Frédéric "Fred" Nardin was born July 6, 1987, in Saint-Rémy, in the Saône-et-Loire department of Burgundy, into a family of amateur musicians: his father played tenor saxophone (after starting on drums and harmonica), his sister played piano, and his brother played drums. He took his first piano lessons at five, after hearing his sister work through Bach, Mozart, and Chopin. From age nine he studied classical music and jazz at the Conservatoire de Chalon-sur-Saône, then at eighteen entered the Jazz and Improvised Music department of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), earning a master's degree in 2011. In 2013 he began a second course of study in film-scoring composition at the CNSMDP under composer Laurent Petitgirard and Marie-Jeanne Serero, graduating in 2015 - training that shows up throughout his own writing in the form of through-composed preludes and interludes rather than straight head-solos-head structures.

In 2010, while still a student, Nardin co-founded The Amazing Keystone Big Band with three classmates, saxophonist Jon Boutellier, trombonist Bastien Ballaz, and trumpeter David Enhco, an eighteen-piece ensemble built initially around jazz re-arrangements of classical repertoire for family audiences. Its debut album, a big-band re-adaptation of Prokofiev's Pierre et le Loup... et le Jazz narrated by actors Denis Podalydès and Leslie Menu, won the Académie du Jazz's award for Best French Jazz Album in 2013; the band followed it with Le Carnaval Jazz des Animaux (2015, narrated by Édouard Baer) and Monsieur Django et Lady Swing (2017, narrated by Guillaume Gallienne), and won the Victoires du Jazz award for Best Group of the Year in 2018. A later release, Alice au Pays des Merveilles, received the Académie Charles-Cros's "Coup de Coeur Jeune Public" distinction in 2021. As one of the band's four artistic directors (alongside Ballaz, Boutellier, and Enhco), Nardin helped build and lead a 2014 tribute program to Quincy Jones that premiered at the Théâtre Antique during the Jazz à Vienne festival in front of more than 6,000 people, with Jones himself in attendance; the seventeen-piece band's arrangements spanned six decades of Jones's career, from "Soul Bossa Nova" to "Killer Joe." The band's history also lists collaborations with singers and instrumentalists including Cécile McLorin Salvant, Zaz, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Gregory Porter, Rhoda Scott, Charles Aznavour, and James Carter.

Outside the big band, Nardin built a parallel career as an in-demand pianist, arranger, and producer across the French jazz and chanson scenes. He arranged and played piano on "Le Front Caché Sur Tes Genoux," a French-language track on Cécile McLorin Salvant's WomanChild (2013, Mack Avenue) - one of only two French-sung tracks on that album - and served as orchestra director on three tracks of Zaz's Paris (2014). He has been a member of the collaborative Switch Trio (with guitarist Maxime Fougères and bassist Samuel Hubert) since its 2014-2015 debut At Home! and its 2020 follow-up In Town, and has worked repeatedly with saxophonist Gaël Horellou (Roy, 2014; Moral de Fer, 2016; the organ-quintet album released as Power Organ Quintet/Organ Power!, 2021). His most extensive outside collaboration has been with Italian saxophonist Stefano Di Battista, for whom he has served as pianist, arranger, and artistic director on Morricone Stories (2021, Warner Music) and La Dolce Vita (2024, Warner Music). Since 2023 he has also worked extensively with French pop singer Pascal Obispo, as arranger and co-producer of the album Le Beau Qui Pleut and as musical director of the accompanying "30 ans de succès" and "Correspondances" tours, and as producer and pianist on Obispo's 2024 covers album Chante Salvador. His most recent outside credits include Move Your Feet (2023), a collaborative trio recording with guitarist Michael Valeanu and drummer Andreas Svendsen on which Nardin plays organ; Soul Keepers (2024), with saxophonists Ralph Moore and Michael Cheret; and Altesques (2024, Space Time Records), a saxophone-led session with Baptiste Herbin, Jon Gordon, Pierrick Pédron, and Géraldine Laurent.

Nardin received the Académie du Jazz's Prix Django Reinhardt in 2017, awarded annually to a French Musician of the Year (for 2016), and was nominated the following year for a Victoires du Jazz Rising Artist award. In March 2026 he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France's Ministry of Culture, alongside trumpeter and Duke Ellington specialist Laurent Mignard, recognized for his work as a pianist, organist, arranger, composer, and artistic director. He taught jazz piano at the Chalon-sur-Saône conservatory from 2009 to 2015 and jazz piano and arrangement at the Pôle d'Enseignement Supérieur de la Musique de Bourgogne from 2011 to 2015.

Nardin's best-known vehicle as a leader remains his own piano trio, formed in 2016 with American drummer Leon Parker (whom he had met in Paris in 2008) and New York bassist Or Bareket, whom Parker introduced to him in Harlem. That lineup recorded three albums together, Opening (2017), Look Ahead (2019), and Live In Paris (2022); a full account of the trio and that lineup's catalog is maintained in the Fred Nardin Trio profile on this site. The trio's personnel changed for its fourth album: Trio [+] (2025, Jazz Family), still released under the Fred Nardin Trio name, features Swedish bassist Viktor Nyberg and drummer Romain Sarron in place of Bareket and Parker, with guest appearances from Anne Sila (vocals), Stefano Di Battista and Max Pinto (saxophones), Raynald Colom (trumpet), Maxime Fougères and Sébastien Giniaux (guitars), and Inor Sotolongo (percussion). Bareket and Parker's tenure in the trio therefore spans its first three releases (2017-2022) rather than its full catalog to date.

In a 2018 interview with CultureJazz.fr, Nardin named a wide range of pianistic touchstones: Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Kirkland, Kenny Barron, and Mulgrew Miller among jazz pianists, alongside classical composers Debussy and Fauré. French critic Denis Desassis, reviewing Look Ahead for Citizen Jazz, noted that drummer Leon Parker had himself worked alongside two of those named influences, Miller and Barron, calling it "an honor" for Nardin to inherit that lineage at one remove. Desassis also praised the trio's sound as "a claimed jazz classicism" whose "fluency, paired with total command of the vocabulary, wins over the listener without the slightest reservation." Across his own writing, whether for the trio, the Amazing Keystone Big Band, or outside arranging work, Nardin favors composed frames around improvisation - the film-scoring study shows in his fondness for preludes and interludes that bookend a soloist's space rather than a plain theme-solos-theme design.