Pierre Durand was born in May 1974 and fell for the guitar at four or five, listening to the Argentine singer Atahualpa Yupanqui. He is left-handed and was taught to play right-handed anyway. A classical conservatory training nearly finished him off: by sixteen he was listening to Chuck Berry and Little Richard instead of practising and was ready to give the instrument up, and what rescued it was the blues, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, Etta James and Otis Rush. Jazz arrived a couple of years later through Archie Shepp, Count Basie, George Benson and John Scofield. He took a two-year university diploma in economics, decided against it, and went to music instead: a private Paris jazz school, then the conservatoire de Noisiel, then the jazz and improvised-music department of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, which he entered in order to study North Indian classical music with Patrick Moutal. He took the conservatoire prize in 2003.

His formative room was not a classroom. The studio des Islettes in Barbès is where he says he and Laurent Bardainne, Thomas de Pourquery, Sylvain Rifflet, Médéric Collignon and Richard Turegano worked out who they were going to be. His first appearance on record is a single track: guitar on the sixth piece of the pianist Giovanni Mirabassi's Architectures (Sketch, 1999), cut at the Studio La Buissonne on October 20 and 21, 1998, with Louis Moutin on drums. Prizes at the La Défense jazz competition followed in three different bands: 2002 with Jérôme Rateau's Le Grand Rateau, 2003 with the Rockingchair quintet, and 2005 for both group and composition with his own Roots Quartet. Rockingchair, co-led by the trumpeter Airelle Besson and the saxophonist Sylvain Rifflet with Éric Jacot on bass and Nicolas Larmignat on drums, waited until 2007 to make its first record; Rockingchair (Chief Inspector) took a Choc from Jazzman and won its two co-leaders the 2008 Django d'Or for new talent. Julien Omé held the guitar chair by the time the band made 1:1 in 2010.

The decade after the conservatoire is a Paris sideman's decade, and an unusually broad one. He was the guitarist in Bruno Régnier's X'tet, on Variations Altérées (Yolk, recorded January and February 2003) and then through the Ciné X'tet's live scores for silent film: Sherlock Jr. (recorded at the théâtre Beaumarchais in Amboise on April 5 and 6, 2007), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (2008) and The Mark of Zorro (recorded in Amboise in September 2009). He played the Richard Turegano Quintet's Bilan de Santé (Visages, 2005) and both of the singer Marine Bercot's early albums, Les Amants (2005), where he is credited with electric, acoustic and classical guitar and shares the arrangements, and Ma Langue au Chat (Le Chant du Monde, 2007). He has been the guitarist in the vibraphonist David Patrois's bands since Il Sogno di Diego (Cristal Records, 2007), a record assembled from sessions in February 2004, November 2005 and September 2006, and again on the quintet's Live (Arts et Spectacles, 2012), whose sleeve note is by Jack DeJohnette.

In May 2009 he took a week at Piety Street Recording in New Orleans with the engineer Mark Bingham and made a solo guitar record. It sat for three years and appeared on October 25, 2012 as Chapter One: NOLA Improvisations (Les Disques de Lily), the first instalment of a planned seven-album sequence, each volume taking a different angle on the same protean music. Four of its eight pieces are spontaneous compositions, one of them titled "Who the Damn' Is John Scofield"; John Boutté, Nicholas Payton and Cornell Williams sing on "Au Bord", and Durand sings ZZ Top's "Jesus Just Left Chicago" himself. Chapter Two: ¡Libertad! followed on September 26, 2016, made with the Roots 4tet: the tenor saxophonist Hugues Mayot, the bassist Guido Zorn and the drummer Joe Quitzke. The band's name nods at both Charles Mingus and Alex Haley, and the record moves between West Africa, Ireland, a baroque minuet, tex-mex and a Led Zeppelin-weight blues called "White Dogs". Chapter III: The End & The Beginning arrived on November 17, 2023 with a different quartet, Fred Escoffier on Fender Rhodes, synthesizer and vocoder, Jérôme Regard on electric bass and effects and Marc Michel on drums, reading pop and rock through jazz. Its centrepiece is "Bowie", written over more than a year as an attempt to catch David Bowie's phrasing and his abrupt way of moving between sections rather than to quote him.

