As a young child, Isabelle Leymarie developed a passion for African-American music (and also Broadway tunes and the French, Spanish and Russian composers of the late 19th and early 20th century).

She obtained a degree in sociology from the Sorbonne and studied ethnomusicology at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris.

[5] As a pianist she performed in particular with the Cotton Club Orchestra (Harlem), Melba Liston (New York), Cab Calloway's bass player Jimmy Garret (Japan), Clifford Thornton (Switzerland), as well as with her own groups.

She also worked with Latin bands, and sat in with the Machito orchestra at Livingston College[6] In the early 1990s, in Paris, she was musical director for jazz of the Théâtre du Châtelet and the fr:Auditorium des Halles (inviting Shirley Horn, Abbey Lincoln, John Stubblefield, Wynton Marsalis, Ahmad Jamal, Tommy Flanagan, Mulgrew Miller, Dom Salvador, James Newton, Angélique Kidjo, etc.).

She translated over forty books into French, among them the biographies of Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Chet Baker and Johann Sebastian Bach.