Médéric Collignon was born on July 6, 1970, in Villers-Semeuse, in the Ardennes department of northeastern France. He is a cornettist, vocalist and bandleader whose career runs through three overlapping worlds: the composer-led orchestras and ensembles of the Paris scene, his own quartet Jus de Bocse, and a long list of duo, theatre and studio projects in which his voice matters as much as his horn. He began music with solfège at the age of five, took up the trumpet two years later at the Conservatoire de Charleville-Mézières, and left the conservatoire in 1989 to spend a year at the CMCN in Nancy, where he later taught for a time.

He moved to Paris around 1996 or 1997 and met the older generation of French improvisers: François Jeanneau, Louis Sclavis, Michel Portal and Denis Badault. He played cornet in the Orchestre national de jazz under two directors, Paolo Damiani (2000 to 2002) and Claude Barthélemy (2002 to 2005), and is on Barthélemy's Sereine (Label Bleu, 2000) and the ONJ album Admirabelamour (Label Bleu, 2003). Sclavis's Napoli's Walls (ECM, 2003) credits him as well. He also played with Bernard Struber's Jazztet, Fred Pallem's Sacre du Tympan, Claude Tchamitchian's New Lousadzak (Human Songs, 2006) and, from 2004 to 2009, Andy Emler's MegaOctet, on whose Crouch, Touch, Engage (Naïve, 2009) he plays cornet, flugelhorn and voice.

His own quartet, Jus de Bocse, was built around Philippe Gleizes on drums, Frank Woeste on Fender Rhodes and Frédéric Chiffoleau on double bass. Its first album, Porgy and Bess (Minium/Discograph, 2006), recorded in July 2004 at Studio La Buissonne, revisits the 1959 recording by Miles Davis and Gil Evans; the second, Shangri-Tunkashi-La, goes into Davis's electric years of 1969 to 1975. The first record won the Académie Charles-Cros's grand prix du disque de jazz in 2006, and the Victoires du jazz named Collignon instrumental revelation of the year in 2007. The Académie du Jazz gave him its Prix Django Reinhardt for 2008, shared that year with the saxophonist Géraldine Laurent. In 2008 he also led Septik, a seven-piece electric group with Thomas de Pourquery, Frank Woeste, Matthieu Jérôme, Maxime Delpierre, Jean-Philippe Morel and Gleizes, which played an amplified, unruly version of Ennio Morricone's music as Il était une fois la ré-solution, created at Jazz in Marciac and the subject of a documentary shown on Mezzo in 2009. That year brought the Django d'Or of the Spedidam and his appointment as a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres (March 31, 2009), and the Victoires du jazz named him artist or instrumental ensemble of the year for 2010.

In 2012 Emmanuel Harang (bass) and Yvan Robilliard (keyboards) replaced Chiffoleau and Woeste, and the quartet added two string quartets for À la recherche du roi frippé, a version of King Crimson's repertoire in which the strings take the electric guitar parts. It won album of the year at the Victoires du jazz in 2013. Jus de Bocse then turned to film music for MoOvies (Just Looking, 2016), whose track list draws on 1970s American crime-film scores, among them Dirty Harry, Magnum Force and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Josselin Carré's 2014 documentary Médo(S) is a portrait of the musician.

Outside the quartet he has stayed busy as a guest and collaborator: Together (Neuklang, 2011) with the boNObo-trio, Scirocco with the Wanja Slavin Quintet (Jazzwerkstatt), the live album Wax'In (Le Triton, recorded in 2016) with the bassist Philippe Bussonnet, the drummer Franck Vaillant and the guitarist Christophe Godin, and Fonotópia (éOle Records, 2021) with the composer Georgia Spiropoulos. He also appears on Et me voici, a tribute to Claude Nougaro by the group Nougarologie. His duo and stage work has included projects with the choreographer Boris Charmatz, the trombonist Sébastien Llado, the actor Jacques Bonnaffé in David Lescot's L'instrument à pression and the slam poet Dgiz.

Le Triton, the club and label in Les Lilas, east of Paris, has become his main home on record. Arsis Thesis, released on December 6, 2024, is a large electric album that he composed, arranged and mixed himself, with Yvan Robilliard, Emmanuel Harang and Nicolas Fox in the rhythm section and guests including the saxophonists Géraldine Laurent, Pierrick Pédron and Christophe Monniot. In 2026 he released Hip-Hop tout sAmplement with the same rhythm section: fifteen tracks of jazz and hip-hop built from loops and chopped-up fragments of the band's own improvisations.

Collignon's signature is a pocket cornet played with unusually flexible lips, paired with a voice treated as a second instrument: scat, beatbox techniques and vocalisations in the extreme high register, often bent or amplified with electronic effects. He also plays double cornet, slide trumpet and flugelhorn, along with keyboards, electronic percussion and, at times, toys. French Wikipedia traces his taste to funk, hard rock and jazz-rock and to composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Edgard Varèse, set against a classical conservatoire training.

His projects tend to take a famous body of music and rebuild it on his own terms: the Gershwin opera as arranged for Miles Davis by Gil Evans, Davis's electric period, King Crimson's progressive rock with string quartets, American crime-film scores, Ennio Morricone. The result sits where jazz fusion, jazz-rock, free improvisation and theatre meet, and he has been described in the French press as a prodigy of the scene. His own records are heavily electric, with Fender Rhodes, effects and sampling in the foreground. He is primarily a jazz musician by his prizes, his orchestral and sideman record and the festivals that book him, although much of his recent writing leans toward rock, hip-hop and contemporary composition.