Ève Risser was born in Colmar, in Alsace, on June 24, 1982, and is a pianist and composer best known for prepared piano, for free improvisation and for large ensembles that bring improvised music together with West African traditions. She had piano lessons as a child and at eleven came across graphic notation, which fired her imagination even though her teacher stressed disciplined study over that kind of freedom. She lived in Colmar until she was eighteen, studied piano and classical flute at the conservatory there, then spent four years in Strasbourg working on improvised music and jazz piano, and on flute in contemporary music. After those studies she chose the piano and, having given up the flute, began working inside the instrument, shaping sounds that imitate trumpets, percussion and saxophones. She went on to the jazz class of the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris; French Wikipedia lists a jazz prize from the conservatoire and a soloist prize at the national jazz competition at La Défense, both in 2008.

From 2009 to 2013 she was the pianist of the Orchestre national de jazz under its artistic director Daniel Yvinec, and she is on its albums Around Robert Wyatt (2009), Shut Up and Dance (2010), Piazzolla! (2012) and The Party! (2013). In the same years she built a catalogue of small-group records, many of them on Umlaut, the label and collective of which she is a founding member. With the drummer Yuko Oshima she formed the duo Donkey Monkey, which made Ouature (2007) and Hanakana (2011), and which toured from 2004 to 2016. With the clarinettist Joris Rühl she made Fenêtre Ovale (2011), built on music by Karl Naegelen, and shared the 2010 split release Split with the group OBLIQ and Christof Kurzmann. The quartet The New Songs, with the singer Sofia Jernberg and the guitarists Kim Myhr and David Stackenäs, recorded A Nest at the Junction of Paths in September 2011, with songs split between Risser and Jernberg as writers.

Her trio En Corps, with the double bassist Benjamin Duboc and the drummer Edward Perraud, recorded its first album at Studio Sextan in Malakoff in March 2012 for the Dark Tree label, and followed it with En Corps - Generation, taken from a concert at the Artacts festival in St. Johann in Tirol, Austria, in March 2016 and issued in 2017. Her solo piano album Des pas sur la neige, recorded at Studio Juillaguet in September 2013 and issued by Clean Feed in 2015, drew praise in Down Beat for an arsenal of techniques that turns the piano into a kaleidoscopic sound machine. Other partners in those years include the bassist Pascal Niggenkemper (Lucky Prime, 2013, and Talking Trash, 2016), Jean-Jacques Birgé (Game Bling, 2014, and Pique-nique au labo, 2020), the guitarist Marcelo dos Reis (Timeless, recorded in Coimbra in October 2016 and issued in 2017) and the pianist Kaja Draksler, with whom she recorded the two-piano set To Pianos in Ljubljana (Clean Feed, 2017).

Her first large-scale project was the White Desert Orchestra. White Desert, a piece for tentet with amateur choirs, premiered in March 2015, and the touring band recorded Les deux versants se regardent for Clean Feed in August 2016, in Villetaneuse, on a commission from the French Ministry of Culture. Its players included the saxophonist and clarinettist Antonin-Tri Hoang, the flautist Sylvaine Hélary, the bassoonist Sophie Bernado, the guitarist Julien Desprez, the trombonist Fidel Fourneyron and the drummer Sylvain Darrifourcq. In February 2018 she recorded the solo prepared upright piano piece Après un rêve at the FGO Barbara in Paris; it was issued by Clean Feed in 2019, and she played it at Jazzfest Berlin that year. Other recordings of the period include Piano Trialogues (Creative Sources, 2019), with the pianists Magda Mayas and Marta Warelis, the guitarist Nicola L. Hein and the percussionist Etienne Nillesen, and Formation < Deviation (Relative Pitch, 2021), recorded in November 2017 by the trio Cranes with the trombonist Matthias Müller and the drummer Christian Marien.

In 2019, drawing on her interest in Africa and on questions about the place of a Western musician, she created the Red Desert Orchestra, a twelve-piece band that includes three West African-born players living in France and uses balafon, djembe and voices alongside horns, guitar, bass and drums. She has studied the balafon in Bamako, Mali. The orchestra recorded Eurythmia in December 2021 at La Soufflerie in Rezé, and Clean Feed issued it in 2022. Her biography at the Opéra national du Rhin adds the show Kogoba Basigui, made with female musicians from Mali, and the duo Anw Be Yonbolo with Nainy Diabaté. In 2023 she received the Paul Acket Award from the North Sea Jazz Festival, given each year to an artist whose talent deserves a wider audience. Her later credits include the quartet record Bestiaire #01 | Explorations (Budapest Music Center, 2022) led by the saxophonist Matthieu Donarier and La Grande Crue (NoBusiness, 2024), on which she is the piano guest of the trio The Attic (Rodrigo Amado, Gonçalo Almeida and Onno Govaert). She also writes on commission for Radio France, Ensemble LINKS and the Frankfurt radio big band, and with the Scène nationale d'Albi-Tarn she founded Young Girls in the Bands, a big band of 21 players aged 7 to 17.

Risser's playing is physical and percussive. On the piano she uses mallets, plastic sheets and wooden inserts to alter the strings, takes the left hand for rhythm and bass lines (on the upright she has also used a foot-triggered kick drum) and leaves the right hand for improvising, and she has said she takes rhythmic ideas from drummers such as Tony Allen. A reviewer of En Corps described muted strings, extended techniques and repeating phrases, and the North Sea Jazz jury called her playing poetic, percussive and physical. Her compositions draw on nature, especially mountains, snow and minerals, and her titles include Des pas sur la neige, Tent Rocks, Fumeroles and Jaspe. Her records alternate between solo piano, duos and trios in the free-improvising tradition and written pieces for large ensembles, where the Red Desert Orchestra adds the rhythms and singing of West African musicians. She has performed at the Moers festival, Jazz em Agosto, Jazz sous les Pommiers, Jazzfest Berlin and Jazzkaar in Tallinn. Her West African collaborations are central to her recent work, but jazz and free improvisation remain the frame of her catalogue and of the recognition she has received.