Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Martial Solal performing at the Village Vanguard after his 80th birthday in 2007.
(Photo: Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos)Martial Solal, whose irrepressible wit and incomparable wizardry at the piano captivated and confounded listeners for 70 years — and who made an indelible mark in the world of film, having composed a suitably breathtaking score for director Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut, Breathless — died Dec. 12 at the age of 97.
Solal, who was born in then-French Algeria in 1927 and emigrated to France in 1950, was one of the last survivors of the freewheeling jazz scene of post-World War II Paris. By the time of his death, few remnants of that scene remained. But Solal, a revered figure whose passing was announced by the French minister of culture, stood as a monument to it — active of mind and spirited to the end.
In a 2018 phone conversation, Solal, in less-than-perfect English, recalled arriving in the capital city and starting the process of establishing himself. That involved emerging from the shadow of the city’s preeminent pianist, Bernard Peiffer. With him, Solal played four-hands in the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. From him, Solal took over as house pianist at the legendary Club Saint-Germain. After him, Solal became the first-call pianist for American expatriates like drummer Kenny Clarke before breaking out as a solo act.
And what an act. Fully six decades after arriving in Paris, he was, at age 83, attracting overflow crowds in New York, as he did to an April 2011 duo engagement at the Village Vanguard. In stark contrast to the crowds at his Vanguard debut — which, coming only a week after the September 11 terrorist attack a decade earlier, suffered accordingly — those who showed up for the 2011 gig, perhaps his last stateside, were a lively bunch who hung on every note with a cult-like devotion.
To be sure, a certain devotion was called for. Whatever tune Solal called — and, in one set on that 2011 date, he wove four originals into a 10-tune list bracketed by “Here’s That Rainy Day” and “Willow Weep For Me” — his treatments were discursive in the extreme. Recognizing tunes amid Solal’s dizzying twists and turns became a kind of game — one that the pianist foisted on his rapt public with a smile, even as bassist Francois Moutin, his duo partner and an eminently inventive player in his own right, broke a sweat keeping up.
Nearly five years later, saxophonist Dave Liebman, a master of the extemporaneous himself, had a similar experience. Speaking to DownBeat in 2017, he described his initial bandstand encounter with Solal, at Paris’ Sunset Sunside Jazz Club in December 2015: “I was thrown by his spontaneity. It’s up my alley and in jazz we’re supposed to treasure those moments, but the first time we played the two sets at the club, I was like, ‘How am I going to hang in there with this guy?’”
When they met again — the following April, for a concert at Château Guiraud in Sauternes, France, that yielded the album Masters In Bordeaux (Sunnyside) — they were in sync. Liebman found that beneath Solal’s rapidly multiplying harmonic and melodic excursions was a deep, if idiosyncratic, sense of groove that he could lock into. For all Solal’s digressions, his direction in the end was clear.
“His timing is perfect,” Liebman said, “and that was the saving grace because a lot of times I had to depend on the rhythmical aspect of turning corners. That would make you say, ‘Oh, we’re going somewhere,’ because you could hear the rhythm change.”
If at times Solal’s excursions came off as cerebral, if they seemed to some to lean a bit too much into his almost limitless dexterity of hand and flexibility of mind, they were always delivered with intent, according to French-American pianist Dan Tepfer, a sometime student and longtime friend of Solal’s.
Speaking by Zoom from Paris in the days after Solal’s death, Tepfer said: “He was always respectful of form. He was never haphazard.”
In an email sent after Solal’s passing, his daughter, singer Claudia Solal, pointed to his uncompromising attitude: “He didn’t care about what people thought about his music, he was totally emancipated from all considerations of style (my opinion).” And, she added: “What mattered more than anything (except my mother and his two children) was his music.”
That level of commitment, Tepfer said, was reflected in the lifelong attention he paid to running scales and the like — the “dumb practice” tasks he found critical to maintaining the physical tools that enabled maximum expressivity. But for all the seriousness with which he applied himself, Tepfer added, a “constant humor” suffused nearly every aspect of Solal’s musical life.
In Tepfer’s Zoom call for this interview, he displayed a video in which a bemused Solal, on piano, is gamely laying down the sparest of accompaniments for the earnest vocal stylings of Tepfer and saxophonist Lee Konitz, with whom both pianists had long and productive relationships, on a blues. In its unexpected role-playing, the scene is as disorienting as any Solal excursion. Yet the sense of play is palpable.
Invariably, Solal brought that sense of play to his encounters with a vast array of collaborators, from Sidney Bechet to Stan Getz, from Daniel Humair to Jack DeJohnette. The playfulness was clear in the buoyancy he brought in 1953 to the bebop-inflected final recording of Django Reinhardt. It was as clear in his oblique rethinking of Thelonious Monk in a 2011 solo outing at the Library of Congress as in his turn-of-the-century reworking of Duke Ellington with his 12-piece Dodecaband.
Playful eccentricity attends to his writing, particularly the solo piano and duet pieces — 11 Etudes and Ballad For 2 Pianos, respectively, come to mind — that draw on 20th century Western classical conventions. In a jazzier vein, the off-kilter lyricism of a piece like “Coming Yesterday” seems destined to live on, fulfilling what his daughter posited was his greatest hope-for legacy: that “young generations of musicians play his music, as they play standards.”
Of course, given the impact of celebrated films, Solal might ultimately be remembered more for his Breathless score. Should that happen, the work — a characteristically fragmented affair tempered by a touch of whimsy — would represent the ultimate quirk of fate, but one Solal’s ironic side might appreciate. DB
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