No piano aficionado should be without this CD. French pianist Martial Solal has always been, to use crude jazzbo praise, a motherfucker — but at 81, he now has to be considered something beyond that. Motherfucker laureate?

This solo set was recorded live at the fabled Village Vanguard jazz club on Oct. 12, 2007, and features a series of familiar titles: “On Green Dolphin Street,” “Lover Man,” “’Round Midnight,” The Last Time I Saw Paris et al.” Solal uses the songs as raw material for freewheeling improvisations — but not, as if often the case, as excuses to launch into skronky noise or vague abstractions.

The pianist deconstructs the tunes’ harmonies, making often sideways references to the melodies and darting around with speedy phrases that evoke surprise and delight. Solal is not an avant-gardist in the common sense — mostly he hits the pretty notes, and seems to be amusing himself by letting his mind and fingers take him into whimsical explorations. His playing is staccato and extroverted and … fucking amazing.

And I can’t help but thinking: It would’ve been that much cooler to have been there. (CamJazz.com)
—Eric Snider

This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...