Laurent Coulondre was born in Nîmes, in the south of France, on January 2, 1989. He started on drums at four, moved to piano soon after, and at nine discovered jazz through the pianist Stéphane Kochoyan, playing with the Big Band de Petite Camargue in sets that opened for Marcus Miller, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Al Jarreau and Michel Legrand. He studied first in Vauvert and Toulouse, earning a Jazz DEM from the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Toulouse and a musicology degree from the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in 2010. An Erasmus year at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona gave him his other instrument: it was there that he took up the Hammond organ.

His first album, the trio date Opus I (2011, with Philippe Wozniak on double bass and Pierre-Alain Tocanier on drums), coincided with a run of competition wins: the Tremplin Européen Didier Lockwood in 2010, the Jazz à Castelló competition in Spain in 2011, and the Jazz en Baie competition in 2012. He settled in Paris in 2011 and built a parallel career as a sideman, recording and touring with musicians including the guitarist Paul Jackson Jr., trumpeter Nicolas Folmer, saxophonist Sylvain Beuf, drummer Stéphane Huchard and pianist Pierre de Bethmann, while cutting his second trio album, Opus II (Cristal Records, 2014), with bassist Jérémy Bruyère, Tocanier again on drums and a guest vocal from Laura David.

In 2014 he reshaped the trio around a "reversible" concept, switching between piano and organ within the same set, and the group won the Concours National de Jazz à la Défense that year. Schizophrenia (Sound Surveyor Music, 2015), with Rémi Bouyssiere on bass and Martin Wangermée on drums, brought the widest recognition of his career: the Académie du Jazz's affiliated Victoires du Jazz named him Révélation de l'année in 2016, and the trio played major dates including an opening slot for Sting at Jazz à Vienne, plus Jazz in Marciac, the Olympia (opening for Lisa Simone), Nancy Jazz Pulsations, the Paris Jazz Festival, Tokyo Jazz and the London Jazz Festival. He was also named a Spedidam Génération artist for 2014-2017 and an Adami jazz talent prizewinner in 2015, and picked up the Fondation Lagardère's jazz prize in 2016.

Gravity Zerø (2017) turned the format inside out: a keys-and-drums duo project pairing Coulondre with a rotating cast of French drummers, among them André Ceccarelli, Wangermée, Yoann Serra and Cyril Atef, which toured internationally, including a ten-city tour of China in 2018 and dates at the Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, North Sea and Winter Jazz Fest festivals. In 2019, for the twentieth anniversary of Michel Petrucciani's death, he recorded Michel on My Mind (New World Production) with Bruyère on bass and Ceccarelli on drums, mixing Petrucciani's own compositions with a tune by the organist Eddy Louiss and two Coulondre originals; it won the Académie du Jazz's Prix du disque français for 2019. The following year Jazz Magazine's critics poll named him French Musician of the Year and put him on its February 2020 cover, and the Victoires du Jazz gave him its instrumental artist award.

2022 brought two very different records: A Trip in Marseille (Paradis Improvisé), a solo grand piano session, and Meva Festa (New World Production), a nine-piece Latin and Afro-Brazilian date built around his duo work during lockdown with the Brazilian percussionist Adriano Dos Santos Tenorio, filled out by Bruyère, trumpeters Folmer and Alexis Bourguignon, saxophonists Lucas Saint-Cricq and Stéphane Guillaume, trombonist Robinson Khoury, singer Laura Dausse, and Ceccarelli and Wangermée again on drums. In 2023 he joined the Israeli saxophonist Shauli Einav's quartet, based in Luxembourg, playing piano, organ and synthesizer on Living Organs (Outside In Music), the electric record that took Einav furthest from his hard-bop roots.

2025 produced two more records in contrasting formats: Shifting Lights (New World Production), a piano-flute-and-voice duo with the flutist and singer Christelle Raquillet, and The Getdown (Artwork Records), an organ trio billed as a three-way collective with the pianist Grégory Privat and the Guadeloupean drummer Arnaud Dolmen, its eleven tracks split roughly evenly among the three composers. In 2026 he co-led Hermeto Universal (New World Production) with the Brazilian harmonica player Gabriel Grossi, a tribute to Hermeto Pascoal recorded with the bassist Michael League and the Cuban pianist and drummer Ruy Adrián López-Nussa as the core band, and a guest soloist on almost every one of its fourteen tracks: the trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf takes the solo on "Bebê," with Vanessa Moreno, Varijashree Venugopal, Chris Potter, Jorge Pardo, Baptiste Herbin and Pascoal himself each featured on others. Alongside his own projects, Coulondre teaches jazz piano at the École supérieure de musique de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and has taught at the Centre des Musiques Didier Lockwood.

Coulondre's signature is the "reversible" trio format he introduced in 2014, moving between acoustic piano and Hammond organ within a single set rather than treating them as separate projects, and All About Jazz categorizes him specifically as a jazz organ and Hammond B3 player alongside his piano work. Reviewers covering his records have consistently pointed to a groove-driven, percussive attack, an inheritance of his early years on drums, set against a harmonically dense left hand. That range shows in the catalogue itself: a straight-ahead organ trio (Schizophrenia), a keys-and-drums duo stripped of harmony instruments entirely (Gravity Zerø), a composer's tribute built from another pianist's book (Michel on My Mind), a nonet steeped in Afro-Cuban and Brazilian rhythm (Meva Festa), and, most recently, both a chamber duo with flute and voice (Shifting Lights) and a three-way organ-piano-drums collective (The Getdown). The constant across all of them is a leader who changes instrumentation and personnel around each new idea rather than settling into one working band.