Guy Lafitte, born Denis Fernand Lafitte, was a French tenor saxophonist and clarinettist. He was born on January 12, 1927 in Saint-Gaudens, in the Haute-Garonne, and grew up in Toulouse, which he later called his home city. As a teenager he took part in the Resistance against the German occupation. He began on clarinet in swing and gypsy-style dance bands in the south-west of France, played in the Toulouse cabarets, and took up the tenor saxophone in 1947, with Coleman Hawkins as his idol. He was in Paris by 1950 and based there from 1954.

His break came through the blues. The critic Hugues Panassié recommended him to Big Bill Broonzy, with whom he worked around 1950. Through Broonzy he met the American clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow, and in November 1951 he made his first record, for Vogue, with Mezzrow's band, which included the trumpeter Lee Collins and the drummer Zutty Singleton. In 1952 he played a concert at the Salle Pleyel with the trumpeter Bill Coleman, the start of a friendship that lasted the rest of Coleman's life. Lafitte stayed in Coleman's band for nearly thirty years and left it in 1980. In the same period he worked with Emmett Berry, Dicky Wells, Buck Clayton, Peanuts Holland, Lucky Thompson and, in 1956, with Claude Bolling.

From 1954 to 1958 he led a small band with a regular engagement at the Paris club Les Trois Mailletz. In 1955 the Académie du Jazz gave him the Prix Django-Reinhardt, the first year the prize was awarded. He was under contract to EMI-Pathé Marconi from 1955 to 1967, recording under his own name, with the pianist André Persiany and with Franck Pourcel's orchestra, and the 1956 album with Persiany, Les Classiques du Jazz, won the Grand Prix du Disque of the Académie Charles-Cros. That year he also recorded and played concerts in Paris with Lionel Hampton. With the pianist Georges Arvanitas and the drummer Christian Garros he played in the Paris Jazz Trio, and in May 1962 he recorded a sextet date for Columbia with the drummer Franco Manzecchi. Wikipedia and AllMusic both place him among the musicians who played on Duke Ellington's soundtrack for the 1961 film Paris Blues. In a 1991 interview he said that a 1960 twist single, "Twist à Saint-Tropez," arranged by Martial Solal, was a hit. In 1969 he worked with the trumpeter Roger Guérin at the Club Saint-Germain. He moved to RCA in 1968 and made Jambo! that year, Blues in Summertime in 1971 and Sugar and Spice in 1972.

In the early 1970s he stopped performing. He and his wife moved to a farm at Tournan, in the Gers, and he spent about five years raising sheep. He returned in 1977 on a short tour with the New Orleans trumpeter Wallace Davenport and from then on played festivals regularly. From 1978 until 1998 he led his own group every year at Jazz in Marciac, where he was vice-president for many years and, with Bill Coleman, honorary president. He was also involved with the jazz festival at Ramatuelle.

Black & Blue gave his last two decades a body of records. Corps et Âme (1978) has Hank Jones, George Duvivier and J.C. Heard behind him, Live in France (1980) pairs him with the Texas tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb and the pianist Roland Hanna, and from 1982 to 1985 he worked in a trio with the organist Wild Bill Davis and the drummer Clyde Lucas. He recorded Three Men on a Beat with Davis and the drummer Alvin Queen in Paris in January 1983, and Lotus Blossom, also with Davis, in Toulouse that November. An album of Charles Trenet songs followed in 1984, and The Things We Did Last Summer (1991) was made with the young pianist Jacky Terrasson, the bassist Pierre Boussaguet and the drummer Al Levitt. His last records were made with Boussaguet and the pianist Jeanot Rabeson. A live set from 1993 contains "Talma," a piece by Boussaguet that became the closing theme of Philippe Meyer's France Inter radio programme La prochaine fois je vous le chanterai, and the duo album Crossings with Boussaguet was issued in 1998.

Lafitte passed away on June 10, 1998, a few weeks before he was due to play the Montauban jazz festival with Boussaguet and Terrasson. A book of his recollections, Comme si c'était le printemps, was published by Art-Média in 2003.

Lafitte was a mainstream swing tenor player in the line of Coleman Hawkins, whom AllMusic names as his main inspiration. In a 1991 interview he named Chu Berry as his earliest influence, followed by Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, Don Byas, Paul Gonsalves and Lucky Thompson, and Ben Webster to a lesser extent. His clarinet years in the south-west's swing and gypsy-style bands and his early work with Broonzy, Mezzrow and Bill Coleman placed him in the blues-inflected Swing tradition. AllMusic calls him a fine swing tenorman who appeared in many mainstream settings, and notes that visiting American veterans often used him in France, among them Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Milt Buckner, Wallace Davenport, Arnett Cobb and Wild Bill Davis. His own records range from small-group jazz dates to string and orchestra settings for the French labels and, around 1960, popular dance singles for Pathé such as the twist and madison numbers on his Sax Succès EPs.