Collection: Michel Petrucciani

Michel Petrucciani was born in Orange in the Vaucluse on December 28, 1962, to Italian parents in a family that played jazz as a matter of course: his father Antoine a guitarist, his brothers Philippe on guitar and Louis on bass. He was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic condition causing brittle bones and restricted growth that left him unable to walk and standing around three feet tall. His doctors told the family he would not survive past twenty. He saw Duke Ellington on television at four and switched from drums to piano. He never went to school. He stayed in his room and practised up to ten hours a day, was performing professionally at local jazz festivals at thirteen, and was working with Kenny Clarke by fifteen. In 1982, aged nineteen, he moved to California and talked saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who had been in self-imposed retirement from music, into coming back to perform. They toured Europe and recorded "Montreux 82." He moved to New York shortly after. The solo album "100 Hearts" (Concord, 1984) won the Grand Prix du Disque in France. Blue Note signed him, Bruce Lundvall calling him the owner of the greatest right hand he had ever heard in the business. Seven Blue Note albums followed between 1986 and 1994, including "Power of Three" (1986) recorded at Montreux with Wayne Shorter and Jim Hall, and "Michel Plays Petrucciani" (1987), an album of his own compositions. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1994. He was thirty-one. He won the Prix Django Reinhardt. He joked that he had been told he would not live past twenty and had already outlasted Charlie Parker, who died at thirty-four. He died at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan on January 6, 1999, aged thirty-six. He is buried at Pere Lachaise, next to Chopin.