Jean-Louis Chautemps was a French saxophonist, born in Paris on August 6, 1931, who worked in nearly every corner of French jazz for more than sixty years: Paris clubs and the Claude Bolling orchestra in the 1950s, a European tour with Chet Baker, the free-leaning big bands of Jef Gilson, the Orchestre national de jazz, a saxophone quartet that won a Charles Cros prize, and a long second career as a composer for stage and film and as a teacher of improvisation. He passed away in Paris on May 25, 2022, at the age of 90.

He studied medicine and law before settling on music, and took up the saxophone at 16. His first important job came in 1950 with the pianist and bandleader Jef Gilson, and in 1952 he joined the orchestra of Claude Bolling. Around the same period he played with the pianist Henri Renaud and the New Orleans clarinettist Albert Nicholas, and the Paris jazz scene put him next to visiting and resident figures including Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt, Zoot Sims, Lester Young, Bobby Jaspar, Albert Ayler and Roy Eldridge. In 1956 he toured Europe as a sideman in Chet Baker's group, and recordings from that tour are still in circulation. By the end of the decade he had worked in the dance orchestras of Jacques Hélian and Kurt Edelhagen, the latter based at West German radio in Cologne, where he also arranged.

Back in Paris in the 1960s he was a regular in the clubs and on records by Gilson, whose 1964 album Œil Vision with the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and the 1966 New Call From France nonet date for the German SABA label both feature his tenor. He recorded with the American tenor saxophonist Nathan Davis in 1965, the year the Académie du jazz named him winner of its Prix Django-Reinhardt, a prize he declined. He also began writing for the screen and stage: the feature film Les Cœurs verts (1966) and the animated short L'Ombre de la pomme (1967) carry his music, and in 1990 the French theatre critics' union gave him its prize for best stage-music composer for Français, encore un effort.... From 1961 he studied classical saxophone and from 1968 to 1972 the flute, and during the 1970s he also played in contemporary-music ensembles, among them Musique Vivante and Paul Mefano's 2E2M, and with the Ensemble intercontemporain.

The 1970s and 1980s widened the range of his jazz work. He ran a jazz workshop at the Sorbonne in 1975, played on Elton John's "Honky Cat" in 1972, and shared billing with the cornettist Butch Morris on Europamerica (1977), a Jef Gilson-conducted concert recorded for Radio France in December 1976. With François Jeanneau, Jacques Di Donato and Philippe Maté he formed a saxophone quartet whose album Mad Sax 2 won the Grand Prix du disque of the Académie Charles Cros. He played in Martial Solal's big band, took part in the Orchestre national de jazz in 1986 under Jeanneau, and in 1988 made the album that carries his name, Chautemps, with a rhythm section and guests that included André Ceccarelli, Yves Torchinsky, Martial Solal and Kenny Wheeler. In 1985 he received the SACEM Grand Prix du Jazz and was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; in 2001 he became an Officier of the Ordre national du Mérite.

His interests ran well beyond the bandstand. He was a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique, the society of Alfred Jarry's admirers, which named him a Commandeur Exquis of its Ordre de la Grande Gidouille in 2021. He published Le Saxophone (1987) with Daniel Kientzy and Jean-Marie Londeix, and in later years he performed with a quartet that included the trumpeter Éric Le Lann, the bassist Sylvain Romano and the drummer Donald Kontomanou. After his death his family gave his teaching materials to the Médiathèque musicale de Paris and left his personal archive to the Bibliothèque nationale de France; a tribute evening with Jeanneau and students from the Paris conservatoire's jazz department was held on April 10, 2025.

Chautemps played tenor and alto with a settled, carefully built tone and a wide vibrato, a sound the Académie du jazz described as carrying the mark of his passage through free jazz, with a broken phrasing that favors large leaps. French sources place his early manner close to Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins, but his range was unusually broad: he was equally at ease in the post-bop and swing sections of Bolling and Solal, in the open writing of Gilson's nonets, in contemporary-music ensembles and in theatre scores. His surrealist and Oulipo-minded sense of humour, expressed through his membership of the Collège de 'Pataphysique and the playful titles on his own album, runs through his career alongside the serious teaching he did for decades. Prizes and honours came from the jazz world (Prix Django-Reinhardt, SACEM Grand Prix du Jazz), the record industry (Charles Cros) and the state (Arts et des Lettres, Ordre national du Mérite).