François Tusques was born in Paris on January 27, 1938, and is a pianist and composer who played a central part in the first generation of French free jazz. His family left Paris for Brittany soon after his birth. His father, Jean Tusques, was a physician and professor who took part in the French Resistance, and his mother had been a singer at the Paris Opera. Childhood years in Afghanistan, where his father helped set up a medical faculty in Kabul, and in Dakar came before the family's return to France in 1950. He has said that his awakening to jazz was hearing Sidney Bechet play with Claude Luter at the Olympia that year; he started on clarinet, collected New Orleans records, and in Dakar at 17 or 18 was turned toward Charlie Parker. Back in Nantes he took up the piano seriously, largely self-taught, and in the later 1950s ran a local Hot Club branch and played in dance bands. He has also said that the pianists he learned from by listening included Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell.

After military service in Algeria he settled between Nantes and Paris in the early 1960s, playing with the double bassist Bernard (Beb) Guérin, the trumpeter Bernard Vitet, the drummer Jacques Thollot and the saxophonist François Jeanneau. In 1964 he played at the Théâtre de la Vieille-Grille in Paris with Vitet, Thollot and Aldo Romano, and the American cornetist Don Cherry, then living in Paris, played with the group and strongly influenced its direction. A seven-inch record, La Maison fille du soleil, made in Nantes in December 1964 for an exhibition on Le Corbusier, has Cherry on cornet, Guérin on double bass and Tusques on piano, with a narrator.

In 1965 he recorded Free Jazz for the Disques Mouloudji label with Vitet (trumpet), Jeanneau (saxophone, flute), Michel Portal (bass clarinet), Guérin (bass) and Charles Saudrais (percussion). It is widely described as the first free jazz album made in France. Tusques composed the four tracks and has said that he cut up and reassembled the studio takes at the mixing desk, building the music he imagined rather than the music the band could yet play live. On November 7, 1966 he took part in the « Manifeste de l'Avant-Garde » concert at the Alliance française with Portal, Jeanneau, Barney Wilen and others. Le Nouveau Jazz (Mouloudji, 1967), billed to Tusques with Wilen, followed with Guérin, Jean-François Jenny-Clark and Romano; it was recorded in January and February 1967.

Through the late 1960s he was also the pianist in Paris for visiting Americans. He is on Sunny Murray's Big Chief (recorded in Paris on January 11, 1969) and on Clifford Thornton's The Panther and the Lash, taken from a live concert at the Maison de la Radio on November 7, 1970. He has said that, despite this work, he did not record under his own name between 1967 and 1970. He made Piano Dazibao, a solo record, at home in Paris between May and September 1970, and Dazibao n°2 followed in 1971, a set of four political pieces that includes a version of Elaine Brown's Seize the Time. In May 1971 he recorded Intercommunal Music in Paris with Murray, the cellist Alan Silva, the trumpeter Alan Shorter, the saxophonist Steve Potts and the bassists Guérin and Bob Reid; Tusques also plays musical saw, bowed guitar and maracas on it. After May 1968 he worked texts into his concerts and accompanied the singer Colette Magny, appearing on her album Répression (1972).

In the 1970s he formed the Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra, a changing group meant to bring free jazz closer to dancing and to a wider public, with repertoire opened to African music, revolutionary songs and Basque and Breton regional music. It played in factories on strike and in hostels for immigrant workers, and with a collective called Le Temps des Cerises he self-produced recordings, among them Vol. 1: Concert à Prades-le-Lez (1974) and Après la marée noire (Le Chant du Monde, 1979), made with Breton bombarde players. Le Piano préparé (Le Chant du Monde, 1977) is a piano record. In the 1980s he took part in the Chantenay-Villedieu festival, recorded two records of Federico García Lorca poems with the singer Violeta Ferrer, and wrote the music for Génération, a documentary by Daniel Edinger on the events of May 1968. A trio with the bass clarinettist Denis Colin and the drummer Noël McGhie came next.

His records from the 1990s are often tied to literature: Octaèdre (Axolotl Jazz, 1994) is a homage to the writer Julio Cortázar, with Vitet, the singer Isabel Juanpera and the bandoneon player César Stroscio, and Blue Phèdre (1996) is a large-ensemble session with Vitet, Colin, McGhie, Itaru Oki and the bassist Didier Levallet. Arc Voltaic (In Situ, 2003), recorded at Le Triton in 2002, sets poems by Joan Salvat-Papasseit sung by Carles Andreu. Since 2010 most of his output has been on the Improvising Beings label, including Topolitologie (2010) with McGhie, Near the Oasis, a live duo with the saxophonist Sonny Simmons recorded at the Vision Festival in New York, La Jungle du Douanier Rousseau (2014) with Alexandra Grimal and Sylvain Guérineau, Le Chant du Jubjub (2015) with Oki, the accordionist Claude Parle and Juanpera, and the home-recorded solo album Avants-Derniers Blues (2017). Souffle Continu reissued Piano Dazibao and Dazibao n°2 in 2022, and the writer Pierre Crépon devoted a Wire playlist to his work that year.

He has remained active into his late eighties. Sans détours (2023) marks ten years of work with the trumpeter and pianist Fabien Robbe, and the live LP Tusques is now!, recorded at the Pontivy conservatoire on November 15 and 16, 2024 with Robbe, the drummer Jérôme Gloaguen and the saxophonist Eric Leroux, came out on November 7, 2025. He has said that he wrote more than 200 pieces during the 2020 lockdown. For much of his life he earned a living outside music as a typist and copywriter, and later worked for the newspaper Libération and the magazine Actuel.

Tusques says he relies on attack and rhythm more than on long melodic phrasing, and names Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Earl Hines and Jimmy Yancey among the pianists he admired. He credits Don Cherry and Sunny Murray with strengthening a working rule he still follows: if he knows what to say about a piece of music, he discards it, and if he cannot explain it, he keeps it. His 1965 and 1967 records belong to the first European wave of free jazz, and his solo records of 1970 and 1971 attach political titles and subjects to piano improvisation, while the Intercommunal orchestra deliberately aimed at dancers as well as listeners and drew on folk and regional music. Literary and visual subjects recur, from Cortázar and Lorca to Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark and the painter Henri Rousseau. French Wikipedia credits him with a decisive influence on the emergence of free jazz musicians in France.