François Couturier is a pianist and composer from the Orléans area who became one of the main French voices of chamber-scale improvised music. He was born on May 2, 1950, in Fleury-les-Aubrais, near Orléans, and began piano at six. He studied classical piano and musicology, took his degree in 1977, and by his own account turned to improvisation in the early 1970s under the influence of modernist pianists. In 1978 he met the double bassist Jean-Paul Céléa in the quintet of the drummer and composer Jacques Thollot, and the two began a partnership that produced the duo record Couturier-Céléa (Disques JMS, 1980) and later The Game (JMS, 1983), recorded as the Couturier Céléa Quintet with François Jeanneau, André Ceccarelli and the vibraphonist Philippe Macé. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was also in Jazz Impression, a band he formed with the saxophonist Jean-Jacques Ruhlmann, which made two albums for Disques JAM, Le Vice et la Paresse (1978) and Énigme Infinie (1981). He received the Prix Django Reinhardt of the Académie du Jazz in 1981.

From 1981 to 1983 he toured the world in John McLaughlin's group The Translators and recorded with it, appearing on Belo Horizonte (1981, with Céléa and François Jeanneau also in the band) and Music Spoken Here (recorded in 1982 and released in 1983, again with Céléa). In 1986 he and Céléa founded the quintet Passaggio with the clarinetist and saxophonist Armand Angster, the percussionist and vocalist Françoise Kubler and the drummer Wolfgang Reisinger; it recorded for Label Bleu, among others the album Passaggio "L'Ibère", made in November 1994. His other partners in these years included François Jeanneau, the bassist Didier Levallet, Michel Portal, the saxophonist Larry Schneider and the violinist Dominique Pifarély. In 1993 he recorded the two-piano album Planisphères with Jean-Pierre Chalet and the quartet album Acte IV with the saxophonist Jean-Marc Larché, the bassist François Méchali and the drummer Peter Gritz.

His duo with the violinist Pifarély brought him to ECM, where Poros (ECM 1647, 1998) was the first record under the two names. He had already appeared on the label on Anouar Brahem's Khomsa (1995). From 2001 he was a member of the Tunisian oud player's trio, and recorded Le Pas du chat noir (ECM, 2002) and Le Voyage de Sahar (ECM, 2006) with it, touring the world; he is also on the double album Souvenance (ECM, 2014). With Larché he formed the trio Music for a While, with the accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier, which made a record for Émouvance in 2002, and the two composed the opera Mozart and Amadeus to a libretto by Anthony Burgess.

His own ECM work began in 2005, when he recorded Nostalghia - Song for Tarkovsky in Lugano with the cellist Anja Lechner, Larché on soprano saxophone and Matinier on accordion. Released in August 2006, it was a tribute to the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and the first album under his own name in many years, built from original pieces and improvisations rather than film music. The group, which came to be called the Tarkovsky Quartet, made two more records, Tarkovsky Quartet (2011) and Nuit blanche (2017), and between them came a solo piano album, Un jour si blanc, recorded in Lugano in September 2008 and issued in January 2010 as the second volume of the planned trilogy that Nostalghia began. In 2011 he presented the audiovisual piece Le temps scelle with the filmmaker's son.

Alongside the Tarkovsky project he made trio records with Céléa and the drummer Daniel Humair (Tryptic, Bee Jazz, 2007), and with Méchali and the drummer François Laizeau (Musica Callada, Zig Zag Territoires, 2010, a homage to the Catalan composer Federico Mompou). In 2013 ECM issued Il Pergolese, recorded in December 2012 with the singer Maria Pia De Vito, Lechner and the percussionist Michele Rabbia on a commission from the Festival Pergolesi-Spontini of Jesi. His duo with Lechner followed with Moderato cantabile (ECM New Series, 2014) and Lontano (ECM, 2020), and in January 2025 ECM released Preludes and Songs, a new duo record with Pifarély recorded in October 2023. He has also written music for films, among them Maman est folle (2007), La Petite Venise (Io sono Li, 2011), for which he was nominated for the European Film Award in 2012, and City of Dreams (2013). He was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2008.

Couturier's playing sits between the French improvised-music scene he came up in and the contemplative chamber sound of ECM. His own description of the Tarkovsky project ties the director's silence and slowness to what he calls an ECM aesthetic, and the quartet's records mix his compositions, collective improvisation and reworkings of earlier music, from a Bach passion aria to a Vivaldi psalm setting and a piece, "Dakus", that acknowledges Toru Takemitsu's Nostalghia. A classical training shows in his programs, which also include Mompou, Schnittke, Pergolesi, Komitas and Gurdjieff, and in a recording of Takemitsu songs with the countertenor Dominique Visse, while his jazz background shows in the open improvisation and in standards such as "All the Things You Are" on the two-piano album. John Kelman's All About Jazz review of Nostalghia described a tribute rather than a soundtrack, with Couturier's piano moving from delicate repeated figures to turbulent cascades and then to calm. Since 2005 his ECM work has centered on small, closely matched groups: the quartet, the duos with Lechner and Pifarély, and the solo record.