Jac Berrocal (Jacques Berrocal) was born on October 22, 1946 in Saint-Jean-d'Angély, in the Charente-Maritime, and is a trumpeter, singer and composer whose records run from free jazz through experimental rock to music theatre and electronics. He grew up in Burgundy, around Sens, where his father's company had moved the family after the Second World War; he has said his father came from Paris, his mother from the south of France, and that the Berrocal name is Spanish. As a boy he sang Renaissance motets in a choir, and as a teenager he was the singer in a friends' rock'n'roll band whose members loved Count Basie and Django Reinhardt as much as Gene Vincent. His first recording, a 1964 single of "Be-Bop-a-Lula" in tribute to Gene Vincent, was pressed in two copies.

The trumpet came late. He started it during his national service near the German border, taking lessons from two fellow conscripts, one of them a New Orleans-style player, and has said he was drawn to it by a photograph of his maternal grandfather, who played cornet in a village band and was killed in the First World War in 1914. What opened his ears was the radio: Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry playing "Lonely Woman", and a broadcast of a John Coltrane quartet concert at the Olympia in Paris. He lived in Paris during the week and returned to Sens at weekends, and among the trumpeters he names as influences are Miles Davis, Don Cherry, Bernard Vitet, Jon Hassell, Lee Morgan and Roy Eldridge.

In the early 1970s he worked in a loose circle of music theatre and happenings with the painter and writer Michel Potage, whom he had met in 1967, the accordionist Claude Parle, and Roger Ferlet, whom he met hitchhiking in Lapland in 1970. French Wikipedia dates the founding of their Musik Ensemble to 1970. He and Ferlet travelled through Syria, Iraq, India and Pakistan and came back with local instruments, and in India in 1971 he was cast in Dev Anand's film Hare Rama Hare Krishna. Those journeys fed his first album, Musiq Musik (Futura, 1973), made with Dominique Coster and Ferlet and recorded in the crypt of the Romanesque church of Saint-Savinien-et-Saint-Potentien in Sens, where the stone supplied the reverberation. Gérard Terronès produced it for Futura and Jef Gilson is credited with mixing and editing. Berrocal has said that it was neither a jazz record nor a rock record, and that the nearest description is a sonic postcard.

Parallèles (1976) was the first release on his own label d'Avantage. It was recorded in several places, among them a house in Paris built by Le Corbusier and a pig farm, and it mixes conventional instruments with sheet metal and a bicycle. Its best-known piece, "Rock'n Roll Station", is a text Berrocal has said he wrote, spoken by the 1960s rock singer Vince Taylor over a bass and a struck bicycle. In 1978, 1980 and 1983 he directed the Sens Music Meeting festival.

In August 1979 he took a group to a festival of improvised music in Antwerp, and it stayed together as Catalogue: Potage, the drummer Jean-Pierre Arnoux, Patrick Prado and the guitarist Jean-François Pauvros, with the drummer Gilbert Artman for most of its life. The group lasted nearly eleven years. It made the album Catalogue for d'Avantage and, for the hat ART label, Pénétration, recorded live in a Basel brasserie in April 1982. He has said that rock promoters booked the group and did not know what to make of it, and that jazz festivals that booked it tended to regret it; Cecil Taylor, who was at a festival in Austria where it played, told him it was the only thing on the bill that did not bore him. Around 1979 he also met Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, and he played trumpet and Tibetan oboe at the London sessions for To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl (1980) and for a track on An Afflicted Man's Musica Box.

Hotel Hotel (nato, 1986), produced by Jean Rochard and recorded in 1985 and 1986 in Paris, Marly and Chantenay-Villedieu, goes from medieval echoes to free jazz tributes to Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, with singers from several countries. La nuit est au courant (In Situ, 1991) has him on trumpet with the double bassists Francis Marmande and Hubertus Biermann and the drummer Jacques Thollot, in sessions made between May 1989 and October 1990, among them one in Ivry-sur-Seine on August 30, 1989 and one in East Berlin in November 1989. The saxophonist Daunik Lazro proposed Outlaws in Jazz (Bleu Regard, 1994), a quartet of free jazz repertoire with Didier Levallet on double bass and the drummer Denis Charles, recorded in November 1993; Berrocal has said that Charles's death ended plans for a second record. In the mid 1990s Jason Willett's Megaphone label issued the compilation Fatal Encounters in the United States, and in 1996 Berrocal went to Baltimore to record with James Chance and the bassist Ron Anderson. He also made records with the Portuguese duo Telectu and the drummer Chris Cutler (1995), took part in Jazz Off Multimedia with Telectu and Louis Sclavis (1995), and recorded The Oblique Sessions (1997) with Pascal Comelade, Pierre Bastien and Jaki Liebezeit.

From the late 1990s the Italian label Alga Marghen reissued and added to his catalogue, with the 10-inch records Flash (1999) and Prière (2004). Berrocal has also worked as an actor, with parts in Jean-Pierre Mocky's Le Miraculé (1987), Jérôme Boivin's Confessions d'un barjo (1992) and Marie Losier's Felix in Wonderland (2019), and he is the subject of Guy Girard's film Les Chants de Bataille. Since 2009 he has played regularly with David Fenech, in a trio with Ghédalia Tazartès that made Superdisque (Sub Rosa, 2011) and in a trio with Fenech and Vincent Epplay that began on record with Antigravity (Blackest Ever Black, 2015) and continued with Why (2017), Ice Exposure (2019), Exterior Lux (2020), Transcodex (2022) and Broken Allures (2024). In 2019 Rotorelief reissued Musiq Musik, Parallèles and Catalogue together as a box set with a book, and in 2021 nato issued Fallen Chrome, made with the Minneapolis duo Riverdog. A 2021 review in Politis described the trio's set at the Sonic Protest festival as synthetic free-rock with a dense atmosphere. He turned eighty in October 2026, and his most recent record listed on Discogs is Ste Cy (La Scie Dorée), released in April 2026 with Epplay and Timo Van Luijk.

Berrocal's music resists a single label, and the sources that describe it divide between free jazz and experimental rock. French Wikipedia places it between independent rock and free jazz, MusicBrainz tags it free jazz, avant-garde jazz and free improvisation, and Politis has written that he bends jazz, goes beyond rock, flirts with chanson and experiments with musique concrète. His formative listening was jazz on the radio, above all Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and John Coltrane, alongside Vince Taylor, Léo Ferré, Jacques Brel and Charles Mingus, and he has said that moving from Ferré to Mingus was never a problem. The trumpet is the constant, joined by his singing and speaking voice, a bicycle and other found sounds, instruments from his travels such as the shenai and the Tibetan conch, and, in the later trio records, electronics. The early records belong to French music theatre as much as to jazz, Catalogue is closer to punk and experimental rock, and his records of the 1990s and the trio with Fenech and Epplay return to free improvisation and free jazz repertoire. He has said that jazz audiences and rock audiences were both uneasy about Catalogue, and that he never signed up to be called a marginal figure.