Fred Gérard was a French jazz trumpeter, composer and trumpet teacher. He was born Georges Monnin in Besançon on March 18, 1924, and passed away in Ivry-sur-Seine, just south of Paris, on December 26, 2012, at the age of 88. English Wikipedia dates his playing career from 1941 into the 1990s. For most of it he was a Paris musician: a lead trumpeter in the big bands and show bands of the 1950s and 1960s, a mainstream jazz soloist, and, on a run of 45s and EPs for French labels, the leader of his own trumpet ensembles. Michel Laplace, the French trumpet historian who wrote his entry in Grove Music Online, ranks him with Robert Fassin among the most precise and respected lead trumpeters of the French big-band era. French Wikipedia adds that he studied with the trumpeter Raymond Sabarich.

His first documented jobs are in the dance and swing orchestras of postwar Paris. English Wikipedia lists him with Alix Combelle's band in 1948 and 1949, with Jacques Hélian's orchestra from 1949 to 1951, in the band of the American trumpeter Ernie Royal in 1950 and 1951, and with Raymond Legrand in 1952. French Wikipedia and the International Trumpet Guild's obituary add Aimé Barelli (1951), Noël Chiboust, Hubert Rostaing (1953) and Combelle again (1953); German Wikipedia says he held the first trumpet chair in the orchestra of the Lido in Paris in 1953.

In the autumn of 1953 he was on a Paris session that has been reissued many times. On September 28, 1953, Gigi Gryce led a big band in Paris for Vogue that paired the American visitors Clifford Brown, Art Farmer and Quincy Jones with local players, among them Fred Gérard, the trumpeter Fernand Verstraete, the bassist Pierre Michelot and the pianist Henri Renaud. The four pieces cut that day, "Brown Skins", "Deltitnu", "Strike Up the Band" and "Keeping Up with Jonesy", appeared on Vogue and on Blue Note, and are on Clifford Brown's The Complete Paris Sessions reissues; on the 1997 Vogue and BMG CD of The Complete Paris Sessions, Vol. 1 Discogs credits Fred Gérard on trumpet for "Brown Skins" and "Keeping Up with Jonesy" and for two further Gryce orchestra pieces, "Conception" and "All the Things You Are".

Through the second half of the 1950s his name turns up in the orchestras that defined Paris jazz of the time. French Wikipedia and the Trumpet Guild obituary list Christian Chevallier (1955 to 1959), André Persiani (1955 to 1958), Claude Bolling (1956 and 1957), Michel Legrand (1956 and 1957) and Martial Solal (1956 to 1958), and he also played with Lucky Thompson, Michel de Villers and Géo Daly. Discogs credits him on trumpet on Chevallier's Formidable (Columbia FP 1067, 1956), beside Christian Bellest, Fernand Verstraete, Robert Fassin and Roger Guérin. German Wikipedia counts 53 jazz recording sessions with him between 1950 and 1975. Outside jazz the same sources place him in the bands of Harry Belafonte (1959) and Judy Garland (1960).

From the late 1950s he also led records under his own name. For the labels President and Disques Festival he made a long series of 45 rpm singles and EPs, sometimes billed to Fred Gérard and his trumpet and sometimes to Fred Gérard et ses Five Trumpets, or "avec ses 5 trombones ou 5 trompettes". The Trumpet Guild's obituary says the Five Trumpets were a trumpet ensemble with other leading French trumpeters, among them Roger Guérin and Henri Van Haeke. The repertoire on these discs is mostly the popular song and dance music of the day, from Aznavour and Henri Salvador to Bacharach, with cha-cha-cha and rock and roll arrangements in 1958 and twist arrangements in the early 1960s; one of the EPs, Piccolo Trumpet (Disques Festival, 1960), is built around his own composition of that name, and another, Roses Are Red, has Pierre Michelot on bass, Christian Garros on drums, René Duchossoir on guitar and Georges Arvanitas on organ. Discogs files the 1958 EP Fred Gérard avec ses 5 trombones ou 5 trompettes under jazz and Trompettes Party under Latin.

He kept working in jazz in the same years. The credits attributed to him in French Wikipedia and the Trumpet Guild obituary include Pierre Michelot (1963), Dany Doriz (1966), the Paris Jazz All Stars (1966), Jean-Claude Naude (1967), Sonny Grey and Slide Hampton (both 1970) and Claude Luter (1972). The Paris Jazz All Stars were the big band that Ivan Jullien led on Paris Point Zéro (Riviera, 1966), where Fred Gérard sat in the trumpet section with Jullien, Bernard Vitet, Maurice Thomas and Roger Guérin. In 1965 he was in the trumpet section on Raymond Fol's Les Quatre Saisons "In Jazz" (Philips), beside Jullien, Maurice Thomas, Michel Poli and Guérin.

In his later years German Wikipedia says he belonged to the Hot Club de Lyon, and in the early 1990s he played in Michel Laplace's Trumpet Workshop, an ensemble he also wrote for. English Wikipedia places his last band role in the 1990s, in Emile Vilain's group Swing Locomotive. He taught trumpet and wrote a method, La Trompette: approche méthodique moderne (Paris, 1989). Among his pupils German Wikipedia names Gilles Zabezinski. His funeral took place in the church at Ivry-sur-Seine, with a trumpet ensemble that included Guy Touvron.

The Trumpet Guild obituary describes him as a mainstream jazz soloist influenced by Louis Armstrong, Jonah Jones, Roy Eldridge and Charlie Shavers, and French Wikipedia says he had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz trumpet. He named Raymond Sabarich, Aimé Barelli and Armstrong as the three trumpet sounds he admired most. English Wikipedia singles out his command of the upper register, and the same French source says that classical trumpeters including Roger Delmotte, Maurice André and Timofei Dokshitser respected him. A good part of his own record output is light dance music and chanson covers rather than jazz, so the jazz case for him rests on the big-band and session work listed above and on his Wikipedia and Discogs classification as a jazz musician, not on a body of leader jazz albums.