Gaël Horellou is a French alto saxophonist and composer, born in Caen on August 22, 1975. According to his official biography he began working as a jazz musician in 1992 with the Lower Normandy drummer Jean-Benoît Culot. From 1994 to 1997 he was a member of the Collectif Mu, which won the competition at the Jazz à Vienne festival in 1995 and the La Défense jazz competition in 1996, and which recorded Live au Crescent (Seventh Records, 1996, taped at the Crescent Jazz Club) and Don Quichotte (Seventh Records, 1997). He helped found the Crescent club, where he shared the stage with Wayne Dockery, Steve Grossman, Peter King and Ricardo del Fra among others. In 1996 he formed Cosmik Connection with the drummer Philippe Garcia, an electro-jazz band that won the electro prize at the Printemps de Bourges in 2000 and a Talents MIDEM award in 2001 and released albums from 1998 to 2010.

From 2000 he was in the sextet of Laurent de Wilde, touring with it and playing on the albums Time 4 Change (Warner Jazz, 2000) and Stories (Warner Jazz, 2003). He co-wrote and co-produced de Wilde's electro-jazz quintet album Organics (Nocturne, 2004), playing saxophone and programming on it. From 2000 to 2003 he also played in the quintet of Luigi Trussardi, appeared on drum'n'bass records by UHT, DJ Volta and DJ Ben, and performed solo electronic sets as Dual Snake. In 2002 he founded NHX, an electro-instrumental group with the drummer Yoann Serra, the bassist Philippe Bussonnet, the keyboardist Emmanuel Borghi and the guitarist James Mac Gaw. The same year he began a long-running saxophone, bass and drums trio with the bassist Géraud Portal and the drummer Antoine Paganotti or Philippe Soirat, which made three records for the Normandy label Petit Label: Live 2008, Segment (2010) and Plo (2012). In 2003 he met the pianist Barry Harris during a course at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and he has studied regularly with him since, in Europe and the United States.

His acoustic quartet and sextet records date from 2008. With the pianist Jean-Sébastien Simonoviez, the bassist François Gallix and the American drummer Ari Hoenig he recorded Pour la Terre live at the Sunside in Paris on May 20 and 21, 2008 (DixieFrog and DTC Records, 2009), toured France in 2009 and 2010 and played the Jazz Gallery in New York in May 2010. A sextet with the tenor saxophonist David Sauzay and the trombonist Michaël Joussein recorded Live! at the Sunside in March 2011 (DTC Records, December 2011). Since 2012 he has hosted the monthly after-hours sessions at the Duc des Lombards in Paris, where he has played with Jeremy Pelt, Rodney Green, Eric Alexander and others, and in January 2013 he recorded the quintet album Legacy there with the American tenor saxophonist Abraham Burton as guest (Breakz, February 2014).

The Barcelona label Fresh Sound, which had issued Versus (1999), his record with David Sauzay, brought out three more of his albums: Time After Time (2013), a two-alto quintet date recorded in July 2011 with Perico Sambeat, BrOoklyn (2014), recorded in New York on June 25, 2013 with Hoenig, the pianist Etienne Déconfin and the bassist Viktor Nyberg, and Coup de Vent (2017), a quintet with Pelt on trumpet recorded at Studio des Egreffins in July 2017. His organ trio with Fred Nardin and Paganotti recorded Roy at the club L'Arrosoir in Chalon-sur-Saône on May 1 and 2, 2014 (Petit Label) and Moral de Fer in April 2016. The organ line led to Organ Power! (Fresh Sound, 2021), a hard-bop and soul-jazz quintet record made in September 2020 with Nardin, the trumpeter Pierre Drevet and the trombonist Simon Girard, and to Organ Power II (Fresh Sound, recorded in September 2024) with David Sauzay, Joussein, the organist Florent Gac and Paganotti. Fresh Sound's notes count it as his sixth album for the label.

A second thread is electronic. His solo project Travels for saxophone and electronics (recorded in 2010, Petit Label), the albums Explorations (2006) and Synthesis (2015, with the vibraphonist David Patrois) and the duo Nasty Factorz with Hoenig, which played the Nublu club in Manhattan, run alongside the acoustic records. A third is La Réunion. After a residency on the island in February 2015 he made Identité (Breakz, 2017), a jazz and maloya record with Gac and four Réunion musicians, and followed it with Tous les peuples (2019), Dalonaz (2022) and Koulèr Fitir (2025), which his Bandcamp page presents as the fourth part of the Identité project and which features the Réunion singer Fabris Coupama. He has given jazz masterclasses since 2010 at conservatories including those in Caen, Annecy and Paris, and his official biography says he has directed the jazz course at the Festival des Cuivres in Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille since 2012. In 2026 he was still playing in Paris: a Paris listing has the Koulèr Fitir band at the Jass Club on July 2.

Horellou's core is a bebop-rooted alto sound that he has applied to organ-combo hard bop, saxophone-bass-drums trios, quartets and electronic settings alike. He names Barry Harris, with whom he has studied since 2003, as the master of bebop he works with. His Organ Power! records draw on the Blue Note organ groove: Organ Power II includes John Coltrane's "Central Park West" and "Duke", a ballad in Ellington's manner, and Fresh Sound describes the first Organ Power! as a blend of soul music and hard bop. In Jazz Journal, François van de Linde praised the tone of Organ Power! and the way Horellou builds tension through a solo, heard Charlie Parker's music taken apart and rebuilt alongside Blue Note-style grooves, and judged him "his own man". Beside the acoustic work he has long run projects in other idioms: the drum'n'bass and electro-jazz of Cosmik Connection and NHX, the saxophone-and-electronics Travels, and the jazz-maloya series from La Réunion, where his Bandcamp page describes the aim as finding the roots of jazz. They sit beside, rather than in place of, the Fresh Sound and Petit Label jazz records, the Duc des Lombards sessions and the study with Harris that anchor his career, so he is best described as a jazz saxophonist who also works in electronic music and in Réunion traditions.