Martial Solal, Europe’s pre-eminent jazz pianist, who recorded dozens of startlingly original albums in a career of almost three quarters of a century and who wrote scores for numerous films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece “Breathless,” died on Thursday in Versailles, France. He was 97.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by Rachida Dati, France’s minister of culture.
Mr. Solal, who was born in Algeria, was 34 when he performed his first concert at the landmark Salle Gaveau concert hall in Paris, his adopted home, in 1962. He was 91 when he took the same stage in 2019 for his farewell concert.
The two performances were bookends to an extraordinary career in which he recorded countless albums and wrote music for solo piano, big bands and symphonies, including four concertos for piano and orchestra, as well as the film scores.
Although he was little known in the United States, the critic Francis Davis, writing in The New York Times in 2001, said that Mr. Solal “might be the greatest living European jazz pianist — and is at least the equal of any in the United States.”
In 2010, John Fordham, the chief jazz critic of The Guardian, called him “France’s most famous living jazz artist.”
Mr. Solal was admired as much for his technical virtuosity as for his exploratory improvisations. Critics compared him to the great jazz pianist Art Tatum, and his playing at times echoed (without imitating) the likes of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. But he blazed his own path, combining spare melodic lines with lush chordal passages in a style the French newspaper Le Monde described as “cutting through his music with the precision of a goldsmith.”
Martial Saul Cohen-Solal was born on Aug. 23, 1927, in Algiers to Jacob Maurice Cohen-Solal, an accountant, and Sultana Abrami, an amateur opera singer.
After 1940, when Algeria, then a French colony, came under the rule of the Nazi-controlled Vichy government, Martial was expelled from school for being Jewish — or, more precisely, for having a Jewish father. He immersed himself in the piano, to which his mother had introduced him when he was 7. His teacher, a neighbor of his aunt’s, was a jazz musician.
“He was a big, fat, impressive cat who played piano, saxophone, drums, accordion, clarinet, trumpet, everything,” Mr. Solal told The Guardian in 2010. “When I hear him play jazz, I go crazy.”
Mr. Solal eventually joined his teacher’s band, playing piano and clarinet.
In 1950, seeking a broader musical perspective, he emigrated to France. He dropped “Cohen” from his surname and began performing as Martial Solal, the name he carried for the rest of his life.
“When I arrived in France, nobody knew that name was Jewish,” he said in an email interview for this obituary last year. Antisemitism there, he said, was commonplace if not virulent. “I hid myself well, for fear of losing a few friends,” he said.
Shortly after arriving in Paris, he recorded with the influential Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt. It was Mr. Solal’s first recording session and Mr. Reinhardt’s last.
Mr. Solal’s first gigs in Paris were in the house band at the renowned Club St. Germain and, when it opened in 1958, the Blue Note. Both clubs presented a host of visiting American jazz greats, including Miles Davis and Art Blakey. Mr. Solal accompanied many of them. The expatriate American drummer Kenny Clarke, who had helped launch bebop with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, worked regularly with Mr. Solal at Club St. Germain.
Mr. Solal was approached by Mr. Godard about writing the score for “Breathless,” his first feature film, in 1959.
“Godard had no ideas about the music, so fortunately I was completely free,” Mr. Solal said in 2010. “He did once say, ‘Why don’t you just write it for one banjo player?’ — I thought he was being funny, but you couldn’t be sure with him. Anyway, I brought a big band and 30 violins. I never found out if he liked it, even now, but it seems to have worked.”
Released in 1960, “Breathless” came to be regarded as a classic of the French new wave. Both Mr. Solal’s career and Mr. Godard’s were launched.
Mr. Solal’s most recent film score was for Bertrand Blier’s “Les Acteurs” in 2000.
Mr. Solal made his first trip to the United States in 1963, to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival. The festival’s promoter, George Wein, also booked him at the Hickory House on West 52nd Street in New York, accompanied by the drummer Paul Motian and the bassist Teddy Kotick. After an effusive review in Time magazine, word spread and lines to get in wound around the block. The gig was extended to six weeks, and then to 10.
After returning to Europe, Mr. Solal continued to recorded prolifically, most often solo or accompanied by bass and drums.
Critics raved — Francis Davis described him as “comparable to Art Tatum in the speed of his arpeggios but thoroughly modern in his rhythmic accents and with a sense of caprice that seems all his own” — but many wondered why he was not better known in the United States.
One possible explanation is that he rarely performed there. At what was only his third appearance in New York, in 2001, just 10 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he played to a nearly empty Village Vanguard. The Times critic Ben Ratliff, reviewing Mr. Solal’s performance in what he called an “unjustly empty” room, called him “easily one of the most impressive pianists in jazz.”
When Mr. Solal returned to the Vanguard in 2007, Mr. Ratliff wrote, “Being 80 has not dimmed his agility 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.”
Although he played in a wide variety of large and small groups, Mr. Solal was best known for his solo work.
“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,” he told an interviewer in 2007. “Nobody is there to help you or to disturb you. It’s a different approach.”
When he strayed beyond the solo or trio format, it was often to lead a 12-piece ensemble he called his “dodecaband.” And there was little that gave him more pleasure than working with his daughter, the vocalist Claudia Solal, as he did on the 2007 album “Exposition Sans Tableau.”
She survives him, as do his wife, the Scottish-born painter Anna Solal; their son, Eric; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
When asked at age 95 how he would like to be remembered, he replied by email, “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.”
His farewell concert at Salle Gaveau, the jazz critic Francis Marmande wrote in Le Monde, was “not only an exceptional event” but “a rare feast of intelligence, senses and history.”
Alone on the stage, Mr. Solal gave a musical tour of his long career, including performing “indestructible standards,” as he put it, like “Frère Jacques,” Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” and “Tea for Two,” and ending with a bit of Beethoven.
Finally, he turned from the piano and faced his audience. “When energy is no longer available, it is better to stop,” he said. Placing his fingers on his keyboard for the last time in public, he played a final chord.
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