A squint through the metal fence around Martial Solal’s tree-shrouded villa, in Chatou, the suburb of Paris known as the “ville des impressionnistes”, could have confirmed that the great French pianist was not the average jazz musician. Solal, who has died aged 97, was the most famous jazz musician in France from the 1950s onwards, and widely known across Europe and the US.
The breakthrough that paid for that Chatou villa came when Solal – then a little-known club pianist – wrote the score for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). The commission came out of the blue via Godard’s jazz-loving friend and fellow director Jean-Pierre Melville, and Solal collected royalties on it for ever after. “It’s like I won the Lotto,” he told me in 2010. “Because back in 1959 when I did it, I was mainly just known for being the house pianist in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés jazz club.” Godard had few ideas about the music he wanted, beyond joking to Solal that he might compose a piece for a banjo player, to save money. The pianist promptly produced a soundtrack for big band and 30 violins.
Solal went on to work on several more films, and was one of the first Europeans to perform at the Newport jazz festival in the US. Into his 80s, he could still walk the tightrope of unaccompanied improvised performance, and his compositions had a signature as personal and harmonically idiosyncratic as Thelonious Monk’s. Solal, who liked stop-start melodies and constant rhythmic changes, wrote elegant pieces that slowly coalesced out of scattered fragments. He loved peppering classic jazz material – even as sacrosanct as Duke Ellington’s – with disrespectful quotes going all the way back to his danceband days in Algiers, the city where he was born.
Solal’s mother, Sultana Abrami, an amateur opera singer, introduced him to classical piano as a child. During the second world war, under Nazi race laws, Martial was excluded from a secondary education because his father, Jacob Cohen-Solal, an accountant, was Jewish. He took jazz clarinet and piano lessons from a local bandleader, with whom he was soon performing tangos, waltzes and Benny Goodmanesque swing. Soon, Fats Waller, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and the bebop virtuoso Bud Powell began to displace Chopin and Bach among Solal’s keyboard models.
He moved to Paris in 1950 after his military service, and teamed up with the American bebop drums pioneer Kenny Clarke in the house band at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés club. The young pianist’s nervous recording debut was in April 1953 with the jazz-guitar genius Django Reinhardt, who turned out to be playing on his last; Reinhardt died the following month. That year, Solal recorded Modern Sounds with his own trio and also recorded unaccompanied. After working with Sidney Bechet in 1957, he received the commission for the Breathless score.
The word about Solal then began to reach America – both Oscar Peterson and Ellington had been entranced by him in Paris, with Ellington pronouncing him a “soul brother”. In 1963, he played at Newport, with the bassist Teddy Kotick and the drummer Paul Motian; despite barely knowing his new partners, Solal boldly added his 11-minute tempo-shuffling Suite Pour Une Frise to the usual programme of standard songs.
Turning down an invitation to move to the US, Solal led world-class groups in the 1960s and 70s, often including the drummer Daniel Humair, the bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, and even an advanced two-bass trio for piano and the double-bassists Gilbert Rovère and Jean-François Jenny-Clark. He also explored fruitful duo partnerships with the American saxophonists Lee Konitz and Phil Woods between the 70s and the 90s, and led innovative big bands, notably on the thrilling Martial Solal Big Band session (for the Gaumont label in 1981) and Plays Hodeir (1984).
An insatiable capacity for self-education helped Solal to develop a characteristically pungent harmonic language. He wrote and performed contemporary classical music and published jazz-piano pieces modelled on the Mikrokosmos educational cycles of Béla Bartók.
In 1989 the Martial Solal jazz piano competition was founded. Its winners have included the Frenchman Baptiste Trotignon and the charismatic Armenian virtuoso Tigran Hamasyan. In the 90s, Solal often worked with the Moutin twins, François and Louis, on bass and drums – both were flexible enough to follow their leader’s tendency to launch a tune without telling them what it was, change key without warning, or turn it into a different song entirely.
As he entered his 70s, Solal seemed to be playing with a revitalised and swashbuckling confidence – as if he was finally sure that he would still sound like himself whether he played within the regular rules, or broke them. In 1999, he won Denmark’s Jazzpar prize, and celebrated by writing parts for the accompanying Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra owing as much to the French impressionist classical composers as to jazz. In that decade, Solal also had an unprecedented 30-concert solo run on French national radio.
In 2000, with his 12-piece Dodecaband, he recorded Martial Solal Dodecaband Plays Ellington. During the following decade, he recorded two live albums at the Village Vanguard in New York; the brilliant unaccompanied session Solitude; the duet Rue de Seine, with the trumpeter Dave Douglas; and the Exposition Sans Tableau session for his woodwind-less, brass-packed Decaband – a typically quirky lineup featuring Solal’s talented daughter Claudia singing the roles of a missing sax section.
His final public performance was a solo concert in 2019, at the Salle Gaveau hall where he had made his Paris debut in 1961. After a masterly exposition later issued on the album Coming Yesterday, Solal’s typically elegant exit was prefaced by the words: “I don’t want to bore you. It’s better that you leave here serene.” Then he played “a nice chord like this” – a single F major – said “Voilà. Merci” and left the stage.
Solal undoubtedly loved improvisation, but he believed it needed the spur of challenging composition to stop improvisers from slipping into habits. Not everyone shared his enthusiasm for musical jokes and maybe Solal was unnecessarily diverted by whether or not jazz could satisfy what he saw as classical listeners’ expectations of “perfection”. But he was a jazz-lover to his nimble fingertips, nonetheless. Speculating that probably no more than 10% of his fellow countryfolk knew anything about jazz, Solal phlegmatically declared that “as long as we can live, and play the music we like, it’s too bad for the 90%. It’s their loss.”
Solal is survived by his wife, Anna, their son, Eric, and daughter, Claudia, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
• Martial Saul Cohen-Solal, musician, born 23 August 1927; died 12 December 2024