Twenty-five years after wearing out his Archie Shepp records, Durand joined the saxophonist's reconstituted Attica Blues Orchestra. I Hear the Sound (Archieball, 2013) was taped at Jazz à la Villette on September 9, 2012, at the CNCDC de Châteauvallon on June 14, 2013 and at Les Nuits de Fourvière three days later, and was nominated for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 57th Grammy Awards. The band around him included Amina Claudine Myers, Famoudou Don Moye of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Reggie Washington, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Marion Rampal, with Ambrose Akinmusire on one track. Alongside Shepp he has also played with Daniel Humair and the blues guitarist Joe Louis Walker.

Two sessions in 2015 put him beside musicians he had not worked with before. On June 4 and 5 at the Studio de Meudon he played guitar on one piece of the Israeli saxophonist Shauli Einav's Beam Me Up (Berthold Records BHT4730025, released January 2016). The record is billed to the Shauli Einav Quartet, and the quartet is Einav, Paul Lay on piano and Fender Rhodes, Florent Nisse on double bass and Gautier Garrigue on drums. Durand is a guest on the closing "76 San Gabriel" and on nothing else, which is what both the release credits and the album's own published credit block say. In September he recorded live at the Studio Prado with the pianist François Chesnel and the drummer David Georgelet for The Rich and the Poor (Prado Records, 2016), a bass-less trio whose eight pieces include three by Keith Jarrett, Leonard Cohen's "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" and the Beatles' "Girl". Two years earlier he had made Live au Sunset (Connexe Records, taped at the Sunset on September 25, 2013) in a co-billed trio with the tenor saxophonist Sylvain Cathala and the drummer Franck Vaillant, writing four of its ten pieces.

He was a substitute in the Orchestre National de Jazz under several of its directors, Daniel Yvinec among them, and a full member under Frédéric Maurin from 2019. Dancing in Your Head(s) (ONJ Records, recorded live at the Jazzdor festival in Strasbourg on June 7, 2019, released October 2, 2020) is the record of that tenure: a programme of Ornette Coleman with one piece each by Eric Dolphy and Julius Hemphill, arrangements mostly by Fred Pallem, and Tim Berne guesting on three tracks. Durand plays electric guitar throughout and takes one of the three solos on the closing "Theme from a Symphony". Covid cancelled most of the touring that followed. His other recent sideman work runs through Daniel Zimmermann's trombone quartet, on Montagnes Russes (Label Bleu, recorded at the Studio Gil Evans in Amiens in January 2016), L'homme à tête de chou in Uruguay (2022) and Snapshots (2025); Sébastien Texier's Dreamers (Cristal Records, 2016); Raphaël Imbert's Music Is My Hope (Jazz Village, recorded at the Studios Saint Germain in May 2017), where he plays every track but one; Céline Bonacina's Fly Fly (Cristal Records, 2019), where his electric guitar is on six of thirteen pieces; and the accordionist Didier Ithursarry's trio album Atea (LagunArte, 2019).

Away from the bandstand he teaches jazz at the conservatoire of the twentieth arrondissement of Paris and guitar at the Pôle Supérieur Paris Boulogne-Billancourt, works in priority-education schools through the same conservatoire, runs writing and composition workshops with Marine Bercot, and plays regularly in prisons and hospitals. In December 2016, on a commission from the Africolor festival with the Maison de la Musique de Nanterre, he travelled to Mali with the flautist Joce Mienniel and created "Un jour de blues à Bamako", a tribute to Ali Farka Touré performed by a mixed French and Malian band.

Durand's whole position is that the blues is not a genre he passes through but the thing underneath everything else he plays, which is why a single set of his can hold a West African groove, a baroque dance, a Led Zeppelin riff and a jazz ballad without sounding like a survey. Citizen Jazz called ¡Libertad! a reinvention of the pop song and singled out his economy: fine melodist, powerful narrator, nothing surplus. His own account of his influences is deliberately unhierarchical and runs from B.B. King and Billy Gibbons through George Benson, John Scofield, Jim Hall, Bill Frisell and John Abercrombie to musicians who play nothing like a guitar at all: Bill Evans, Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, Ali Farka Touré and Bach. He is a narrator in a fairly literal sense as well: he names his albums chapters because he has read more books than he has heard records, gives solo lecture-concerts on the history of jazz and the blues, and has spent more than a decade playing live scores to silent film. The constant across the three Chapters is that each uses a deliberately different instrument, solo guitar in New Orleans, an acoustic quartet crossing continents, and an electric band built on Fender Rhodes, vocoder and bass pedals, while the material underneath stays recognisably his.