René Urtreger was a Paris-born pianist who spent more than seventy years at the centre of French bebop. He was born on July 6, 1934, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, to Polish-Jewish parents, and grew up in occupied France; DownBeat's obituary reports that his mother was deported to Auschwitz and did not return. He began piano at four and studied at the conservatoire, where Chopin was his first passion. Swing records played by his older sisters and their fiancés opened the way to jazz, and by his teens he had found bebop. Charlie Parker became his favorite musician and Bud Powell his lasting model: in a 2001 interview he said Powell's phrases sang like saxophone phrases.

In the early 1950s he played the Left Bank clubs, including the Sully d'Auteuil, where Sacha Distel and the drummer Jean-Louis Viale were fellow students. In 1953 he won a national piano contest for amateurs, which decided him on a professional career, and the pianist Bernard Peiffer recommended him for the band at the Club Saint-Germain. In 1954 he accompanied the saxophonist Don Byas and the trumpeter Buck Clayton in Paris. The American drummer Kenny Clarke, then living in France, taught him how to work in a rhythm section and brought him to the visiting Americans. In 1955 he recorded René Urtreger Joue Bud Powell for Barclay, with Benoît Quersin on bass and Viale on drums, now regarded as a landmark of European bebop. Before he was twenty-five he had worked with Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, the Belgian saxophonist Bobby Jaspar, Chet Baker, Stéphane Grappelli and Lionel Hampton, and he toured Europe with Lester Young in 1956; he is on Young's last recording, Le Dernier Message de Lester Young (Barclay, 1959).

His best-known session came with Miles Davis. Davis toured Europe in 1956, and in late 1957 he appeared in Paris with a group built around Urtreger, with the tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, the bassist Pierre Michelot and Clarke. A November concert at the Olympia was followed in December by the studio session that produced the score for Louis Malle's film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, issued on Fontana in 1958. The sparse harmonic setting is often seen as a precursor of Davis's later modal work, and Urtreger's piano is part of that foundation.

In 1960 he formed the HUM trio with Michelot and the drummer Daniel Humair; its record Hum! appeared on Vega that year, and in 1961 he received the Prix Django Reinhardt of the Académie du Jazz. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s he took work outside jazz, accompanying the pop singer Claude François (he is on the live album À l'Olympia), working with Serge Gainsbourg and Distel, and writing film music, including the soundtrack album La Première Fois (Pathé, 1976) and scores for Claude Berri and René Féret. He later said that alcohol and drugs had undermined his playing for about twenty years, and that he stopped drinking at forty-two.

From 1977 he returned to the Paris jazz scene full time. Récidive (Sonopresse, 1978), with the guitarist Marc Fosset, the bassist Alby Cullaz and Viale, marked the comeback, and a new Urtreger-Michelot-Humair record followed on Carlyne Music in 1979. He played the Antibes festival in 1980 and, through the decade, concerts and festivals with Dizzy Gillespie, Getz and Lee Konitz, as well as with Aldo Romano, Wilen and a younger generation of French players. His solo album Jazzman (1985) and Masters (1987), made with the bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, were followed by Move (Black and Blue, 1997) and the trio album HUM (Sketch, 1999). The Victoires de la Musique gave him the jazz prize in 2000 for HUM and an honorary award in 2005. He also received the Grand Prix SACEM (1997), the rank of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (2006) and the Légion d'honneur as a Knight (2009).

In his later years he led a trio with the bassist Yves Torchinsky and the drummer Éric Dervieu (an album on Carlyne Music, 2014), published the conversation book Le Roi René with the novelist Agnès Desarthe (2016) and recorded Premier Rendez-vous with her (Naïve, 2017). A solo piano LP appeared on LP3 45 Records in 2020. He lived in the countryside of the Perche region and was a keen chess player. He passed away on July 16, 2026, at the hospital in Mortagne-au-Perche at the age of 92; his son Philippe announced the death to the news agency AFP.

Urtreger played swing-based bebop in the line of Bud Powell: fast right-hand lines that follow a saxophonist's phrasing, sharp harmonic thinking and a firm sense of tempo, an ideal he credited to Count Basie. His 1985 solo record Jazzman reworks bebop material in pieces such as "Budomania" and "Monkmania" and offers another take on "'Round Midnight". DownBeat's obituary calls him more traditional than contemporaries such as the pianist Bernard Peiffer and Martial Solal, whose playing moved toward abstraction. He named Charlie Parker as his favorite musician and admired Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Sonny Stitt for writing melody over complex harmony. He found free jazz hard to enjoy at first but came to think it had kept the music from stagnating, and he worried that jazz was becoming a music for specialists. French listeners called him "le roi René", the title his book with Agnès Desarthe also carries, and the Académie du Jazz, the Victoires de la Musique and the SACEM all honored his work.