Xavier Desandre Navarre, known as XDN, was born in Paris on October 11, 1961. He spent much of his childhood between Paris and Aix-en-Provence, and a year living with his family in Iran, he says, first awakened his interest in the range of rhythms that percussion can carry. In 1975 he began studying classical percussion at the conservatoire in Aix-en-Provence. Alongside it he learned Brazilian rhythms, from samba to candomblé, with Sylvio de Santana Jr., a master drummer of candomblé ceremonies in Brazil, and with the Brazilian musicologist and conductor Nicia Ribas d'Avila.

He settled in Paris in the autumn of 1987, when Laurent Cugny asked him to be the percussionist of his Orchestre Lumiére for a European tour with Gil Evans. The band recorded with Evans, and Discogs lists him on both Rhythm-A-Ning and Golden Hair, and later on Cugny's own Santander and Dromesko. In 1991 he joined the Orchestre national de jazz under Denis Badault, with whom he made three albums for Label Bleu, and he recorded in the same years with the trombonist Yves Robert and the cellist Vincent Courtois. At the Banlieues Bleues festival he gave a solo concert, Tribalmopolite, in 1992 and played with Charlie Haden's Liberation Orchestra in 1993. His own chronology also lists concerts and studio work with Michel Portal from 1995 to 1998, which no credited release confirms.

From the mid-1990s a long association with the Danish pianist Niels Lan Doky opened the Scandinavian scene to him. He is on Lan Doky's Doky Brothers 2 and his 1998 Verve Forecast album, and went on to record with the bassist Lars Danielsson, the singer Cæcilie Norby, the guitarist Ulf Wakenius and the trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær. He joined the pianist Tania Maria in 1997, and across these years also took on world-music and variety work, with Manu Dibango, Alan Stivell, Les Rita Mitsouko and Michel Jonasz. In 1998 he wrote music for the opening ceremony of the football World Cup in Paris, and in 1999 he helped found the production label Peak Power, which issued his own Zoom (2000).

His most visible recordings from the following decade are with the Korean singer Youn Sun Nah. He is on Memory Lane (2007), on Voyage (2008, as drummer) and on Same Girl (2010) and Lento (2013), the last two of which his own site lists among his gold records; Same Girl was also nominated for best French jazz album and went gold in Germany in 2011. In parallel he recorded Braining Storm (Fuga Libera, 2010) with the Belgian musicians Jean-Louis Rassinfosse, Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven and Fabrice Alleman, played the electronic show of Laurent Garnier at the Salle Pleyel, and in 2012 presented his solo programme Beat Body & Soul at the Lyon opera house.

In 2014 he released In-Pulse on Jazz Village, an acoustic quartet record of his own compositions with the saxophonist Stéphane Guillaume, the pianist Emil Spanyi and the bassist Stéphane Kerecki, with Vincent Peirani as guest on accordina. From 2015 to 2019 he played in the Wanderer Septet, the bassist Yves Rousseau's project on the songs of Franz Schubert, and in 2018 and 2019 he was an artist in residence at the Thâtre 71 in Malakoff. Conversations in Paris, a duo with the Tokyo-based Korean pianist Hakuei Kim recorded live at the Sunset-Sunside club in Paris on September 25, 2018, came out on Verve in Japan in 2019. In 2020 he composed the music for AKZAK, a dance piece by the choreographers Héla Fattoumi and Eric Lamoureux, and released In-Pulse 2 on Cristal Records. A filmed concert of the quartet, with the saxophonist Christophe Monniot in Guillaume's place, was issued on DVD by the Le Triton club in 2024. He also teaches, giving master classes and drum circles on rhythm, improvisation and electronic treatment of sound.

Desandre Navarre plays a hybrid set of drum kit, hand percussion and electronics, and uses his voice as part of the rhythm section; his own account is that everything can be percussion, down to the body and a plastic bag. His stated aim is to build bridges between African, Brazilian, Cuban and Middle Eastern rhythms and the language of jazz, and his quartet music is written around that idea, with melodic themes and a lot of room for improvisation. French press has described a musician who is constantly in motion and whose music joins Orient and Occident. He is a jazz musician above all in his leader records and in the big-band and orchestral work of the Cugny and Badault years, but a good part of his catalogue lies outside jazz, in electronic, world-music, variety and film and television work, which is why AllMusic files him under Jazz, International and Pop/Rock with the style tag Pan-Global.