Collection: Martial Solal

Martial Solal was born in Algiers in 1927 to Algerian Jewish parents, his mother an opera singer who pushed him toward piano from age six. He absorbed Ravel, Debussy and Bach first, then a saxophone-playing teacher introduced him to Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, and that was the end of the classical project. He was performing publicly at fifteen, turned professional in 1945, and moved to Paris in 1950, where Kenny Clarke was already playing and where Sidney Bechet and Django Reinhardt came through the clubs. He became house pianist at the legendary Club Saint-Germain and built a reputation as the most formidably inventive improviser in French jazz across a decade before the wider world found him. In 1959 Jean-Luc Godard, who was directing his first feature, asked Solal to compose the score. “A Bout de Soufflé” came out in 1960 and the combination of Godard’s jump-cut editing and Solal’s nervous, unpredictable piano became one of the defining sounds of the French New Wave. The same year he appeared at Newport, brought by George Wein, and was received with what one French account described as great fanfare. He never really pursued the American market. His approach to improvisation, which he described as being an eternal researcher in jazz, involved tying recognising a familiar tune as a game with his audience: listeners would catch a standard passing through his hands at speed, transformed almost beyond recognition, then watch it vanish again. He played duo with Lee Konitz across multiple decades, the “Live at the Berlin Jazz Days 1980” (MPS) recording among the finest documents. He collaborated with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, Stéphane Grappelli and Joachim Kühn. In the 1980s he formed his twelve-piece Dodecaband. His autobiography “Mon Siècle De Jazz” was published in 2024, the year of his death. Solal died in Versailles on December 12, 2024, aged 97.