Jacques Loussier was born October 26, 1934, in Angers, France, and began piano lessons at ten. At eleven he heard a piece from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach and was transfixed; two years later, in Paris, he met the pianist Yves Nat, who set him a series of short study projects and steered him toward the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique, where Loussier enrolled at sixteen and studied under Nat for six years. Rather than pursue a purely classical career afterward, he traveled through the Middle East and Latin America, spending roughly a year in Cuba absorbing music well outside the conservatory tradition, and returned to Paris to work as an accompanist and arranger for popular singers of the day, including Frank Alamo and Catherine Sauvage, for whom he arranged and conducted "Jacques Loussier et son Orchestre" on a run of chanson recordings through the early and mid-1960s.

In 1959 Loussier formed a trio with bassist Pierre Michelot, previously a member of Django Reinhardt's Quintette du Hot Club de France, and drummer Christian Garros, built around a simple, radical idea: playing Bach's keyboard and orchestral works as a jazz piano trio, retaining Bach's melodic and harmonic material while opening it up to swung rhythm, walking bass, and improvised variation. The resulting Play Bach series, issued on Decca beginning with a 1960 debut LP recorded in Paris, became a genuine commercial phenomenon: the trio sold more than six million albums in its first fifteen years, eventually topped seven million records overall, and performed more than 3,000 concerts. A 1966 tour of Germany was formally endorsed by the Bonn government as a contribution to Franco-German cultural understanding. Critical reaction split sharply from public enthusiasm: classical purists were frequently hostile, with one American critic dismissing the group's playing as "tiresome and offensive," while Loussier maintained that he was not subverting Bach but honoring an improvising tradition Bach himself had practiced as a working keyboardist.

The original trio wound down by the late 1970s as Loussier turned toward composing for film and television, eventually completing scores for more than one hundred productions, including the theme for the French television series Thierry la Fronde and the score for the 1968 war film Dark of the Sun. In 1977 he opened Studio Miraval on his property in Correns, Provence; the studio became internationally known in its own right, hosting sessions for artists including Pink Floyd (parts of The Wall), Elton John, Sting, Chris Rea, and Sade, and the surrounding Château Miraval estate was later purchased by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and developed as a vineyard.

Loussier revived the Jacques Loussier Trio in 1985 to mark the 300th anniversary of Bach's birth, with drummer André Arpino and bassist Vincent Charbonnier; Benoît Dunoyer de Segonzac joined on bass in 1997 after Charbonnier suffered a stroke, and this lineup remained together for the rest of Loussier's performing career. Recording for Telarc from the mid-1990s onward, the reconstituted trio widened its repertoire well beyond Bach, releasing jazz-trio interpretations of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (1997), Satie's Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes (1998), Ravel's Boléro (1999), Debussy (2000), Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks (2002), Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 (2003), a solo-piano set of Chopin's Nocturnes (2004), and Mozart piano concertos (2005), alongside further Bach anniversary releases in 1999 and 2009. In 2002 Loussier filed a $10 million lawsuit against Eminem and Dr. Dre, alleging that the beat of "Kill You," from The Marshall Mathers LP, had been lifted from his 1979 electronic composition "Pulsion"; the case was settled out of court. Loussier continued performing into his late seventies, suffering a stroke onstage on July 14, 2011, during a concert at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr in Germany, after which he retired from performing. He died March 5, 2019, in Blois, France, at eighty-four.

Loussier's music is usually described, including by the artist himself, as third stream: a genuine synthesis of jazz and classical vocabulary rather than a novelty crossover, built from a classically exact reading of Bach's counterpoint laid over a swinging, walking-bass jazz-trio rhythm section, with substantial passages of trio improvisation grafted onto the original themes. His conservatory training under Yves Nat gave him a level of technical fluency with the source material that distinguished his records from lighter "classics with a beat" novelty records of the same era, and he defended the format for decades against critics who considered it a dilution of Bach rather than, in his own view, a continuation of the improvisatory practice Baroque keyboardists were themselves expected to exercise. Reception shifted over his career: early Play Bach records drew real hostility from classical purists and only lukewarm interest from jazz critics, but by the time of the trio's 1997 recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, much of that resistance had softened into recognition of a distinct, durable idiom that Loussier had sustained, virtually unchanged in its basic method, across five decades and dozens of albums.