Henri Renaud was a French pianist, bandleader and record producer who spent the first half of his career gathering rhythm sections and ensembles for American musicians passing through Paris, and the second half running the jazz catalogue of French CBS. He was born on April 20, 1925, in Villedieu-sur-Indre, a village in the Indre department near Châteauroux. His mother was a schoolteacher who started his music lessons early: violin at five, piano at eight. He first heard jazz on the radio in 1937, and during the Occupation he is said to have traded his tobacco ration for Duke Ellington scores. In 1946 he formed a vocal group at his school in Châteauroux, then decided to become a professional and moved to Paris.

He began in the bars and restaurants of the Latin Quarter, where the drummer Gérard Pochonet and the saxophonist Jean-Claude Fohrenbach noticed him and hired him. Through the late 1940s and 1950 he accompanied visiting and resident Americans, among them Don Byas, James Moody, Roy Eldridge and the blues singer Big Bill Broonzy. In June 1951 he led his own group for the Saturne label, with the tenor saxophonists Sandy Mosse and Bobby Jaspar, the guitarist Jimmy Gourley, the bassist Pierre Michelot and the drummer Pierre Lemarchand, in ten bebop sides first issued on five picture-disc 78s and reissued on CD in 2001. The Saint-Germain-des-Prés club Le Tabou became his base, and in 1952 he led a big band for the matinées that Eddie Barclay organized at Le Bœuf sur le Toit, with Jean-Louis Chautemps, the bassist Benoît Quersin, the vibraphonist Fats Sadi and arrangements by Francy Boland.

By 1953 he was the pianist for the sessions that Vogue recorded with American players in Paris. That year he played on Clifford Brown's Paris quartet date and on the sextet session with the alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce, made a quartet date with Lee Konitz in September and a sextet date with Zoot Sims in November, and led a quintet session of Gryce compositions with Bobby Jaspar. In 1954 he spent about six months in New York. There he led the All Stars sessions with Al Cohn, J. J. Johnson, Milt Jackson and Percy Heath, made a quartet record with Cohn, and supervised and played on the sessions that the American label Period issued in 1957 as The Birdlanders, with Kai Winding, Tal Farlow, Oscar Pettiford and others.

Back in Paris he opened the club Le Caméléon with Roger Guérin, Chautemps and the drummer Charles Saudrais, then led a quintet and a quartet with the American baritone saxophonist Jay Cameron at the Ringside, the club that became the Blue Note. In 1955 Boris Vian singled out one of his piano passages in a review of a Jay Cameron record in the magazine Arts. Through the mid-1950s he recorded for Vogue and its associated labels with Bob Brookmeyer, Frank Foster, the guitarist Réné Thomas and the tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson. In March 1956 he made the Ducretet Thomson record with Zoot Sims and the trumpeter Jon Eardley that was later reissued as Night Session in Paris, and in January 1957 he led an octet and a trio, with the tenor saxophonist Allen Eager and Kenny Clarke on drums, for another Ducretet Thomson album. He accompanied the American singer June Richmond until 1959, played the Blue Note in Paris with Clarke in 1962, and appeared at Aux Trois Mailletz with the trumpeter Buck Clayton. A last stage appearance in Stockholm in 1964 closed his career as a working pianist.

In 1964 (the Encyclopœdia Universalis dates it to 1965) he took over the jazz department of CBS France, later part of CBS-Sony. There he ran a reissue programme that brought out catalogue material by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson and many others, and he directed the label's Jazz Originals and Essential Jazz collections; Discogs credits him as producer on more than a hundred and eighty releases, most of them CBS and Columbia reissues and compilations. He kept recording and composing: Blue Cylinder (PSI, 1970) and Jeu de l'oie (Arion, 1971), a suite of pieces named after Paris districts made with Georges Arvanitas and André Ceccarelli, belong to this period, as do occasional film scores. In 1980 he produced and wrote the notes for the Columbia double album I Remember Bebop, in which eight veteran pianists, among them Duke Jordan, John Lewis, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan and Jimmy Rowles, each play two to four bebop pieces. In the 1980s he worked in radio and television, and a record of his own compositions appeared in 1993. Henri Renaud passed away on October 16, 2002, at the age of 77.

Renaud played bebop-based piano in the cool manner that was current in Paris and New York in the early 1950s. The English Wikipedia lists swing, bebop and cool jazz among his idioms, and the German Wikipedia names Al Haig and George Wallington as the main influences on his piano style. His lasting influence was as an organizer rather than a soloist: he put together Paris sessions for visiting Americans such as Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce, Lee Konitz and Zoot Sims alongside the Belgian saxophonist Bobby Jaspar, and from 1964 he directed the jazz department of French CBS and its reissue programme.