Born in Algiers to Algerian Jewish parents, Martial Solal was encouraged in music from an early age by his mother, an amateur opera singer. Largely self-educated, he was expelled from school by the Vichy regime in 1942 because of his Jewish ancestry but after studying classical music in school, and encouraged by a local bandleader, he turned to broadcast jazz on the radio. His early influences were Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, Bud Powell and Bill Evans.
Solal was highly regarded in France (and Europe at large) from 1950, by which time he had moved to Paris. Earlier this week Rachida Dati, France’s minister of culture, published this tribute:
“The great Martial Solal has died at the age of 97. He was a legendary pianist and composer, whose name shines in the jazz firmament alongside the likes of Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal. We still have the memory of his graceful playing, the nostalgia of the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but above all his marvellous music, the sound tracks he composed for Melville, Godard (À Bout De Souffle) and Orson Welles, recordings by the hundred.”
Virtually unknown in the United States, Solal had already performed and recorded in Paris with Sidney Bechet and Django Reinhardt. He had also played with visiting American or expatriate jazz musicians including Clark Terry, Stan Getz, Don Byas and Lucky Thompson. On his first trip to the US in 1963 he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival and was then booked by the festival’s promoter, George Wein, to play at the Hickory House in New York for what became a 10-week engagement, accompanied by drummer Paul Motian and bassist Teddy Kotick – who had been in Bill Evans’ famous trio. As the word spread, American critics (and Time magazine) began to take belated notice of the newcomer. Time lauded an “amazingly adept virtuoso who pursues unconventional harmonic flights with an imagination that is rich to the point of bursting”. Critic Francis Davis compared him to Art Tatum in “the speed of his arpeggios but thoroughly modern in his rhythmic accents and a sense of caprice that seems all his own”. When he returned to the Vanguard in 2007, the New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff wrote “Being 80 has not dimmed his ability or his imagination. He interpreted each passing moment of the songs as a provocation: spinning out a quick cycle of chords from just one, or interrupting the shape of a melody to add on a whole new structure, invented at breathtaking speed.”
Solal became a frequent visitor to America and made several well-received albums with Lee Konitz and as a sideman with Toots Thielemans, Stephane Grappelli, Wes Montgomery, Hampton Hawes, Slide Hampton and Johnny Griffin. But his solo (live and studio) albums elicited the most favourable reception from eminent American critics. Solal himself said in 2007: “The music you play alone is quite different from what you play with a rhythm section because you have to tell the whole story yourself. Nobody is there to help you or to disturb you. It’s a different approach.” Writing in 1992 Martin Williams predicted “It could be that Solal will develop an importance which, like Django Reinhardt’s, is greater than considerations of geography or even of instrument… he swings with a vitality that is personal, and a sureness which allows him rhythmic vitality and variation of a sort that many American jazzmen of his generation have not even attempted. Above all, he invents interesting, fresh, and personal music.” The late Dan Morgenstern reported in 1994 that Solal always “approaches each performance as a voyage of discovery but never indulges in gratuitous effects”. He continued “There isn’t an iota of meretriciousness in his artistry. Not a false or empty note is struck.” He called him “one of the very greatest of living musicians, an artist who continues to surpass himself”.
After attending a Solal performance at the Village Vanguard in 2001, Gary Giddins wrote “His virtuosity is nothing like Tatum’s – he avoids adverbial flourishes, preferring the kind of two-finger hammering that Gershwin wrote in to the piano arsenal in Rhapsody In Blue. His grounded harmonies and impetuous rhythms result in an idiosyncratic attack.” He also noticed that during the entire performance “everyone around me was smiling”. Columbia Records producer George Avakian flatly announced that “Martial Solal, Europe’s greatest jazz musician today, performs with Americans on their own terms as an equal – or even as a superior – his technique is one of the most prodigious ever heard in jazz.”
In addition to his solo and small group performances, Solal also fronted a big band. The album Martial Solal Dodecaband Plays Ellington (2000) includes a searing 15-minute Caravan, and a medley of eight ducal tunes. In a brief sleeve-note, Solal explained “The choice of Ellington, beyond my own interest in his music, was predicated by the desire to show, by means of well-known pieces, that the job of arranger is actually a compositional task. These most famous tunes get a complete reworking here yet the original melodies remain omnipresent.” On the 2007 album Exposition Sans Tableau, and much to his delight, he was joined by his vocalist daughter Claudia.
Solal’s massive discography, dating from the 1930s to the 2020s, with over 60 albums as leader or co-leader, contains irrefutable evidence of his originality and stature. Among his landmark albums are Martial Solal Trio: Complete Recordings 1953-1962, At Newport (1963), Solo Piano (1966) Just Friends (1971), 1.2.3…Solal (2001), Solitude (2005), Live At The Village Vanguard (2007), Live In Ottobrunn (2018) and Coming Yesterday: Live At Salle Gaveau (2019). One might add that Solal had long been recognised in Jazz Journal as a major artist. Richard Palmer, reviewing the 1997 album Just Friends, complimented two Solal compositions – Sapristi and Sacrebleu – as “characteristically urgent and penetrating pieces that make considerable demands on the listener” and recommended it “to all modernists”.
When asked at the age of 95 how he would like to be remembered, Solal responded “As a composer who has worked a lot in the service of improvisation, the freedom of invention that only an instrumental technique at the highest possible level can allow.” After Solal’s last concert at Salle Gaveau, French critic Francis Marmande wrote in Le Monde that it was “not only an exceptional event” but also “a rare feast of intelligence, senses and history”. At the end of his recital, Solal informed the audience that ”When energy is no longer available, it is better to stop.” He also said of his technique “You have to make people believe that it is very easy, even when it’s very difficult.” One French critic remarked “Solal is always serious but never solemn. Eternally playful and cavalier about conventional melodies, he might insert them mischievously as fleeting landmarks.” Alain Gerber in a foreword to Solal’s recently published autobiography Mon Siècle De Jazz reiterated that he was one of the first non-Americans to fall under the spell of jazz and understand its language.
He is survived by his wife Anna, son Eric and daughter Claudia, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Martial Solal, pianist and composer: born Algiers, 23 August 1927, died Versailles, 12 December 2024