JAZZ - MARTIAL SOLAL: PIANO SOLO

The French pianist Martial Solal is one of the doyens of contemporary improvised music. Now in his seventies, he has been on the jazz scene for over half a century and his performances are as fresh and creative as ever. Solal has the rare ability to accommodate his playing to widely varying styles, which is impressively demonstrated in this recording made at the Bayerischer Hof Night Club during the Munich Klaviersommer.

With his famous audio release Just Friends, Solal proclaimed that friendship is the secret driving force behind free dialogue. He demonstrates this yet again as he plays an exciting trio session with François Moutin (double bass) and Louis Moutin (drums). They were recorded performing live at the Bayerischer Hof Night Club during the Munich Klaviersommer. The enjoyment these musicians derive from playing together provides an obvious source of energy for their upbeat performance in which they take a selection of jazz standards as their starting point for exciting musical explorations.

“Martial Solal has, in abundance, those indispensibles of the musician’s craft: sensitivity, creativity and a prodigious technique.”  Duke Ellington

Martial Solal (born August 23, 1927, Algiers, Algeria) is a French jazz pianist and composer, who is probably most widely known for the music he wrote for Jean-Luc Godard's debut feature film À bout de souffle (1960).

Solal was the son of an opera singer and piano teacher, who learned the instrument from the age of six. After settling in Paris in 1950, he soon began working with leading musicians including Django Reinhardt and expatriates from the United States like Sidney Bechet and Don Byas. He formed a quartet (occasionally also leading a big band) in the late 1950s, although he had been recording as a leader since 1953. Solal then began composing film music, eventually providing over twenty scores.

 In 1963 he made a much admired appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island; the Newport '63 album purporting to be a recording of this gig is actually a studio recreation. At this time, his regular trio featured bassist Guy Pedersen and drummer Daniel Humair. From 1968 he regularly performed and recorded with Lee Konitz in Europe and the United States of America.

In recent years, Martial Solal has continued to perform and record with his trio. Throughout his career he has performed solo, and during 1993-94 he gave thirty solo concerts for French Radio, a selection of performances from which were subsequently released in a 2-CD set Improvise Pour Musique France by JMS Records.

Solal has also written a piano method book entitled Jazz Works.

 Source: Wikipedia