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.”
