Laurent Cugny is a pianist, arranger, composer and conductor who has spent four decades writing for large jazz ensembles, and a university professor who has also written books on Gil Evans and Miles Davis. He was born on April 14, 1955, in La Garenne-Colombes, west of Paris. He began piano lessons in 1965, studied economics (a master's degree at Paris-Nanterre in 1977) and film (a postgraduate diploma at Paris-Panthéon-Sorbonne in 1978), and made two short films before music took over. In 1979 he founded the big band Lumière, which he led and wrote for. That year he took third prize for solo piano at the Concours National de Jazz de la Défense, and in 1980 Lumière won first prize and the composition prize at the same competition. From 1981 to 1991 he taught piano and large-ensemble playing at the Centre d'Informations Musicales in Paris.

Lumière's early records were Lumière on the Open label and Eaux-Fortes (Ecorce, 1984). The turning point came in November 1987, when Cugny and the big band recorded in Paris with Gil Evans, the arranger of Miles Davis's orchestral albums. Evans led from the piano and Cugny conducted and arranged; the sessions produced Rhythm-A-Ning (EmArcy, 1988) and Golden Hair (EmArcy, 1989), and the saxophonist Andy Sheppard and the trumpeter Stéphane Belmondo are among the players. Cugny followed with Santander (EmArcy, 1991), which won the Prix de l'Académie Charles-Cros and includes a Gil Evans piece with the guitarist Biréli Lagrène, and with Dromesko (EmArcy, 1993), recorded in February and March 1992. In 1989 the Académie du Jazz gave him its Prix Django Reinhardt.

From 1994 to 1997 he was the musical director of the Orchestre National de Jazz. His four records with the orchestra, all on Verve, were Yesternow (1994), built on music from Miles Davis's electric years, In Tempo (1996) with the organist Lucky Peterson, Reminiscing (1996), which won the Académie du Jazz's Prix Boris Vian, and Merci, Merci, Merci (1997), recorded live. The orchestra included the Italian players Stefano Di Battista and Flavio Boltro, and in 1997 it received a Django d'or as best French orchestra. Between 1993 and 2008 he also wrote arrangements for other artists, among them Abbey Lincoln, Lucky Peterson, David Linx, Marc Beacco, Viktor Lazlo, Juliette Gréco and the Brussels Jazz Orchestra.

His second career was academic. He earned a doctorate in musicology at Paris-Sorbonne in 2001 with a thesis on the analysis of jazz works, the habilitation to supervise research in 2004, and a professorship at Paris-Sorbonne in 2006. As of 2023 he is a professor at Sorbonne University's Faculty of Letters, specializing in jazz. His books include Las Vegas Tango: Une vie de Gil Evans (P.O.L, 1989), Électrique: Miles Davis, 1968-1975 (André Dimanche, 1993), Analyser le jazz (Outre Mesure, 2009), the first volume of Histoire du jazz en France (Outre Mesure, 2014) and Analysis of Jazz: A Comprehensive Approach (University Press of Mississippi, 2019); the Académie du Jazz has given book prizes to several of them. He coordinated a national research project on the history of jazz in France from 2009 to 2011, and in 2014 he became artistic director of the Jaaz Festival in Saint-Omer.

Composition has run alongside both careers. His jazz opera La Tectonique des nuages, freely adapted from the play Cloud Tectonics by José Rivera, with a libretto and staging by François Rancillac, was first given as a concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival in 2006, played at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in 2007, recorded in 2009 and 2010 and released by Signature (Radio France) in November 2010, then staged as an opera in Angers and Nantes in 2015. It won the Académie du Jazz's Grand Prix in 2010. In 2014 he founded the Gil Evans Paris Workshop, a large ensemble that plays Evans's repertoire alongside his own writing and recorded the double album Spoonful (Jazz&People, 2017), with the drummer Gautier Garrigue and the reed player Antonin-Tri Hoang in the band. In 2022 he formed a tentet, which recorded Zeitgeist (Frémeaux & Associés, 2023), with Laurent Coulondre on Hammond organ; the Académie du Jazz gave it the Prix du disque français in 2023. He was made an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2011.

Cugny writes for the large ensemble in the line of Gil Evans. His bands add flutes, French horn and tuba to the usual saxophones and brass, the instrumentation Evans favored, and the rhythm section often adds electric bass, guitar and keyboards. He is also a close reader of Miles Davis's electric years, which he analyzed in a book and then arranged for the Orchestre National de Jazz on Yesternow. His own pieces include "Santander", "Dromesko" and "Salamero", and his large-ensemble work from Santander to La Tectonique des nuages has been recognized by the Académie Charles-Cros, the Académie du Jazz (the Prix Django Reinhardt, the Prix Boris Vian and the Grand Prix) and the SACEM. Because he is also a musicologist, he writes about his subject as well as playing it: he has published on the analysis of jazz works, on jazz in Europe and on the history of jazz in France.