Jean-Michel Pilc was born October 19, 1960, in Paris. His formal education was scientific rather than musical: he graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique, the French engineering grande ecole often compared to MIT, and spent three years working as an engineer on a television satellite project in Toulouse. He had taken piano lessons only until age ten, after which his real education, in his own telling, came from records: he would put on Earl Hines or Bud Powell and go to the piano to work out what he had heard by ear. In 1988, at 27, he quit engineering to become a full-time musician, already active by night on the Paris jazz scene. His first recorded appearances came from that period, including sideman work on Martial Solal and Eric Le Lann's 1989 strings album of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet material, the group album Funambule under his own trio's name the same year, and his first true leader date, Big One for 13 Piece Band (1993, EMP/Harmonia Mundi), a nonet-scale session that brought in trumpeter Enrico Rava and guitarist Marc Ducret alongside a five-man reed section. Through the first half of the 1990s he also recorded as a sideman with singer Elisabeth Kontomanou, drummer Aldo Romano, drummer Andre Ceccarelli, bassist Richard Bona (Scenes from My Life, 1999, Sony/Columbia), and saxophonist Jean Toussaint (Life I Want, 1995, World Circuit).

Pilc moved to New York City in 1995, reasoning, as he later put it, that the major festivals and the front pages of the jazz press belonged to musicians working in America. He formed a trio with bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Ari Hoenig and, in 2000, released the two-volume Together: Live at Sweet Basil, NYC on the Dutch label A-Records, drawn from a week-long engagement at the since-closed Greenwich Village club. The trio then signed to Dreyfus Jazz, releasing Welcome Home (2002), which carried liner notes from Harry Belafonte, for whom Pilc had worked as musical director and pianist. Cardinal Points followed in 2003, built around the extended piece "Trio Sonata," commissioned with support from Chamber Music America's New Works program and funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; it was named one of the year's fifty best albums by JazzTimes. Pilc released his first solo piano album, Follow Me, on Dreyfus in 2004, then returned to the trio format for Live at Iridium, New York (recorded October 2004, released 2005) and New Dreams (2007), the latter split between two drummers, Ari Hoenig and Mark Mondesir. True Story (2009) brought drummer Billy Hart and bassist Boris Kozlov into the group in place of the earlier rhythm section.

In 2010, Moutin and Hoenig reconvened with Pilc as a collective trio under the name Pilc Moutin Hoenig, releasing Threedom (2011, Motema) alongside a solo live recording, Essential (2011, also Motema). A documentary by filmmaker John McCormick, Jean-Michel Pilc: A Portrait, appeared the same year. In 2013 Pilc received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, funding a new octet piece he titled "Big One," reusing the name of his 1993 nonet album for an unrelated, larger-scale commission; no commercial recording of the Guggenheim-funded piece has been found. He released two more solo albums in the following years, What Is This Thing Called? (2014, Sunnyside), recorded alone over three nights with engineer Dan Tepfer setting up the equipment and leaving him with the piano, and Parallel (2018, Challenge Records). Alongside his own projects he kept a busy sideman calendar through the 2010s and into the 2020s: saxophonist Rosario Giuliani's More Than Ever (2004, Dreyfus Jazz), bassist Petros Klampanis's Minor Dispute (2014/2015), drummer Tony Moreno's Short Stories (2016), the Moutin Factory Quintet's Deep (2016), and a long-running duo and trio partnership with soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome documented across Magic Circle (2017), the NPO Trio's Live at the Stone (2018, with violinist Meg Okura), and Cosmic Unconsciousness Unplugged (2023).

In September 2015 Pilc joined the jazz faculty of the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, becoming a tenured full professor and serving as Jazz Area Chair from 2016 to 2018; he had previously taught at New York University's Steinhardt school from 2006 to 2015 and privately at the New School. He holds French, American, and Canadian citizenship. Since relocating to Montreal he has become a regular presence in that city's jazz scene as leader, co-leader, and sideman, recording with trumpeter Jacques Kuba Seguin, guitarist Kevin Dean, and singer Jonathan Orland, and signing to the Montreal-based Justin Time label, which has released Alive: Live at Diese Onze, Montreal (2022, with bassist Remi-Jean Leblanc and drummer Jim Doxas), the solo album Symphony (2023), and a new Pilc Moutin Hoenig studio record, You Are the Song (2023). Pilc is also, by multiple accounts including his own, an accomplished whistler, a skill documented on record as far back as Cardinal Points and later on a solo piano-and-whistle track on the various-artists album Christmas from the Blue Note (2010, Half Note). He is the author of the instructional book It's About Music: The Art and Heart of Improvisation (Carl Fischer) and has released several video courses on jazz improvisation.

Pilc's playing has been described by JazzTimes critic Thomas Conrad as among the most unpredictable in jazz from one tune to the next, capable of a "violent, thundering assault" on a standard immediately followed by a "wistful, crystalline fragmentation" of another. He draws on an unusually wide range for a jazz pianist: two-handed contrapuntal writing in a Baroque manner, the harmonic language of Bill Evans, and a free, form-scrambling approach to standards that treats a familiar melody as raw material for structural experiment rather than a fixed vehicle. He is entirely self-taught on piano beyond childhood lessons that stopped at age ten, and has argued in interviews that jazz itself, as a still-young idiom, was mostly transmitted this way among musicians of his generation, who learned by imitating recordings rather than through formal jazz pedagogy. His catalog runs from small-group standards dates to large-ensemble original writing (the 13-piece Big One) to unaccompanied solo recitals built on extended theme-and-variations structures borrowed from classical practice, most explicitly on What Is This Thing Called?, a 68-minute set of 29 variations on Cole Porter's title tune. His own artist biography and his McGill faculty page both state that he has performed live, at various points in a touring career spanning more than 60 countries, with a long list of major names including Michael Brecker, Kenny Garrett, Roy Haynes, Chris Potter, John Abercrombie, Dave Liebman, Marcus Miller, Lenny White, Michel Portal, and Daniel Humair; none of these names appears in his own selective discography or anywhere in his complete 90-item Discogs credit history, so they are stated here as bio-attested live associations rather than documented recordings.