Michel Graillier, known to musicians as Mickey, was a Paris-based pianist who spent about ten years in Chet Baker's working group, played in Magma in the early 1970s and led a trio with Aldo Romano and Jean-François Jenny-Clark that won him the Prix Django Reinhardt in 1978. He was born Michel François Graillier on October 18, 1946, in Lens, in the Pas-de-Calais. He studied classical piano in Lens from the age of four until he was eighteen and played drums as a teenager in an amateur yé-yé group called Les Chaps.

He went on to the ISEN engineering school in Lille, where he met the bassist Didier Levallet, who introduced him to jazz and encouraged him from the start. He took his electronics engineering diploma in 1968 and moved to Paris that spring, in the middle of the May events. He chose music over industry quickly. At the Caméléon club he played in a trio with Aldo Romano and Jean-François Jenny-Clark, and the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, who first heard him there with Romano, hired him for the group he was forming. Graillier toured Europe with Ponty before the violinist left for the United States. His first recording was with Steve Lacy on Epistrophy (1969), a set of Thelonious Monk pieces, and Discogs also credits him on records by the Belgian singer-songwriter Julos Beaucarne and the French singer-songwriter Jacques Bertin from 1968 and 1969.

In 1970 he was one of four pianists on Saravah's Pianos Puzzle, a five-LP set recorded in June of that year with a disc for each of Georges Arvanitas, René Urtreger, Maurice Vander and himself. His own volume, Agartha, was made with the bassist Alby Cullaz and the drummer Bernard Lubat. In the early 1970s he recorded with Barney Wilen on Moshi and with Ivan Jullien's big band on Secret Service and Porgy and Bess. From 1972 to 1974 he was Magma's pianist, on the invitation of the drummer Christian Vander. He is credited on the band's Köhntarkösz (1974) and sometimes appeared under the Kobaian name Tsoï Menekaah; he later described the two years, which took the band to a New York festival, around Europe and above all to England, as a deep experience that stayed with him.

When Magma went quiet he worked as a freelance. His first album under his own name, Ad Lib (Musica, 1976), recorded in Paris on July 9 and 10, 1976, has a free solo piece on the first side and a trio with Romano and Jenny-Clark on the second, and it brought him the Prix Django Reinhardt of the Académie du Jazz for 1978. He also made the duo album Libra with the guitarist Christian Escoudé, which grew out of a year of duo work at the Caveau de la Montagne club and was recorded on July 6, 1976 (Musica, issued 1978). The same trio then accompanied the saxophonist François Jeanneau for about two years, which produced Techniques douces and Éphémère and an appearance at the Antibes Juan-les-Pins festival in 1977. He was the regular pianist at the Riverbop club, backing visiting Americans such as Philly Joe Jones and the saxophonist Steve Grossman, and he recorded the solo album In a Spring Way (Red Record, 1978) and the live recital Toutes ces choses... (Open, 1979), taped at Hérouville-Saint-Clair on February 17, 1979 with a programme of standards and modern-jazz repertoire.

In 1977 the Belgian musician Jacques Pelzer, whose daughter Micheline he later married, introduced him to Chet Baker. Graillier left other work behind to follow the trumpeter and played in his groups for about a decade, from New York to Japan, with the bassist Riccardo Del Fra in a minimal, intimate trio. Discogs credits him as pianist on Mr. B (recorded May 25, 1983), Al Capolinea (October 1983), Sings Again (October 1985) and Candy, and on Live from the Moonlight (recorded November 24, 1985 and issued in 1988), as well as on many live and broadcast releases that have appeared since Baker's death in 1988.

Between Baker tours he made his own records. Dream Drops (Owl, 1982) was recorded in Holland in April 1981 and in Paris that November: he plays piano, electric piano and synthesizer, with Chet Baker on the title piece, Michel Petrucciani on "Little Song" and Jean-François Jenny-Clark on "L'étranger". After Baker's death he recorded the solo album Fairly in Paris in October 1991 (Quantum), two duo records with Alain Jean-Marie, Portrait in Black and White (recorded June 9 and 10, 1991, Musidisc) and the live Oiseaux de nuit, the vocal-and-trio set The Art of Romance (1990 sessions) with Del Fra and the drummer Simon Goubert, a duo album with the trumpeter Éric Le Lann, Trois heures du matin, and a series of trios and quintets with his old friend Goubert, among them Couleurs de peaux (1993) and L'Encierro (1995). Soft Talk (Sketch, 2000), a duo with Riccardo Del Fra recorded in June 2000, won the Grand Prix du Disque of the Académie Charles Cros and the Académie du Jazz's Prix Boris Vian. He had already received the Grand Prix of the Académie Charles Cros in the jazz category in 1983.

Graillier passed away in Paris on February 12, 2003, at the age of 56. Musicians who worked with him, among them Alain Jean-Marie, Jean-Luc Ponty and Emmanuel Bex, left written tributes describing an intense, uncompromising player of great sensitivity. A tribute concert from the New Morning in Paris was broadcast on Mezzo in 2003, further tribute concerts were held at Le Triton and Les Arcades and in Lille in 2013, and Live au Petit Opportun, recorded at the Paris club of that name between 1996 and 1999, was issued in 2013.

Graillier was an introspective, harmonically searching pianist. He named Bud Powell, Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner as his main influences, and later Herbie Hancock of the Miles Davis quintet. The critic Xavier Prévost, writing in the Dictionnaire du Jazz, described a playing of inwardness and breath that leaves room for silence, and his repertoire bears that out: the live recital Toutes ces choses... mixes "Solar", "Dolphin Dance", "Naima" and "Moment's Notice" with standards, and the solo album Fairly takes up pieces by Tyner, Richard Beirach and Hank Mobley beside his own. Alain Jean-Marie remembered a player of great concentration whose music was always serious and never light or superfluous, with a fragile poetry and real power; the critic Alain Gerber wrote that he refused to be voluble in vain. His chamber-like touch suited the drummerless and trio settings of his Chet Baker years, and the Baker group's minimal sound is a good guide to his taste. His Magma period belongs to French progressive rock rather than jazz, and he moved between the two worlds with ease, but nearly all of his own records are jazz piano albums.