Maxim Saury was a Paris clarinettist and bandleader who spent more than a decade playing almost nightly at the Caveau de la Huchette and became one of the best-known faces of French traditional jazz. He was born Maxime Honoré Saury on February 27, 1928, in Enghien-les-Bains, north of Paris, the son of the violinist André "Kiki" Saury. French Wikipedia says he took violin lessons from about 1940 to 1942, found the instrument unsuitable, and moved to the clarinet in 1943, after admiring the playing of Hubert Rostaing.

He started in the orchestra of the pianist Christian Azzi in 1946 and joined the group of the pianist Claude Bolling in 1947. Encyclopedia.com's entry adds that he won a clarinet prize at a festival in Brussels that year. With Bolling's New Orleans-style band he is credited on clarinet and soprano saxophone on the 78 rpm album Buddy Bolden...Nous Sommes Ici! (Circle, 1949), made up of sessions recorded in June and December 1948. In 1949 he left to lead his own trio, and in 1951 he rejoined Bolling.

From 1955 to 1968 he played almost continuously at the Caveau de la Huchette in the Latin Quarter, leading the band known as Maxim Saury and his New Orleans Sound, which appears on Ducretet Thomson records from 1955 and on a club recording made at the Vieux Colombier in Paris on September 15, 1953. On his 1957 and 1958 records the front line was the trumpeter Jean-Claude Naude and the trombonist Michel Camicas, with Guy Ray on bass. French Wikipedia calls him a symbol of the New Orleans revival in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The band also backed visiting Americans: the trumpeter Peanuts Holland on the 1955 album Rendez-vous à la Nouvelle-Orléans, whose release notes record the Grand Prix de l'Académie du Disque Français, the clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow as the Mezzrow-Saury Quintet in 1955, and the pianist Sammy Price and the trumpeter Emmett Berry on a 1956 album. Reference entries also name Sidney Bechet, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard and Bill Coleman among the American visitors he accompanied. He recorded a series of Bechet tributes, beginning with the 10-inch LP Joue... Sidney Bechet (Ducretet Thomson, 1957).

He also worked in film. French Wikipedia lists him as a musician in Bonjour Tristesse (1958, directed by Otto Preminger), Les Tricheurs (Marcel Carné), Jacques Tati's Mon oncle and Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine. The 1958 EP Joue "Les Tricheurs" names Carné's film on its sleeve, which also carries the line Prix Jazz Hot 1959, and the soundtrack EP of Mon oncle issued by Philips in 1959 credits the Maxim Saury Jazz Band. In the 1960s he was a regular at the Cannes, Antibes, Nice and Juan-les-Pins festivals, and he toured Norway in 1960, North Africa in 1963, Madagascar and La Réunion in 1965 and Tahiti in 1966. In the United States he played with Barney Bigard in 1968, took part with Claude Luter in the 1970 celebrations of Louis Armstrong's 70th birthday, and returned twice more in the 1970s. The Black and Blue album In Los Angeles was recorded in Westwood, California, on August 27, 1981, with Bob Havens, Dick Cary, Ray Sherman, Nappy Lamare, Ray Leatherwood and Nick Fatool.

He kept performing into his eighties. In 1988 he shared a cassette recorded live at the Jazz Meridien in New Orleans with Jacques Gauthé and Claude Luter, and the CDs Standards de la Nouvelle Orléans (2005) and Standards de Chicago (2007) were issued late in his career, with the live duo album Live in Passavant 2005, made with the pianist Michel Crichton, following in 2006. In 2007 he was among the performers chosen for the four-volume compilation Les 100 plus grands succès de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He remarried in 2008 at the age of 80, and in 2009 he marked sixty years in music. Maxim Saury passed away on November 15, 2012, at the Ambroise-Paré hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt, at 84, of heart problems. His daughter, Julie Saury, is a jazz drummer.

Saury played New Orleans-style traditional jazz in the Paris revival manner, on clarinet at the head of a collective front line of trumpet and trombone over piano, bass and drums, and his repertoire ran from "Royal Garden Blues", "Basin Street Blues", "Muskrat Ramble" and "Tiger Rag" to Bechet's "Petite Fleur" and "Les Oignons". He took up the clarinet after admiring Hubert Rostaing and came up through the bands of Christian Azzi and Claude Bolling. Like other Paris traditionalists of his generation he also recorded for a wider public: Discogs lists a run of Pathé EPs from 1962 to 1966 given over to twist, film themes and pop songs, among them one of airs created by Brigitte Bardot, and an album with a string orchestra, Slow Time (1963), alongside the jazz records. Traditional jazz is the core of his work.