Roger Guérin was a trumpeter, flugelhorn and cornet player and singer who spent his working life in the Paris jazz scene and, in his last years, in the south of France. He was born in Saarbrücken on January 9, 1926, and trained at the Paris Conservatoire. He recorded far more as a sideman than as a leader, yet French jazz critics and readers voted him best French trumpeter in the Jazz Hot polls ten years in a row, from 1955 to 1965, according to his label Fresh Sound Records.

Citizen Jazz, drawing on a 2002 Jazz Hot interview, describes a childhood split between school and the rural cinema his father ran. He began violin lessons at eight, took up the trumpet and then the cornet at eleven in a brass band in Méziéres, and kept playing violin for some years. Hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's "Hot House", Gillespie's 1948 concert at the Salle Pleyel and Louis Armstrong records settled the matter. Through a friend in the Hot Club he joined the orchestra of Aimé Barelli, and in 1948, on his teacher's advice, he entered Raymond Sabarich's class at the Paris Conservatoire. He won first prizes there in trumpet (1949) and cornet (1950), and chose not to follow a classical career.

Through the 1950s he made his living in dance and variety orchestras, among them those of Barelli, Ray Ventura and Yves Montand, and kept a jazz career running beside it. In 1951 he was the trumpeter on the Paris sides that James Moody cut for Royal Roost, with Raymond Fol on piano and Pierre Michelot on bass. He is credited on two Paris sessions with Django Reinhardt, recorded on January 30, 1952 and January 30, 1953, later gathered on the Gitanes reissue Nuits de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In 1956 he was among the trumpeters on Michel Legrand's Michel Legrand à l'Alhambra and played on Christian Chevallier's Formidable, and he plays trumpet on two tracks of Plays André Hodeir, the album Kenny Clarke's sextet recorded on October 26, November 21 and November 30, 1956. Swing FM's biography dates two long associations to 1956: with the pianist Martial Solal, which lasted until the late 1980s, and with the composer André Hodeir, for whom he was the main trumpet and flugelhorn soloist until 1972. The 1957 album Le Jazz Groupe de Paris joue André Hodeir lists him in the band.

His own name first appears on Night in Tunisia, an EP recorded in Paris in 1956 and issued by Versailles, by the Roger Guérin Quartet with Solal, the bassist Pierre Michelot and the drummer Christian Garros. In 1958 he represented France in the International Youth Band at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Citizen Jazz lists Louis Armstrong among the musicians he worked with at Newport that year. In December 1958 he led two Paris sessions for Columbia, on December 12 with Benny Golson and Bobby Timmons and on December 18 with Solal and the vibraphonist Michel Hausser. They were issued in 1959 as the 10-inch LP Roger Guérin, Benny Golson with Bobby Timmons (Jazz Stars Series, Columbia FP 1117 S), and the same material appeared on the EP Blues March / Moanin'. In 1959 he won the Académie du Jazz's Prix Django-Reinhardt and recorded Solal's Suite n°1 en ré bémol pour quartette de jazz. Alongside the horn he sang: he is listed in the vocal groups Les Blue Stars and Les Double Six, the second founded by Mimi Perrin, in which he sang with Eddy Louiss and others.

In 1960 he played in the trumpet section of Quincy Jones's big band on its European tour, and the Lausanne concert of June 27, 1960 was later issued by TCB. He was in the trumpet section of Dizzy Gillespie's big band at the Antibes festival on July 22, 1962, and appeared in the trumpet sections of the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band records Jazz Is Universal (1962) and Handle With Care (recorded in Cologne on January 25 and 26, 1963). Other Paris dates of the decade include Mickey Baker's Mickey Baker Plays Mickey Baker (1962, trumpet on every track), Pierre Michelot's Round About a Bass (July 1963), the Vogue album Vivants! with the trumpeter Ivan Jullien and André Hodeir's jazz cantata Anna Livia Plurabelle (1966, on flugelhorn). In 1965 he played the trumpet solo on Claude Nougaro's song "Armstrong", and in 1964 he made two Bel Air EPs under his own name, one of them with the saxophonist Jean-Claude Fohrenbach on songs by Nino Ferrer.

In a 2002 Jazz Hot interview he said he had tried free jazz in the 1960s without being convinced, and he moved toward the world of entertainment, directing the orchestra at the Casino de Paris from 1970 to 1975. The 1972 CBS record of Zizi Jeanmaire's Casino de Paris revue lists him as conductor, and the same year he played the trumpet line on Maxime Le Forestier's "Mon frére". From the middle of the 1970s he taught, at the CIM and in conservatoires, while leading his own big band (Swing FM dates it from 1972 to 1990) and joining Solal's big band in 1981 and his Dodecaband, with Eric Le Lann and Tony Russo, for Plays Ellington in 2000. Late in his career he recorded with the drummer and composer Henri Chenuet: Musique à voir (1988) and a Gershwin album (1989), both on the Oreil label, and in 2003 the quartet album Carrément, with the guitarist René Mailhes, the keyboardist Patrice Galas and Chenuet. He settled in Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the mid-1990s and kept playing concerts in the region. He passed away on February 6, 2010, at 84, after an accidental fall into a canal.

Guérin was a modern-jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player schooled at the conservatoire, with a metallic, penetrating tone and a taste for humorous quotations in his solos. German-language references describe him as equally at home in traditional and modern jazz, which made him a dependable partner for visiting American soloists, and French writers compared his sound on trumpet and flugelhorn to Clifford Brown's. His formative listening was Parker and Gillespie ("Hot House"), Gillespie's 1948 Paris concert and Armstrong's records, and his friendship with Gillespie is cited as the way Quincy Jones first heard of him. The arranger Billy Byers, who worked in Paris in 1956, said of him, "Roger Guérin is a great jazzman". He also sang, in the vocal group Les Double Six and, on the 1989 Gershwin album, as lead vocalist on two tracks. His range ran from the hard bop of the Golson and Timmons session to big-band section work and studio and variety music; he tried free jazz in the 1960s and decided it was not for him.