Michel Pastre is a tenor saxophonist and bandleader who plays in the swing tradition of the 1930s and 1940s. He was born in Nîmes on April 7, 1966, and tried the drums and the alto saxophone before settling on the tenor. He grew up in a jazz household: in a 2025 interview he said his father already loved jazz in the 1950s and 1960s, and that at ten he went to the first jazz festival held in the Nîmes arena, in 1976, where he remembers the orchestra of Dany Doriz. He began playing as an amateur around Nîmes in the 1980s, and at the Lycée Daudet he started a school jazz club with a friend and a mathematics teacher. He has since settled in Paris.

From 1991 to 1998 he played in two big bands, Banana Jazz and the Tuxedo Big Band. He is the tenor saxophonist on the Tuxedo Big Band's Siesta at the Fiesta (TBB Records, 1996) and To Ella and Chick (1998), and the band recorded with the clarinetist Bob Wilber for Arbors in 1999. In 1995 he joined the Super Swing Machine, the big band led by Gérard Badini, and he plays tenor on its 2006 album Scriabin's Groove beside the pianist Pierre Christophe. He is also the first tenor on the Paris Swing Orchestra's We Got Rhythm (Black and Blue, 2000).

His own groups began in the late 1990s. In 1997 he formed a quintet with the trumpeter Alain Bouchet. In 1999 he toured France with the guitarist Al Casey, who had played with Fats Waller, and the tenor saxophonist David "Bubba" Brooks; the septet's live recording appeared on Djaz Records. The Académie du Jazz gave him its Prix Sidney Bechet, awarded to the traditional-jazz musician of the year, for 1999. In 2000 he founded the Michel Pastre Big Band, whose first album, Diggin' the Count (Djaz, 2001), was recorded in Paris on June 11 to 14, 2001, and which went on to record To Prez and Count for Jazz aux Remparts. A 2012 album, Battle Royal, set the band against Laurent Mignard's Duke Orchestra, and Travelin' Light with Billie (2015) paired a quartet and the big band with the singer Dominique Magloire.

Since the mid-2010s the records have come from smaller groups. The quintet with the trumpeter Malo Mazurié, the guitarist David Blenkhorn, the bassist Sébastien Girardot and the drummer Guillaume Nouaux made Charlie Christian Project (2015) and a 2017 album with the vibraphonist Dany Doriz and the clarinetist Ken Peplowski, which won the Académie du Jazz's Prix Jazz Classique. He had already shared that prize in 2016, with Jérôme Etcheberry and the pianist Louis Mazetier, for the trio album 7:33 To Bayonne. In 2022 he shared it a third time for Fathers & Sons, a quartet record with Doriz and their sons, the organist César Pastre and the drummer Didier Doriz, honoring Lionel Hampton and Illinois Jacquet. The Mazetier and Nouaux trio followed with Fine Ideas (2023).

He is still active. In a 2025 interview he announced a concert in the Gard on October 10 with Doriz and the two sons, tied to his return to the Nîmes Métropole Jazz Festival, and said he was preparing a spring tour and a record with the American tenor saxophonists Scott Hamilton and Harry Allen. A live album credited to him with Hamilton and Allen, The Three Swinging Tenors (From Tarnos to Paris), was released on Camille Productions on October 22, 2026.

Pastre plays swing-era tenor in the lineage that runs through Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, and his own record titles point the same way: Diggin' the Count and To Prez and Count nod to Count Basie and Young, Travelin' Light with Billie to Billie Holiday, Battle Royal set the band against Laurent Mignard's orchestra devoted to Duke Ellington, and Charlie Christian Project to the guitarist Charlie Christian. Scott Yanow, reviewing Fine Ideas in 2023, heard echoes of Hawkins and Don Byas on the opening track and a lighter Young sound on "Mean To Me", and compared the trio to a lively mid-1940s swing combo. Jazz Journal's review of Fathers & Sons described a smooth, mellow tone that sits well against Doriz's vibraphone and singled out his own composition "Sweet Panther". A French radio write-up of a Paris concert with Hamilton and Allen places the three of them in the Texas tenor tradition. Pastre himself says he favors traditional swing, the kind that makes people dance. His records are in the swing and mainstream idiom, in big band and small group settings alike.