French pianist Martial Solal, famous for scoring the music for Jean-Luc Godard’s film À Bout De Souffle, died 12 December, aged 97. Born in Algeria, 23 August 1927, the son of an amateur opera singer, Solal got his love of jazz from a local bandleader, who taught him piano. He moved to Paris in the late 1940s and became one of the key exponents of jazz in Europe, accompanying Django Reinhardt (including, apparently, at the guitarist’s last gig), Sidney Bechet, Kenny Clarke and others.
When Godard made his landmark film in 1960 he apparently had no idea about the music, leaving Solal free to compose as he liked, using piano, a big band and violins. Solal’s ability to tell a story in the score presaged his later acclaim as an individualist composer as much as pianist. After À Bout De Souffle, he went on to compose a number of film scores and a concerto for piano and orchestra (leading to the foundation of the Orchestre National de Jazz).
He achieved star status in New York in the 1960s, getting his big US break in 1963 when George Wein arranged a short run at the Hickory House on 52nd Street. Solal, by chance, inherited Bill Evans’ rhythm section (Teddy Kotick and Paul Motian) for this gig, which was so successful it was extended to 10 weeks. In the same year he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. Reviewing the resultant LP At Newport ’63 for Jazz Journal in 2016, Roger Farbey noted that it exemplified both Solal’s writing and playing skills, saying “Nestling in between this set of standards, there’s also Solal’s own composition Suite for a Friezewhich is a 12-minute veritable tour de force. At times Solal plays such sweepingly fast runs on, say, All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm that he begins to sounds like Art Tatum.”
In contrast to modern stars who contrive to get an autobiography published in their 20s, Solal left a respectable pause before essaying his own. His life story, Mon Siécle De Jazz, was published in March this year by French record label and publisher Frémeaux & Associés. Although Solal wasn’t perhaps so singularly European in style as Reinhardt, Patrick Frémeaux posited that Solal was, along with Reinhardt, one of the two most important 20th-century European jazz musicians.
Foreword-writer Alain Gerber noted that Solal well demonstrated that you didn't have to be a native American to fall under the spell of jazz and understand its language: “Solal was one of the first non-Americans to assimilate this principle: on only think subtly in a native language or not, it doesn’t matter – which, much more than you possess it, possesses you.”
According to Frémeaux, Kenny Werner, a US pianist of a younger generation, concurred, noting Solal had the technique of an Art Tatum. But Werner added that Solal wasn’t a showy or gratuitous virtuoso: “It’s his ideas that make him virtuosic, not the opposite. There is no effect with him but the music. He’s one of my heroes.”
An obituary by John White will follow. See recent JJ reviews of Solal.
