Martial Solal may have travelled through the history of jazz – after an early initiation into swing, he lived through the upheavals of be-bop and free jazz – but the pianist is still having fun reinventing its language and polishing up his own personal grammar book. After over fifty years of recordings and concerts with the greatest musicians (notably Lionel Hampton, Lee Konitz, André Hodeir, Roy Haynes, Kenny Clarke, Sidney Bechet, Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker and Daniel Humair), Solal never gets tired of innovating, renewing and improvising with a rare level of creativity.

He prides himself at never playing the same phrase twice. "The days where I can’t stop smiling are when I’ve played things I’ve never heard before", he says. Even on standards that have been played time and time again and are worn through from over use. "The standard is a totally outmoded object. If you can get new juice from it, then you’re a true improviser. The challenge is great fun." The proof is in his latest disc, Longitude, in which he reworks Tea for Two, Here’s that Rainy Day and The Last Time I saw Paris, alongside his own compositions (Short Cuts, Bizarre, vous avez dit?, etc.).

He forms a trio with the Moutin brothers in the album (Louis on drums and François on double bass), and rolls out music that is sprinkled with humour, incredibly elegant and sensual, and totally new. New in the sense that no one but him would dare to make such breaks in tempo : in performing rubatos (subtle variations that add extra colour to the base rhythm but do not alter it, ed. note), which are usually forbidden in jazz, and in moving away from the theme with little pranks only to come back to it as if nothing had happened. Not to mention his boldness with polytonality.

"When we go on stage, we have no idea what we are going to play", explains the drummer, Louis Moutin. "Martial puts his hands on the piano and improvises as the mood and moment takes him. Both François on double bass and I are listening out. And away we go! We send out, we reply to him. It can go on for a while. And then, a standard appears, or it doesn’t. Solal might move away from it, sometimes going onto another theme. And all of this happens with a great continuity. I don’t know anyone as reactive as he is." The singer Claudia Solal, Martial’s daughter, agrees. "He has a fascinating speed of anticipation. It’s as if he has a pile of dominos in his hand that he’s putting down in the order wants. And it works. The puzzle always comes out looking like something. But sometimes he has so many ideas at once that it scrambles around a bit." A common criticism is that he zaps too much. "It’s true, maybe it’s my weakness", admits Martial Solal wryly. He justifies himself by saying that his fingers are playing different parts in an orchestration. The result is inevitably very dense. "Now that I more or less know how to play the piano, I try to hold back. It makes it much more interesting."

The pianist is certainly impossible to pigeon-hole and he steers clear of the classic jazz recipe of laying out the theme, each player improvising in turn, followed by a re-performance of the theme. Solal prefers to compose his own menu, somewhere between the guardians of the temple of "bop" and the fans of completely free improvisation. "I have always been an advocate of liberty, even before free jazz existed! But if everything’s only avant-garde, in contempt of everything that existed before it, then I’m not interested. Besides, I make an effort not to move away from the fundamental elements of jazz: I either keep up a tempo, or a harmonic structure or a melody", he explains. Free jazz, which blew away the conventions of jazz at the end of the 60s, did not interest him. The recent toying around with fusion (jazz-rock, latin-jazz, etc.) even less so. Classical and contemporary music both attract him, including Stravinsky, Bartók, Berg and Messiaen, but only used sparingly. "They are two very different styles with their own histories. Like water and oil, however much you shake them, the two liquids won’t mix."

Solal tirelessly pursues his quest of taking jazz somewhere else, particularly in the longer pieces. "Jazz is the 20th century’s music. I think it’s worth more than small-time songs, don’t you?", he maintains. It is ideas like these that launched him into his Suite in D Flat in 1959, followed by several concerto compositions for various instruments and orchestra in the 1980s. His big band scores (Dodecaband in 1981, followed by Newdecaband from 2006) sparkle with boldness. With such qualifications, Martial Solal can allow himself the luxury of juggling with notes and surprising us with his mischief. And his voluble technique has seduced some renowned classical pianists, like Samson François and Sviatoslav Richter. "A pianist listening to himself play is not going to revel in the lyricism", judges Claudia Solal. "On the other hand, what gives him pleasure is his never-ending taste for play and maintaining a certain distance from everything."  The humour even creeps into the titles of his pieces (the parody of a famously difficult piano method called Hanon becomes Ah non!) and into the words he uses to introduce his concerts.

Characters like his are sometimes overlooked. Although he has made his mark on jazz, even reaching the general public with the score he wrote for Godard’s A Bout de Souffle in 1960, Martial Solal has not always been enthusiastically received in France. His fame is, however, secure in the birthplace of jazz, the USA. Acclaimed in New York in the 1960s, with a resurge of interest over the last ten years, Solal’s piano has been listened to attentively by the ears of the famous such as Bill Evans and Duke Ellington, who said of him: "Martial Solal has everything it takes to be a musician in abundance: sensitivity, freshness, creativity and an extraordinary technique."  

As Martial Solal embarks on his ninth decade, France is rediscovering that one of the most original pianists in the world and winner of the 1999 Jazzpar Prize (the jazz equivalent of the Nobel Prize), lives on its soil. "For me, he is one of the greatest musicians in the world", recounts Eric Le Lann, who has been playing trumpet with Solal for twenty-eight years. "Listen to him playing piano solo, it’s mind-blowing."