Hubert Rostaing was a clarinettist and saxophonist who became the voice of the clarinet in Django Reinhardt's wartime Quintette du Hot Club de France, then led his own Paris bands, played on the scores of André Hodeir and later turned to film music. He was born Hubert Louis Auguste Rostaing on September 17, 1918, in Lyon, and moved with his family to Algiers when he was young. There he studied at the local conservatory and, as a teenager, played clarinet and saxophone in local venues with a band called the Red Hotters, which also toured Morocco and Tunisia.

After a 1938 tour that reached Luxembourg he settled in Paris, hoping to work the clubs around Place Pigalle. He spent time in Lille, returned to Algiers for a while, and came back to Paris for good in 1940 to play cabaret on the Champs-Élysées. His break came through the war. Django Reinhardt's Quintette du Hot Club de France had been playing in England when hostilities began, and Stéphane Grappelli chose to stay in London. Reinhardt went home and needed a new lead voice; he asked the saxophonist Alix Combelle, who was busy with another job and recommended Rostaing instead. Django Reinhardt took him on, first as a saxophonist, and Rostaing then switched to clarinet. His playing was raw at first, and he worked hard enough that by 1944 a listeners' survey named him the best clarinettist of the Hot Club. His model was Benny Goodman.

Rostaing stayed with the Quintette du Hot Club de France on and off until 1948. Discogs credits him on clarinet on the Swing singles that carry the band's wartime repertoire: "Nuages" and "Les Yeux noirs", recorded in Paris on December 13, 1940, with Alix Combelle also on clarinet on "Nuages", then "Swing 42" and "Dinette", both recorded on September 11, 1941. He had already recorded with Reinhardt on October 22, 1940, on tenor saxophone in Aimé Barelli's orchestra for the Swing single "Indecision" and "Oui, c'est ça". A Blue Star single of 1948 credits him on alto saxophone beside Reinhardt and the American trumpeter Rex Stewart, on "Night and Day" and "Confessin'". During the same years he made his own records for Swing as Hubert Rostaing et son orchestre, from 1941, worked with the orchestras of Raymond Legrand, Fred Adison and Jacques Hélian, and in 1948 and 1949 led a sextet on Swing singles whose titles include "Fugology", "Be-Bop Tune" and "Paris-Bop".

In the Paris of the 1940s and 1950s he was also a studio and stage musician of unusual range. He worked with André Hodeir on film and concert scores including Autour d'un récif (1949) and Saint-Tropez (1953), and in the autumn of 1956 he played alto saxophone on four tracks of the Philips album Plays André Hodeir, on which the drummer Kenny Clarke led a sextet with Martial Solal at the piano. Under the pseudonyms Earl Cadillac, Dick Rasurell and Joe Kalamazoo he recorded French rock and roll and dance music, and in classical music he was a dedicatee of Jean Barraqué's Concerto, giving its world premiere with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. On April 27, 1957, he accompanied Nat King Cole at the Palais de Chaillot, and that year he led the orchestra at the Alhambra for Maurice Chevalier. In 1958 and 1959 he was part of Bob Castella's small group behind Yves Montand's recitals, and Philips issued Montand records billed with Hubert Rostaing et son orchestre in 1960 and 1961.

For Vega he made a run of records in 1957 and 1958. They include the trio albums with the pianist Pierre Spiers and the drummer Jerry Mengo, the Benny Goodman tribute Clarinette Parade, recorded in May 1957 at the Pathé-Magellan studio in Paris with Martial Solal on piano, and Notre ami Django (1958), a tribute with Henri Crolla, André Ekyan and Stéphane Grappelli. From 1956 until his death he worked mainly as a composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor and music director, on 53 films and television series by the count of English Wikipedia. His credits include Cette sacrée gamine (1956), Where Is Parsifal? (1984) and Eye of the Widow. He passed away in Paris on June 10, 1990, at the age of 71, and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.

Rostaing played clarinet in the swing idiom of Benny Goodman, and on the wartime records with Django Reinhardt he is the lead horn voice in the chair Stéphane Grappelli's violin had occupied. English Wikipedia notes that his playing lacked experience at first and that he practiced hard enough to be named the Hot Club's best clarinettist in a 1944 survey. He also played tenor and alto saxophone and, in some dance orchestras, bandoneon, and his range outside jazz was wide: Paris dance bands, the scored writing of André Hodeir, rock and roll under pseudonyms, a classical premiere and, from the mid-1950s, film scoring. Writing in The Clarinet in 2025, Jesse Krebs, as summarized on English Wikipedia, calls his collaboration with Reinhardt an important legacy and says his versatility deserves more recognition. His Vega trio records with Pierre Spiers and Jerry Mengo show a lighter side, with the clarinet in front of piano, celesta, harpsichord or organ and drums.