Marc Ducret was born in Paris on August 19, 1957, and has become one of the central guitarists of French avant-garde and improvised jazz, as well as the long-time partner of the American saxophonist Tim Berne. He taught himself to play and was working professionally by seventeen, taking jobs in dance bands, folk groups and recording studios before he was twenty.

In 1986 the saxophonist François Jeanneau invited him into the first Orchestre national de jazz, with which he played more than eighty concerts that year, and he also won the Concours national de jazz de la Défense. He took the Prix Django-Reinhardt of the Académie du Jazz in 1987, the year his first album as a leader, La théorie du pilier, came out on Label Bleu with the bassist Michel Benita and the drummer Aaron Scott. Jazz Hot named him best guitarist in 1988 and he received the Étoile SACEM in 1989. Le Kodo (1989) and Gris (1990) followed on Label Bleu, Gris with a band that included the trumpeter Enrico Rava and the soprano saxophonist Jeanneau, and in the late 1980s his own trio toured in Europe, Africa and Asia.

From 1991 he worked with Tim Berne, a partnership that has continued into the 2020s. He recorded with Berne's Caos Totale and Bloodcount, whose three-volume Paris Concert was issued in 1995, and he is a member of Berne's trio Big Satan with the drummer Tom Rainey. Alongside this he recorded Acoustic Quartet (ECM, 1994) with the reed player Louis Sclavis, the violinist Dominique Pifarély and the bassist Bruno Chevillon, and played on albums by Aka Moon, Bobby Previte and Michel Portal. His own recordings of the 1990s ran from News from the Front (JMT), with trombone, trumpet and percussion, to two solo records, the acoustic (détail) (Winter & Winter) and the electric Un certain malaise (Screwgun), and to the trio album L'Ombra di Verdi with Chevillon and the drummer Eric Echampard. In the late 1990s he also formed a tentet, Seven Songs, to explore music of the 1960s.

Through the 2000s he kept the trio with Chevillon and Echampard, led a large ensemble, the Grand Ensemble de Marc Ducret, and made Qui parle ? (Sketch, 2003), a set of songs and instrumental pieces for a large cast of players and singers. The Grand Ensemble's Le sens de la marche, recorded in 2004, came out on Illusions in 2009, the year he won the Victoires du Jazz for French artist or instrumental ensemble of the year.

The 2010s were built around long cycles. Tower, drawn from a chapter of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor, was released by Ayler Records as four volumes (2011 to 2013) for different bands, followed by a twelve-piece document, Tower-Bridge (2014), and by Métatonal (2015) with his Trio+3. With the trombonist Samuel Blaser he made Audio Rebel (2020), which the Académie Charles-Cros honoured as a coup de cœur that year, and the ABC albums, Moods and Voyageurs. Lady M (Illusions, 2019), built on Lady Macbeth's Act V monologue for two classical voices and a chamber band, earned the same distinction the year before. Ici (Ayler, 2023), written during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, is a set of four pieces for guitar, trumpet, saxophones and trombone, and Palm Sweat (2023) gathers his readings of Tim Berne's music. In April 2026 he appeared on Twisted Summer with Liudas Mockūnas and Blaser.

Ducret plays mostly electric guitar, with acoustic six- and twelve-string guitars on his solo records, and uses Guild instruments and guitars built by the French luthier François Vendramini. English Wikipedia calls his playing highly original and very expressive, and AllMusic files him under avant-garde jazz, free improvisation and chamber music. His early style grew out of rock and bebop with a strongly virtuosic technique, and from the 1990s onward, in Berne's company and in his own large-scale pieces, his tone became harsher and more fragmented. He is also a composer for ensembles of three to twelve players who has repeatedly used literary texts (Nabokov in Tower, Shakespeare in Lady M) as structural models.