Martial Solal

French pianist, composer, and bandleader Martial Solal's intuitive approach to improvisation has earned him an honored place among the greatest minds in all of jazz. Thoroughly versed in the tradition from big-band swing to bop and post-bop, Solal has also composed chamber music, written scores for more than 20 films, and recorded more than 50 albums as soloist and leader. For more than half a century, Solal personified the cross-pollinated splendor of European jazz by utilizing styles and influences from both sides of the Atlantic to generate and sustain musical ideas that almost invariably come across as intelligent, pleasant, and gratifying. A student of 20th century European composers such as Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, and Olivier Messiaen, his early influences on piano were Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, and Art Tatum, followed by Erroll Garner, Bud Powell, and Bill Evans. Some might hear elements of Herbie Nichols or Dodo Marmarosa. Both Oscar Peterson and Duke Ellington held him in highest esteem. As a composer he is clearly descended from both Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Each of these currents flows freely yet systematically through his music, tempered by his own unique sensibilities and a vast store of impressions harvested and manifested during a lengthy lifetime spent in absorption, reflection, and emanation. Born to French parents in Algiers, North Africa, on August 23, 1927, Martial Solal grew up under the influence of his mother, an opera singer who encouraged him to learn to play piano, clarinet, and saxophone. In 1942 the Vichy government's adopted Nazi racial policies (enforced in the French colony of Algeria) resulted in his expulsion from school, solely on account of his father's Jewish ancestry. Already familiar with the classical piano...