Michel Petrucciani - The Richard Cook Annotations and Reviews

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Not surprisingly, biographies about Michel Petrucciani are primarily available in French. These include Michel Petrucciani by Benjamin Halay [with prefaces by Michel’s son Alexandre and the noted French Jazz violinist Didier Lockwood] and Michel Par Petrucciani by Frederic Goaty and Jazz Magazine. The bio by Halay is also available in a German language edition.

There are several books containing selections of Michel’s sheet music including Michel Petrucciani: The Book by Armand Reynaud and Jeremy Brun and Michel Petrucciani: Great Musicians. Both of these also contain some anecdotal information about Michel as do Travels with Michel a DVD by Roger Willemsen and a DVD by Michael Radford which also comes with a small book.                                             

For those wishing to read more about Michel Petrucciani in the Jazz Literature written in English, aside from the insert notes to some of his CDs, Richard Cook’s writings on Michel provides an excellent starting point.

Until his death in 2007 at the relatively young age of 50, Richard D. Cook had been writing about music since the 1970s.

In his Obituary for The Independent, fellow and co-author Brian Cook said of Cook:

“Cook wrote with an accuracy and consistency of judgement that made him one of the most perceptive and admired commentators, not just on his beloved jazz, but on a whole range of other "sonics" (as he liked to put it), and not just in Britain but internationally. Though his fabled impatience was part of an Englishness cultivated quite without irony, it was also a measure of Cook's utter rejection – in life and music – of the sub-standard. He had an unerring nose for the ersatz and fudged, and though his opinions were strong, sometimes too strong for those who prefer a more liberal rhetoric, he was anything but a bully. He was very happy to see his few loose deliveries driven into the covers, his more controversial assertions batted straight back at him … 

In a decade that elevated style over substance and put old-fashioned musicianship at a discount, Cook always looked for substance and often found it in unexpected places. He wrote as trenchantly about Abba as he did about the improvising ensemble AMM, and his passion for singers, female singers in particular, enabled him to write perceptively about Nina Simone, Joan Armatrading and the soul diva Anita Baker …”

The largest of Cook’s writing projects is The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, co-authored with Brian Morton, now in its eighth edition (and retitled The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings). Other books followed, including a "biography" of the Blue Note label in 2001, and in 2006 a study, It's About That Time, of Miles Davis. The year before, Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia, its title a reflection of his authority, was published by Penguin.

Michel Petrucciani

PIANO

born 28 December 1962; died 5 January 1999

“Surely nobody who ever saw and heard this formidable man will ever forget him and his music. He was born into a French musical family: his father played guitar, his brothers guitar and bass, and Michel worked in the family band from an early age. 

He went to Paris in 1980 and began recording there: despite suffering from osteogenesis imperfecta, which restricted his growth and gave him health problems for all of his adult life, he developed a piano style which was swooningly romantic and seemed, to some listeners, to represent the incarnate successor to Bill Evans's music. 

His early records especially are laden with effusive playing which sometimes suggest Keith Jarrett in more decisive mode, but as he went forward he became more considered and diverse. 

He always kept heavy company, recording with such giants as Jim Hall, Wayne Shorter, Roy Haynes and Eddie Gomez, and he secured a contract with Blue Note in 1985, which brought him to a wider audience, enabling him to move to New York in 1999. There was a brief period where he dabbled in a kind of fusion, but he went back to straight-ahead playing in his final years. There was always a sense that Petrucciani was living on borrowed time, even as his music exuded a palpable joie de vivre, and in the end he died from pneumonia, worsened by complications arising from his physical condition.” Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia

And these reviews are from The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, which Richard co-authored with Brian Morton and now in its eighth edition (and retitled The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings).

Michel Petrucciani (1962-99)

Born in Montpellier, he played in his father's band and began recording after moving to Paris, aged seventeen. Moved to the USA in 1982 and recorded for Blue Note, later for Dreyfus. A diminutive man handicapped by an obscure bone disease, he triumphed over any disability and became one of the most popular of concert performers, playing in a romantic post-bop style.

***(*) Days Of Wine And Roses

Owl548288-2 2CD Petrucciani; Lee Konitz (as); Robin

McClure (b); Jean-Francois Jenny-Clark (b); Aldo Romano

(d). 4/81-1/85.

