oran, French Algeria, on October 30, 1925. He took the name from two of his jazz heroes, Erroll Garner and Charlie Parker. He moved to Paris at 18, attended the Beaux-Arts school there, and then chose to be a jazz musician. Mostly self-taught on the piano, he was billed in his early years as Raph Schecroun, and the name Errol Parker only arrived around 1960.

In May 1950 he played with Django Reinhardt, and he was one of the Be Bop Minstrels. He recorded with Kenny Clarke and James Moody in Paris and was a regular at the Club Saint-Germain at the height of its bebop years. He worked off and on with the tenor saxophonist Don Byas from 1956 to 1958. In late 1955 he toured Scandinavia with Chet Baker: he is the pianist on the six tracks recorded in Copenhagen on December 11, 1955 with the tenor saxophonist Jean-Louis Chautemps, the bassist Eddie De Haas and the drummer Charles Saudrais, later issued as part of Baker's In Europe, 1955. Under his own name as Schecroun he made a ten-inch album of standards for Ducretet Thomson and, in 1960, Organ Jazz, a Hammond organ trio session for Ricordi with Georges Luca on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums.

He used the name Errol Parker to get out of an exclusive contract for organ records, so that he could make piano versions of current hits for Decca. The records sold so well that he kept it. The Decca albums of 1960 and 1961 include Ouah ! Ouah ! Ouah ! Ouah !, Musique pour les dragueurs, Musique pour les tricheurs and Au Tabou, and his composition "Lorre", the opening track of his 1963 Brunswick album recorded in Paris on May 9 and 10, 1963, became a hit in France. In 1964 he opened his own club, Le Ladybird, on the rue de la Huchette. A serious car accident injured his right shoulder and made fast piano playing difficult, and the trio he led with the bassist Roland Haynes and the drummer Ron Jefferson recorded Pretext in Paris in January 1965 and Minor Talk for Polydor in 1966.

Parker left for New York in 1968, the year his daughter, the pianist and composer Elodie Lauten, began university there. He played with free-jazz musicians, became a record producer, and, unable to find a drummer he liked, took up the drums himself, which his shoulder injury did not affect. From 1972 he issued his own records on his Sahara label, beginning with the three My Own Bag albums and African Samba (recorded in April 1976). He then formed the Errol Parker Experience, a group with two horns, and made The Errol Parker Experience (1977), Baobab (1978), Doodles (1979) and Graffiti (1980), with the saxophonist Monty Waters and, on Graffiti, the flautist Byard Lancaster and the trumpeter Jimmy Owens. On the first Sahara records he overdubbed piano and drums himself. His solo concert at St. Peter's Church in Manhattan on February 18, 1979 was issued as an album.

In 1982, while teaching at the Williamsburg Music Center in Brooklyn, he formed a big band that became the Errol Parker Tentet. Its first album was recorded live at that centre on April 26, 1982, with Steve Coleman on alto saxophone, and with eight horns in the band Parker played drums and kept the piano for solo engagements. The tentet's Live at the Wollman Auditorium (April 12, 1985) has Coleman, Wallace Roney, Bill Saxton, the trombonist Robin Eubanks and the trumpeter Graham Haynes; A Night in Tunisia (recorded April 9, 1991) has Donald Harrison and the trumpeter Philip Harper; and Remembering Billy Strayhorn (recorded in September 1994) is a tribute to Billy Strayhorn. Between these he made a solo piano record in 1982 and Compelling Forces for Cadence Jazz Records in 1989. His memoir, De bohème en galère, appeared from Filipacchi in 1996. Parker passed away in New York on July 2, 1998, aged 72, of liver cancer. The New York Public Library holds his scores from 1982 to the 1990s.

Parker's records fall into two periods. In Paris he was a polished trio pianist in the bop tradition, and his Decca and Brunswick records mix standards with his own themes. In New York he turned to writing for larger groups and playing drums himself, and the critic Scott Yanow described a music that used polytonality (playing in two keys at once), simultaneous soloing and a drum sound close to an African one, made by putting a conga where the snare drum would be. AllMusic files him under avant-garde jazz and says his music, although largely overlooked by the jazz establishment, was fresh and original. His working name honours Erroll Garner and Charlie Parker, he recorded a solo tribute to Thelonious Monk in 1982, and a tentet album devoted to Strayhorn in 1994. He counts as a French jazz musician because he was born in Oran when Algeria was part of France and built his first career in Paris, from his arrival at 18 until 1968.