Martial Solal, a distinguished French pianist whose dextrous and imaginative command of the jazz language made him a trailblazer in Europe, as well as a composer known for scoring Jean-Luc Godard’s first film, died on Dec. 12 in Versailles. He was 97.
The French newspaper Le Figaro reported his death, but did not provide a cause.
Over a roughly 75-year career, Solal became synonymous with a regal yet inquisitive style at the piano, marked by whimsical digression with a firm intellectual footing. He made dozens of albums, recording with everyone from Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans-born soprano saxophonist and clarinetist rightly considered a progenitor of jazz, to Dave Liebman, an American tenor and soprano saxophonist with whom he made two of his final recordings.
Solal came of age at a time when jazz was still taking hold outside the United States. He was among the first European jazz artists to earn the imprimatur of legends like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, who each provided a blurb for the cover of Solal’s RCA Victor album At Newport ‘63. Ellington’s quote opens with an appraisal: “Martial Solal has, in abundance, those indispensables of the musicians’ craft: sensitivity, creativity, and a prodigious technique.”
Solal applied those qualities to a range of settings, corralling small combos and big bands alike. He often enlisted accomplished European colleagues like the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and French drummer Daniel Humair — as well as eminent American collaborators like bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian, who support and challenge him in equal measure on a standout 1997 trio release, Just Friends.
Solal also worked extensively in a duo setting, where he invariably kept any conversational partner on their toes. Among the noted tête-a-têtes in his catalog are celebrated albums with alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, and the aforementioned Liebman. He also occasionally set up opposite a fellow pianist — from Joachim Kühn, on the mid-1970s album Duo in Paris, to Tigran Hamasyan, on a French jazz festival in 2011.
But solo piano was a special category for Solal, who played with a vibrant expressive facility that elicited many comparisons to the uber-virtuoso Art Tatum. His expansive solo discography includes historical artifacts like Solo Piano: Unreleased 1966 Los Angeles Session as well as more recent concert albums like Live in Ottobrunn, recorded in 2018. “Playing unaccompanied is the most challenging,” he told John Fordham of The Guardian in 2010. “Even if I don’t play a concert for one month, or two months, I must practise so I know my fingers will follow my thoughts — otherwise it doesn’t seem honest to me.”
Martial Solal was born on Aug. 23, 1927 in Algiers, then the capital of French Algeria. His mother, an amateur opera singer, encouraged his musical interests. Because his father was Jewish, he was expelled from school at age seven, due to race laws adopted under the wartime Nazi regime. He continued his musical studies privately, with a neighbor of his aunt, who also led a dance band. Recordings of Benny Goodman and Fats Waller lit a spark.
In 1950, Solal moved to Paris, where he quickly met Kenny Clarke, who had helped define modern jazz drumming before leaving the U.S. for the life of a distinguished jazz émigré. They became members of the house band at the Club St. Germain, where visiting American musicians would often stop by. The club was also a home to Django Reinhardt, the legendary Romani guitarist; it was with Reinhardt that Solal took part in his first recording session, in 1953.
It was probably Solal’s steady presence at the Club Saint-Germain that endeared him to the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, who recommended him to Jean-Luc Godard. Solal composed the modern chamber-jazz soundtrack for Godard’s groundbreaking 1960 debut, À bout de souffle — known in the English-speaking world as Breathless, and known worldwide as a cornerstone of the French New Wave.
“Godard had no ideas about the music, so fortunately I was completely free,” Solal recalled in 2010, in The Guardian. “He did once say, ‘Why don’t you just write it for one banjo player?’ — I thought he was being funny, but you couldn’t be sure with him. Anyway, I brought a big band and 30 violins. I never found out if he liked it, even now, but it seems to have worked.”
Though it was never his primary occupation, Solal composed and performed scores for a handful of other films, including Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960), an art-house romp titled The Flamboyant Sex (1963), and the French crime film Backfire, which reunited the Breathless duo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg (1964).
While Solal caused a small sensation among the jazz cognoscenti with his first American engagements in the early ‘60s, his return visits were few and far between until early this century. Writing for the New York Times in 2001, when Solal’s new release was Dodecaband Plays Ellington, the critic Francis Davis praised him as “an example of a European musician working within established jazz guidelines and deserving of wider recognition for adding something distinctly his.”
That fall, Solal was booked with a trio for his first engagement at The Village Vanguard. It was partly derailed by the attacks of Sept. 11, though the later portion of the run was recorded and later released as NY1 — the title being a nod to the local news channel that Solal watched obsessively from his hotel room. Solal made an occasional return to the club, including one in 2011 that was broadcast live by NPR Music and WBGO, with Josh Jackson as host and producer.
Solal won the prestigious Jazzpar Prize in 1999, and was twice nominated for Grammy Award. But his highest accolade was the awe he inspired among listeners, and especially among his collaborators. Liebman, who recorded in concert with Solal in 2016 — yielding the fine albums Masters in Bordeuax and Masters in Paris — was among those who held him in highest esteem.
“I will admit that at times I had no idea what he was playing either behind me or during his solos,” Liebman marveled in a post on his website. “His almost constant reharmonization is out of this world.”
