Michel Sardaby was a pianist and composer born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, on September 4, 1935. He made his career in Paris and recorded there, in New York and in Tokyo. His father kept a brasserie and sold pianos, and Sardaby began on the piano at the age of five. He took lessons as a boy but gave them up because he found his teacher too strict, studied art at the École Boulle in Paris, and then returned to music full time. He passed away in Paris on December 6, 2023, at the age of 88.

Through the 1960s he worked in Paris with his own groups and as an accompanist for visiting blues players, among them T-Bone Walker and Sonny Boy Williamson. Credits from the period show how wide his work was: he plays piano on a 1964 Philips EP of Christmas songs by the Martinican group of Barel Coppet, and he is credited as a musician on a 1965 Consul EP by Hazel Scott. In March 1967 he was one of the players on Tape for Billy, a 90-minute Paris session recorded for Billy Strayhorn while Strayhorn was in hospital, reportedly supervised by Duke Ellington, with Errol Parker and Claude Bolling among the others. German Wikipedia adds that he played in Paris with visiting Americans including Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Griffin, Clark Terry and Art Farmer.

His first records as a leader came on the Paris label Disques Debs and on Président. Blue Sunset (Debs HDD 508) is a trio date with the bassist Gilbert Rovère and the drummer Philippe Combelle. Five Cat's Blues (Président, recorded in October 1967) is a quintet record of five of his own compositions, with the trumpeter Pierre Dutour and the tenor saxophonist Alain Hatot. Night Cap was recorded in Paris on October 30, 1970 with Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay on drums. In the 1970s he spent more time in New York, and the records made there are the ones most often singled out: In New York (Debs, 1972), cut at RCA's Studio D with the bassist Richard Davis, the drummer Billy Cobham and the conga player Ray Barretto, and Gail, recorded at Media Sound on February 7, 1975 with Davis, the drummer Billy Hart and the percussionist Leopoldo Fleming. Sardaby played a Fender electric piano as well as acoustic piano on Gail, and the LP carried a sticker announcing the Prix Boris Vian 1976 of the Académie du Jazz.

In 1984 the Paris label Harmonic recorded him in two live concerts at the Modern Art Museum in Paris: Voyage with Ron Carter on bass (recorded on March 28 and May 18) and Caribbean Duet with Monty Alexander, a two-piano set recorded on November 24 and 25. Both came out in 1985. Going Places (Mantra, 1990) is a trio record with Rufus Reid and Marvin "Smitty" Smith, engineered by Rudy Van Gelder, and Night Blossom was recorded in Tokyo on August 1, 1990 for DIW with Jay Leonhart on bass and Albert Heath on drums. Straight On, a quintet set recorded live at the Alligators club in Paris on May 15 and 16, 1992 with the trumpeter Louis Smith, the tenor saxophonist Ralph Moore, Peter Washington on bass and the drummer Tony Reedus, was issued in 1993 by the Japanese label Sound Hills.

Sound Hills became his main label for the rest of his recording life. It issued Plays Classics and Ballads (recorded October 9 and 10, 1996, with Buster Williams and the drummer Ben Riley on most of the program), Intense Moment (recorded in Tokyo with Reggie Johnson and John Betsch), Karen (recorded October 10, 2002, with Reuben Rogers on bass), At Home (recorded April 18, 2004, with Ray Drummond, and including two tributes, one to his father and one to his mother) and Nature (recorded March 14 and 15, 2011, with the bassist Hassan Shakur and the drummer Alvin Queen). On April 21, 2005 a concert at L'Archipel in Paris marked his 70th birthday, and the recording was released as the double album Night in Paris on Universal Music Jazz France, with Johnson and Betsch.

AllMusic describes him as an adept pianist with a warm, sophisticated post-bop style, and notes a lyricism that grew alongside an interest in Latin and funk rhythms in the 1970s. Marc Myers, writing about the Gail reissue, calls him a bluesy, soulful player who draws out the feeling of a song, especially his own. The blues is documented in his early work as an accompanist, and he is reported to have listened to Duke Ellington's music a great deal as a child; the Ellington connection runs through his repertoire, which includes Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood", Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and "Lotus Blossom", and Monk's "In Walked Bud". German Wikipedia, citing the critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton, names John Lewis and Martial Solal as influences on his touch.

Most of his own records are built around his compositions, and the titles keep returning to family and to Martinique: "Waltz for My Father", "Song for My Children", "Martinica" and "Caribbean Flower", and "Macouba" on Caribbean Duet. He worked mostly in the piano trio, with rhythm sections drawn from the American bass and drum players he recorded with in New York, Paris and Tokyo, and he is not tied to a single scene: the records are French in origin, American in personnel and, from the 1990s, Japanese in distribution.