Franck Amsallem is a French jazz pianist, composer, arranger and singer, born on October 25, 1961 in Oran, then part of French Algeria, and raised in Nice. His working life falls into three stretches: his teens and early twenties on the Riviera, about twenty years in the United States (Boston from 1981, New York from 1986), and the years since 2001 in Paris. English and French Wikipedia both describe him as a French-American musician.

He began classical piano at seven, studied saxophone at the Nice Conservatory, where he won a saxophone prize, and kept teaching himself piano. English Wikipedia says he started gigging in 1976, at 14, and played in dance bands on the Côte d'Azur. At the Nice Jazz Festival he heard Count Basie, Charles Mingus and the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis orchestra, and in 1979 John Lewis took him on as a student for an episode of the television series La Leçon de musique. Jam sessions with visiting American players around the festival led to Berklee: he entered the Boston school in 1981 on French government scholarships, studied composition and arranging with Herb Pomeroy and Michael Gibbs, and played in Pomeroy's big band. He won the school's Count Basie Award in 1983 and its Oscar Peterson Award in 1984.

In early 1986 he moved to New York for a master's degree in jazz composition at the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Bob Brookmeyer until 1990 and took classical piano with Phillip Kawin. He also took part in the BMI Jazz Composers' Workshop, run by Manny Albam and Brookmeyer, and taught at the 92nd Street Y from 1990 to 1993. His own biography lists Gerry Mulligan, Charles Lloyd, Maria Schneider and Harry Belafonte among the artists he worked with as a sideman in those years, and he was a long-time partner of the saxophonist Tim Ries. His first record as a leader, Out A Day (OMD), is a trio session with Gary Peacock and Bill Stewart recorded at Clinton Studios in New York in July 1990; Discogs dates the first release to 1992. In the same month he and Ries recorded Is That So? there, released by Sunnyside in 1996. In between came New York Stories (Blue Note, 1992), a guitarist Danny Gatton project on which he plays piano beside Bobby Watson, Joshua Redman and Roy Hargrove, and the quartet record Regards (Free Lance, 1993) with Ries, the bassist Scott Colley and Stewart.

His writing was commissioned and recognized alongside the playing. A National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a prize from the Fondation de la Vocation came in 1989, the year the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra played his piece "Obstinated"; he won an ASCAP award for young composers in 1990 and second prize at the Great American Jazz Piano Competition in Jacksonville in 1992. French Wikipedia lists pieces for the Prism Saxophone Quartet (1992 and 1995), Nuits for orchestra, quartet and the guitarist Biréli Lagrène (1993) and Place du Temps for the Chicago ensemble Fulcrum Point (1999). In 1998 he made Years Gone By (A-Records) with Ries, the bassist Riccardo Del Fra and the drummer Daniel Humair, and in 2000 On Second Thought (Naïve) with Ries, the bassist Johannes Weidenmüller and the drummer Marc Miralta.

He moved back to France in 2001 and settled in Paris. Summer Times (Nocturne, 2003) is a standards trio with Weidenmüller and the drummer Joe Chambers, and A Week in Paris (Nocturne, 2005) is a programme of Billy Strayhorn pieces with Stéphane Belmondo, the saxophonist Rick Margitza and the singer Élisabeth Kontomanou. In 2009 he took part in the six-piano programme that Martial Solal composed for Jazz à Vienne, and he released Amsallem Sings (FRAM), a solo record on which he sings and plays piano; a second volume followed in 2014 with the bassist Sylvain Romano and the drummer Karl Jannuska. In 2011 he was invited to compose for and conduct the WDR Big Band in Cologne and toured South America; French Wikipedia says he has been a regular at the Duc des Lombards in Paris since 2012. He is one of nine pianists on the box set At Barloyd's (Jazz&People), recorded in a Paris apartment in 2016, and he recorded Gotham Goodbye (Jazz&People, 2019) at Studio Sextan in October 2018 with the tenor saxophonist Irving Acao.

He has gone on playing in New York: the Smalls and Mezzrow club archive lists his Mezzrow dates between April 2016 and October 22, 2025, with partners including Peter Bernstein, Alexander Claffy and Matt Penman. His latest album, The Summer Knows (un été 42) (Continuo, May 2025), was recorded at Samurai Studios in New York on June 18, 2024 and is a trio with the bassist David Wong and the drummer Kush Abadey. Apple Music lists a run of remastered releases and new singles under his name in 2026, among them a remastered Summer Times on April 1 and a Solo EP on June 25.

Amsallem is a post-bop pianist whose own tunes keep returning under the same titles: "Dee" and "Running After Eternity" are on both Out A Day and Is That So?, "Affreusement Vôtre" is on Out A Day, On Second Thought and the harmonica player Olivier Ker Ourio's Central Park Nord, and "Irregular Regularity" is on Regards and on the Prism Quartet's Real Standard Time. Composition is at the centre of his training, with Pomeroy and Gibbs at Berklee and Brookmeyer in New York, and John Lewis as an early mentor. Discogs files his albums under Jazz, with the styles Post Bop and Contemporary Jazz.

Next to the original writing he keeps returning to the standard repertoire, in trio, solo and sung settings: "Summertime", "I Got Rhythm" and "The Man I Love" on Summer Times, a whole Strayhorn programme on A Week in Paris, and two albums of songs on which he accompanies himself. Reviewing Amsallem Sings for All About Jazz on July 3, 2010, Bruce Lindsay called his piano restrained and in service of each lyric, compared his voice to Chet Baker's while finding it more powerful, and named Mose Allison and Jamie Cullum as other points of comparison. His large-scale writing includes Nuits and the WDR Big Band programme of 2011.