François Jeanneau is a Paris-born saxophonist, flautist, composer and teacher, born on June 15, 1935, who has been a fixture of French jazz since the early 1960s. He was the first musical director of the Orchestre national de jazz when it was created in 1986, founded the large ensemble Pandémonium, and for years ran the jazz and improvised music department at the Paris Conservatoire. He turned 91 in June 2026 and was still releasing records in 2025.

He grew up in a family of amateur musicians and learned the flute at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied with René Le Roy, but he taught himself the saxophone, soprano first and then tenor. He discovered jazz in 1949 through concerts by Charlie Parker and Sidney Bechet in Paris, and Bechet was his first model. He turned professional in 1960 in the quartet of the drummer Mac Kac, which played every night at the Club Saint-Germain, and learned the trade accompanying American musicians passing through Paris. In 1962 he travelled to Finland with the drummer Aldo Romano and the bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clark, and heard free jazz there for the first time, played by Archie Shepp and Bill Dixon.

Back in Paris he took part in the early French free-jazz sessions: he played soprano saxophone on Jef Gilson's Enfin ! (recorded between December 1962 and February 1963, released 1964), on François Tusques's Free Jazz (1965) and, in April 1966, in the Jef Gilson nonet that recorded New Call From France with Jean-Louis Chautemps and Bernard Lubat. He also took session work well outside jazz, among it the accompaniment of Claude François at the Olympia in 1964, alongside René Urtreger. From 1970 to 1974 he was in Triangle, a group that made records for Pathé and played rock-leaning music, with Jeanneau on flute and synthesizer.

His own records start in the middle of the decade. Une Bien Curieuse Planète (Palm, recorded in September 1975) pairs him with Bernard Lubat, Michel Graillier and Jean-François Jenny-Clark; Techniques Douces (Owl, 1977, recorded in June 1976) has him writing and playing soprano, alto and tenor with Graillier, Jenny-Clark and Aldo Romano; and Éphémère (Owl, 1977) adds an Oberheim synthesizer and a Lyricon wind synthesizer to his tenor and soprano. In 1979 he formed Pandémonium, a band of strings, guitar and rhythm section whose first players included Aldo Romano and Didier Lockwood; its Terrains Vagues (Owl), recorded in January 1983, has Chautemps, Philippe Maté and Jacques Di Donato in the reeds, three French horns, a tuba, Daniel Humair and the bassists Henri Texier and Jean-Paul Céléa. He had won the Prix Boris Vian of the Académie du Jazz in 1976, and in 1980 he took its Prix Django-Reinhardt. That year he founded a saxophone quartet with Jean-Louis Chautemps, Philippe Maté and Jacques Di Donato, wrote the jazz opera Desmodus Minor and continued the trio with the drummer Daniel Humair and the bassist Henri Texier that had made an Owl album in 1979 and recorded Akagera for JMS in the autumn of 1980. In 1981 he was among the reeds in Martial Solal's big band on its Gaumont album, and he was one of the musicians on John McLaughlin's Belo Horizonte (Warner Bros.), with Katia Labèque, Paco de Lucía and others.

In 1986 he became the first leader of the Orchestre national de jazz, the state-supported big band created that year, and recorded its first album for Label Bleu (LBC 6503), with Chautemps, Michel Benita, Andy Emler and Marc Ducret in the band and John Scofield as a guest on one piece. He then created the jazz department of the conservatoire in La Réunion (1987 to 1991), recorded Maloya Transit with the island's Trio Tambour (January 1991, issued by Label Bleu in 1992), and was the first head of the jazz and improvised music department at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, a post he held until 2000. In 1999 he met the American composer Walter Thompson and went on to help develop soundpainting, the live-composition sign language, leading the soundpainting orchestra Spoumj from 2005. His discography after 2000 includes Quand Se Taisent Les Oiseaux (Bee Jazz, 2007, his first French album as leader in twelve years, with the kora player Ablaye Cissoko), duo records with the pianist Uli Lenz (2008, 2013), Very Sensitive (2009) with the Bernica Octet, Duo pour deux, mais pas plus with the cellist Vincent Ségal (RSX, 2022), and The Straight Horn with the pianist Emil Spanyi (2025). In 2025 he also published an autobiography, Une anche passe.

Jeanneau came to the saxophone through Sidney Bechet and Charlie Parker, and then through the free jazz he heard in Finland in 1962; he is described as one of the pioneers of free jazz in France. The records that followed are less simply free than that label suggests: composed, orchestrated and often electric, with synthesizers on Éphémère, a rock-adjacent group in Triangle, a string-and-rhythm band in Pandémonium and, in 2007, a Weather Report-like quartet with kora that All About Jazz's Jeff Dayton-Johnson praised for its tunes and arrangements and for a soprano saxophone sound he heard as distinctively Jeanneau's even in a Wayne Shorter-like setting. Large-ensemble writing is the other constant, from Pandémonium to the Orchestre national de jazz and the Le POM orchestra, and he is as well known as a teacher: his first pupils in La Réunion included Olivier Ker Ourio, Henri-Claude Moutou and Jean-Luc Trulès.