**** 100 Hearts

Concord CD 43001 Petrucciani (p solo). 83.

**** Live At The Village Vanguard

Concord CCD 43006 2CD Petrucciani; Palle Danielsson (b);

Eliot Zigmund (d). 3/84.

There's a freshness and quicksilver virtuosity about Michel Petrucciani's early records which is entirely captivating, and they still sound terrific. While he is an adoring admirer of Bill Evans — “Call me Bill,” he once suggested to Jim Hall, who demurred -his extroverted attack places Evans's harmonic profundity in a setting that will energize listeners who find Evans too slow and quiet to respond to. 

Petrucciani was already a formidable talent when he began recording and, while some of these discs have been criticized for being the work of a pasticheur, that seems a curmudgeonly verdict on someone who enjoys the keyboard so much. 100 Hearts is arguably the best of the early sessions, if only for the marvellous title-tune which skips and leaps around its tone centre: in themes like this, Petrucciani staked a claim to be one of the great romantic virtuosos in contemporary jazz. Live At The Village Vanguard captures a typically rumbustious concert set by Petrucciani's trio of the day: 'Nardis' and 'Oleo' offer fresh annotations on well-worn classics and there are sparkling revisions of his own originals, 'To Erlinda' and 'Three Forgotten Magic Words'.

He made six albums for the independent Owl Label (now since acquired by the Universal Group) and Days Of Wine And Roses compiles a double-CD from this material. These sessions feel like his most European music; originals such as 'Eugenia' and 'Mike Pee' combine his brightness of touch with a more reflective feel in which the overall choice of tracks trades heavily. A contrast to the sometimes forced ebullience of his later music.

*** Pianism

Blue Note 746295-2 As above. 12/85.

***(*) Power Of Three

Blue Note 846427-2 Petrucciani; Wayne Shorter (ss, ts); Jim

Hall(g). 7/86.

*** Michel Plays Petrucciani

Blue Note 848679-2 Petrucciani; John Abercrombie (g); Gary

Peacock, Eddie Gomez (b); Roy Haynes, Al Foster (d); Steve

Thornton (perc). 9-12/87.

Petrucciani's first three albums for Blue Note provided a variety of challenges. Pianism is another excellent batch of six workouts by the trio who made the earlier live album, and if Zigmund and Danielsson sometimes sound a little underwhelming, that's partly due to the leader's brimming improvisations. Power Of Three is a slightly fragmented but absorbing concert meeting of three masters, skittish on 'Bimini' and solemnly appealing on 'In A Sentimental Mood.'

Plays Petrucciani is an all-original set which lines the pianist up against two magisterial rhythm sections, with Abercrombie adding some spruce counterpoint to two pieces. The smart hooks of 'She Did It Again' suggest that the pianist would have had a good living as a pop writer if he had decided to quit the piano, but the more considered pieces show no drop in imagination, even if some of the themes seem to be curtailed before the improvisations really start moving.

*** Live

Blue Note 780589-2 Petrucciani; Adam Holzman (ky); Steve

Logan (b); Victor Jones (d); Abdou M'Boup (perc). 11/91.

*** Promenade With Duke

Blue Note 780590-2 Petrucciani (p solo).

*** Marvellous

Dreyfus FDM 36564-2 Petrucciani; Dave Holland (b); Tony

Williams (d); Graffiti String Quartet, n.d.

The 1991 live album documents Petrucciani's 'fusion' band - not really any kind of jazz-rock, more a sitting of his famous virtuosity inside stiffer beats, with the dubious gratification of Holzman's synthesizer colourings. 'Miles Davis Licks' opens with boogie figures, then turns into a clever steal of some of the later Davis clichés. The sound of the band feels more dated than the rest of Michel's music, and the best moments come when the others stay as far in the background as possible, as in the elegant reading of ‘Estate'.

Michel's promenade is more with Strayhorn and Petrucciani than with Ellington. Beautifully played and recorded, but it's rather sombre after the elated feel of his earlier sessions. Although some of his other Blue Note albums have disappeared, there is a French edition which boxes all seven of them together, but availability is somewhat limited.

