Laurent de Wilde is a French pianist, composer and writer, born in Washington, D.C. on December 19, 1960, who has lived in France since 1964. He entered the philosophy section of the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1981, and in 1983 a music scholarship took him to the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University in New York. The Montreux Jazz Festival's biography describes him as originally self-taught at the piano. When the scholarship ended after about six months he stayed in New York, played the city's clubs and joined the regular band of the trumpeter Eddie Henderson.

His first album, Off the Boat (IDA Records, 1988), put Henderson and the saxophonist Ralph Moore in front of the bassist Ira Coleman and the drummer Billy Hart. Odd and Blue (1989) was a trio date with Coleman and Jack DeJohnette, and Colors of Manhattan (1990), co-billed with Henderson, Coleman and the drummer Lewis Nash, was recorded direct to two-track digital tape in Manhattan on March 7 and 8, 1990. Open Changes, a trio record with Coleman and the drummer Billy Drummond made in New York on December 6 and 7, 1992 and issued by IDA in 1993, won him the Académie du Jazz's Prix Django-Reinhardt in 1993. Back in Paris he worked with Barney Wilen, playing piano and electric piano on Essential Ballads (Alfa Jazz, 1993, recorded in Paris in November 1992), piano and celesta on Talisman (IDA, 1994) and piano on the live album The Osaka Concert (Trema, 1999). He also played in Paris with the drummers Aldo Romano and André Ceccarelli, and appears on Ceccarelli's all-star Carte Blanche (Dreyfus Jazz, 2004).

He signed with Sony Jazz in the mid-1990s. The Back Burner (Columbia, 1995, recorded in New York in April and May 1995) paired him with Henderson, the alto saxophonist Antonio Hart, Coleman and Drummond. Spoon-a-Rhythm (Columbia, 1997, recorded at Clinton Studios in New York from November 25 to 27, 1996) was a trio with Coleman and the drummer Dion Parson, and earned him a Victoires de la Musique jazz award in 1998. His trio toured Europe, the United States and Japan for more than two years, and in Tokyo on March 18 and 19, 1997 he played on Lee Konitz's Dig Dug Dog (Columbia) with Coleman and Parson.

Around 2000 he turned toward electronics. Time 4 Change (Warner Jazz, 2000, recorded at Studio Ferber in Paris on November 28 and 29, 1999) set his Fender Rhodes against programming in a larger band that included the saxophonist Gaël Horellou, the trumpeter Flavio Boltro, the bassist Paul Imm, Michel Benita on computer and the drummers Stéphane Huchard and Philippe Garcia. Stories (Warner Jazz, 2003, recorded in Paris in the summer of 2002) was produced with the electronic musician Smadj and includes a version of Charles Mingus's "Moanin'". Organics (Nocturne, 2004) put the Rhodes and programming in a quartet with Horellou, the bassist Philippe Bussonnet and the drummer Yoann Serra, and The Present (Nocturne, 2006) went back to an acoustic piano trio with the bassist Darryl Hall and the drummer Laurent Robin. PC Pieces (Nocturne, 2007), a piano and computer duo with the electronic musician Otisto 23, was recorded live at the Amphithéâtre de l'Opéra de Lyon on March 9, 2007, and the pair followed it with Fly! (2010) and Fly Superfly (2014). From 2006 to 2008 he was also a sideman and arranger for the poet and singer Abd al Malik.

Since 2012 his own label, Gazebo, has issued his records, and he has produced albums there for other French musicians, among them the alto saxophonist Géraldine Laurent's At Work (2015) and Cooking (2019), both with Paul Lay on piano, Yoni Zelnik on bass and Donald Kontomanou on drums, and Paul Lay's own L'Odyssée (2024). His trio record Over the Clouds (Gazebo, 2012) has Coleman and the bassist Jérôme Regard, with Laurent Robin and Clarence Penn on drums. Riddles (2016) and Wheels (2021) are two-piano duets with the Congolese pianist Ray Lema, the second recorded in November 2020 on two Steinway model B pianos. New Monk Trio (Gazebo, 2017), a centenary tribute to Thelonious Monk with Regard and Donald Kontomanou, took the Académie du Jazz's Prix du disque français, and Life Is a Movie (Gazebo, 2023), recorded by the same trio at the Studio Gil Evans in Amiens on September 14 and 15, 2022, closes with a piece by Kontomanou on which de Wilde also sings. In 2018 he won the Victoires du Jazz artist of the year award and the Grand prix Sacem du jazz.

Writing and broadcasting run alongside the music. His biography Monk (Gallimard, 1996) won the Prix Charles-Delaunay for the year's best jazz book, and Les Fous du son (Grasset, 2016) traces the history of electronic music from Edison onward. He co-wrote and presented Arte documentaries on Monk and on Mingus, hosted the Victoires du Jazz ceremony in 2012 and 2022, presented Portrait in Jazz on TSF Jazz from 2016 to 2020 and On The Wilde Side on Radio Classique from 2020 until July 2025, and has written film and television scores. He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. His own website lists solo piano concerts, shows with the actor Jacques Gamblin and conferences in Paris into 2027.

De Wilde's acoustic work comes out of the piano-trio tradition of Thelonious Monk, the subject of his book, his television film and his 2017 trio album, and the acoustic records are the larger share of his catalogue. His New York years with Eddie Henderson and a series of American rhythm sections (Ira Coleman, Billy Drummond, Dion Parson) put him in the post-bop mainstream, and the acoustic records after 2006 return to it. Alongside that runs a long engagement with electronics: the Fender Rhodes with programming and DJ-influenced production on the Warner and Nocturne albums, live piano-and-computer sets with Otisto 23, and a book on the history of electronic sound. Compilations of the period such as Nu-Jazz (EmArcy) and Nu Jazz Essentials include his tracks, which is how the 2000s records were often filed, but the two strands share players and repertoire rather than splitting into separate careers. He has been recognised in France for both the playing (Prix Django-Reinhardt 1993, Victoires du Jazz 2018) and the writing (Prix Charles-Delaunay 1996).