Renaud Garcia-Fons was born in Paris on December 24, 1962, and is a French double bassist and composer who plays a five-string double bass, mostly with the bow, in music that draws on jazz, flamenco, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern traditions and baroque writing. French Wikipedia describes him as the son of the painter Pierre Garcia-Fons, from a family of Catalan origin. AllMusic says he began on piano at five, moved to classical guitar at eight, played rock in his teens and settled on the bass at sixteen.

He studied at the conservatoire in Paris and took his bowing technique from the bassist François Rabbath; French Wikipedia adds the name of Jean-Pierre Logerot. A concert biography says he won prizes at the conservatoires of Paris and Aubervilliers and holds the state teaching diploma for double bass, and his own site says that at 21 he won the City of Paris prize for classical double bass. His biographies stress that he had the idea early on of adding a fifth string to the instrument.

His first jazz work, according to his own site and English Wikipedia, was in the ensemble of the trumpeter Roger Guérin. From 1987 he was a member of L'Orchestre de Contrebasses, an ensemble of double basses that French Wikipedia and AllMusic both place at about six years. In the same years he played in the Orchestre national de jazz under Claude Barthélemy: Discogs credits him on double bass on Claire (Label Bleu, 1990, recorded in December 1989) and on Jack-Line (1991), in a band that also had Michel Godard on tuba, the accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier and the reed player Michael Riessler. He is on two tracks of Marc Ducret's Gris (Label Bleu, recorded in May 1990), on Riessler's Héloïse (recorded at Donaueschingen in October 1992) and Momentum Mobile (recorded live there in October 1993), and on the guitarist Gérard Marais's Est (recorded in December 1992), a quintet record with Louis Sclavis.

His own records began with Légendes for the German label Enja, recorded in France in December 1992, and with Suite Andalouse (Al Sur, 1994), a duo with the flamenco guitarist Pedro Soler. Alboreá (Enja, 1995) was recorded in Montreuil in June 1995 by a quartet with Matinier on accordion, Jacques Mahieux on drums and Yves Torchinsky on a second bass. Oriental Bass (1997) brought in the lutenist Claire Antonini, the flamenco guitarist Vicente Pradal, a clarinet, a flute, a trombone and percussion, and Fuera (1999) is a duo with Matinier recorded between December 1998 and March 1999 at Studio Zerkall in Germany. Navigatore (2001) and Entremundo (2004) followed, then Arcoluz (2005), a live CD and DVD from Schloss Elmau in Bavaria in July 2005 by a trio with the flamenco guitarist Kiko Ruiz and the percussionist Negrito Trasante. La Línea del Sur (2009, with the singer Esperanza Fernández on three tracks) and Méditerranées (2010) came next, and Solo: The Marcevol Concert (CD and DVD, ENJ-9581) was recorded on September 24 and 25, 2011 at the Prieuré de Marcevol in the Pyrénées-Orientales. A 2010 concert biography already counts nine albums for Enja, and Beyond the Double Bass (2013) gathers ten tracks from them with a documentary film by Nicolas Dattilesi.

Outside his own bands he is a regular guest on other leaders' records. He plays on one of the three trios of Nguyên Lê's 3 Trios (ACT, 1997), the Paris sessions of November 1996, and on Bakida (2000) and on Fragile Beauty (2007, with the singer Huong Thanh and Paolo Fresu on trumpet), on Michel Godard's Castel del Monte (Enja, recorded in September 1998 at the castle in Apulia, with Gianluigi Trovesi and Pino Minafra), on Trovesi's nonet record Round About a Midsummer's Dream (Enja, 2000), on Dhafer Youssef's Malak (1999), on Kudsi Erguner's Islam Blues (ACT, 2001) and on Matinier's Confluences (Enja, 2003). Later credits include the pianist David Peña Dorantes's Sin Muros! (2012), the contrabass on three tracks of Françoise Hardy's Personne d'autre (2018) and the bass on two tracks of Paul Simon's In the Blue Light (2018).

From 2014 his records came out on the E-motive label. Silk Moon (2014) is a duo with the kemençe player Derya Türkan, Paseo a Dos (2015) a set of flamenco forms with Dorantes recorded in Spain in January 2015, and La Vie devant soi (2017) a trio with the accordionist David Venitucci and the vibraphonist Stéphan Caracci. Farangi (Du baroque à l'Orient) (2019) pairs him with the theorbo and lute player Claire Antonini, and Le Souffle des cordes (2021) is an octet with violins, viola, cello, kanun, kemençe and flamenco guitar, with sleeve notes by Henri Texier. Cinematic Double Bass: Music for Imaginary Films (2023) is a double album on his own label, and Blue Maqam (Sound Surveyor, 2024) was recorded at the Théâtre du Vésinet in April 2024 with the vocalist Solea Garcia-Fons, Caracci and the percussionist Jean-Luc Di Fraya; French Wikipedia says Jazz Magazine gave it its CHOC rating.

The prizes are mostly jazz prizes. English Wikipedia lists the Solo Performance Award of the International Society of Bassists (2009), the Echo Deutscher Musikpreis Jazz for best international instrumentalist in the bass and guitar category (2010 and again in 2011), the Giraldillo for musical interpretation at the Seville flamenco biennale (2010), an Echo for best music DVD for the Marcevol concert (2012) and the BMW Welt Jazz Award with his trio (2017). The Grand Prix du jazz of the SACEM, the French authors' society, went to him in 2021, in the year of Le Souffle des cordes. He also writes for other media: string quartets commissioned by France Musique, Mundus Imaginalis for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Ensemble de Basse-Normandie, the theme of France Culture's Les Racines du ciel, the score of the television film Le Pacte sacré (2016) and the music for Sam Garbarski's feature film Es war einmal in Deutschland... (2017).

His playing is built on the bow. All About Jazz reviewers describe a bass that moves between pizzicato, arco and a mixed technique he calls "pizz d'arco", with the fifth string pushing it toward cello and violin registers, and the nickname "the Paganini of the double bass" appears on both AllMusic and English Wikipedia. His teacher François Rabbath is the lineage he names first; English Wikipedia says the strongest influences on his writing are the Iranian tanbur tradition and the master Ostad Elahi, and the Marcevol concert includes "Voyage à Jeyhounabad", credited as inspired by Ostad Elahi's style. Flamenco enters through long partnerships with guitarists and singers such as Pedro Soler, Kiko Ruiz, Esperanza Fernández and Dorantes, and a Mediterranean and Turkish strand runs through Méditerranées, Silk Moon and Blue Maqam.

How much of this is jazz is a matter of emphasis. AllMusic files him under jazz, and Discogs tags the large majority of his albums as jazz, with world-music tags alongside. The Citizen Jazz review of Le Souffle des cordes hears a strong swing and pulse rooted in jazz inside a record that sits between jazz, baroque writing and world music, with the cross-cultural side most prominent. His own site presents jazz, flamenco and world music as parts of one personal language. Because the field offers no exact label for this blend, the tags above name the two canonical subgenres closest to it.