Nguyên Lê is a Paris-born guitarist and composer who has spent more than three decades joining jazz improvisation, rock energy and the music of Vietnam, North Africa and beyond. He was born on January 14, 1959, to Vietnamese parents who had settled in France in 1949. He began on drums at fifteen, then taught himself guitar and electric bass. Before turning to music full time he took a degree in visual arts and a master's degree in philosophy, with work on the concept of exoticism, a subject that returns again and again in his records.

In 1983 he founded the group Ultramarine with the keyboardist Mario Canonge and the percussionist Bago Balthazar, a band that won first prize at the national jazz competition at La Défense and recorded three albums, Programme Jungle (1985), Dé (1989) and Esimala. In 1987 the pianist Antoine Hervé, then director of the Orchestre National de Jazz, chose him as the orchestra's guitar soloist, and he is heard on its records O.N.J. 87 (Label Bleu, 1988) and African Dream (1989).

His first record as a leader, Miracles (1990), was made in the United States with the pianist Art Lande, the bassist Marc Johnson and the drummer Peter Erskine, and it was followed by Zanzibar (1992) with Lande and the reed player Paul McCandless. From 1993 he was a regular guest soloist with the WDR Big Band in Cologne under the composer and arranger Vince Mendoza, and in April 1994 he was the soloist in Bob Brookmeyer's large-orchestra suite The New Yorker. In 1995 he began a long association with the German label ACT, which has issued most of his records since, starting with the trio album Million Waves with the bassist Dieter Ilg and the drummer Danny Gottlieb.

The ACT years produced his most widely known projects. Tales from Viêt-Nam (1996) blended jazz with traditional Vietnamese music, with the singer Huong Thanh, the zither player Hao Nhien and guests such as the trumpeter Paolo Fresu and the percussionist Trilok Gurtu; he had studied the Vietnamese one-string zither đàn bầu with the master Truong Tang. Maghreb & Friends (1998) turned to North African music, and Purple: Celebrating Jimi Hendrix (2002) reworked Hendrix's repertoire with a changing cast that included the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. The trio ELB, with Erskine and the bassist Michel Benita, made E_L_B (2001) and Dream Flight (2008), and the duo album Homescape (2006) paired him with Fresu and the Tunisian oud player Dhafer Youssef. In 2006 he received the Django d'Or for guitar, and he recorded with Uri Caine's ensemble on its Mozart and Othello projects for Winter & Winter. In March 2010 he was the soloist in Erkki-Sven Tüür's Fifth Symphony with the Bremen Philharmonic.

Songs of Freedom (2011), an album of 1970s pop and rock songs recast for a jazz band, brought him the Prix Django Reinhardt of the Académie du Jazz as French jazz musician of the year. He was named to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2012. He later recorded Celebrating the Dark Side of the Moon (2014) with the arranger Michael Gibbs and the NDR Bigband, the duo album Hà Nội Duo (2017) with the Vietnamese guitarist Ngô Hồng Quang, the quartet record Streams (2019) and, in 2023, the trio album Silk and Sand. He joined the Moroccan guembri player Majid Bekkas and the drummer Hamid Drake for Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic XVII: Gnawa World Blues (2025), and he remains active as a leader and as a guest soloist.

Nguyên Lê is a guitar and electronics player whose music joins Vietnamese roots to the influence of Jimi Hendrix, under the sign of jazz improvisation and rock energy. He carries into the guitar the phrasing, pentatonic lines and modes of Asian traditional instruments, above all the đàn bầu, and he layers them with fretless guitar, guitar synthesizer, samplers and laptop. His records divide between jazz-rock and fusion bands (the ELB trio, the Purple band, his quartets) and projects built on the music of other cultures (Vietnamese, Maghrebi, Gnawa); the first group is the core of his career, and the second keeps improvisation at its center. The Académie du Jazz and the Django d'Or jury have honored him, and orchestras and big bands from Cologne to Hamburg have asked him to solo with them.