Marvellous matches him with the formidable team of Holland and Williams, who play up the music's dramatic qualities to the hilt: a graceful tune like the 3/4 'Even Mice Dance' gets thumped open by Williams's awesome drumming. The pianist revels in the situation, though, and produces some of his most joyful playing. Yet it hardly squares with the string quartet parts, arranged by Petrucciani but more of a distraction than an integral part of such fierce playing.

***(*) Au Théâtre Des Champs-Elysées

Dreyfus FDM 36570-2 2CD Petrucciani (p solo). 11/94. The opening 'Medley Of My Favourite Songs' might be a quintessential Petrucciani performance, 40 unbroken minutes of a piano master in full flow, lightning flashes of humour illuminating an otherwise seamless sequence. Maybe he never quite recaptured the effortless excitement of the early discs, and to that extent the energy of his playing is mitigated somewhat by his sense of proportion; but there's a great deal to enjoy across these two discs: a lovely, thoughtful 'Night Sun In Blois', a finger-busting Monk medley, and a beautifully distilled 'Besame Mucho' to close on.

*** Both Worlds

Dreyfus FDM 36590-2 Petrucciani; Flavio Boltro (t); Bob Brookmeyer (vtb); Stefano Di Battista (ts, ss); Anthony Jackson (b); Steve Gadd(d). 96.

Almost a complete departure from his other work, this rather mysteriously seemed to set out to tame Petrucciani by placing him squarely in a band format, where he flourishes only intermittently as a soloist, and even then without his usual brio. He wrote all nine tunes but the arrangements are all Brookmeyer's, who brings his trademark quirks to a nevertheless very interesting line-up. The soloists are all strong enough, and there's a particularly appealing piano—soprano duet on 'Petite Louise', yet this could all use a shot of Michel letting go.

***(*) Concerts Inedits

Dreyfus FDM 36607-2 3CD Petrucciani; Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, Louis Petrucciani (b); Lenny White (d). 7/93-8/94-

****Solo Live

Dreyfus FDM 36597-2 Petrucciani (p solo). 2/97. Petrucciani's passing robbed jazz of one of its most charismatic spirits, especially in performance, and these sets are reminders of how much an audience would respond to him. The three-disc set offers him in solo, duo and trio settings: it's somewhat patchy, since the solo disc has a rather hard and unattractive piano sound, and the trio set (with Louis Petrucciani and White, cut at a Japanese concert) doesn't entirely benefit from the drummer's energies. But the duo record with NHOP is a delight, two virtuosos at the top of their game without overpowering the listeners with how much they can play.

Solo Live is a marvellous Frankfurt concert recording. Michel warms up with a sequence of shorter pieces before stretching out on 'Trilogy In Blois' and 'Caravan'. He was always rethinking material: the 'Besame Mucho' here is entirely different from the treatment on Concerts Inedits. The final 'She Did It Again/Take The "A" Train' medley is showstopping, but each note seems to matter as part of the flow. This great communicator will be sorely missed.”

"Plus Michel Petrucciani - Keys to the Kingdom" by David Hadju

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The following piece by David Hajdu was prepared for publication in 2009 so as to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Michel’s death. Other books by Mr. Hajdu include Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and How Can I Keep from Singing?: The Ballad of Pete Seeger.

In an effort to collect on the blog and its related Archive and Labels as much of the Jazz literature in English about Michel Petrucciani, the JazzProfiles editorial staff has posted Mr. Hajdu’s essay to compliment the series about Michel currently featuring on these pages.

It contains a number of critical insights into what made Petrucciani’s playing so distinctive and is an entertainingly written narrative.

Plus Michel Petrucciani – “Keys To the Kingdom” 

by David Hajdu

The New Republic 

Post Date Wednesday, March 18, 2009

© - David Hajdu,  copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“One grave away from Chopin and not far from Balzac and Jim Morrison in Pere-Lachaise, the Parisian cemetery and tourist hotspot, lies the French-Italian pianist Michel Petrucciani. He died ten years ago this January in New York, the city where he had made his reputation as a jazz tyro, and when his body was returned to France for his burial, thousands of mourners filled the streets of the 20th arrondissement. One of the French radio channels played no music but his for twenty-four hours. Chirac praised Petrucciani for his "passion, courage, and musical genius" and called him "an example for everyone."

Of what, exactly, was Petrucciani an example? Chirac was no doubt referring to what he described, in proto-Oprahish terms, as Petrucciani's "courage"--the tenacity and the inclination to defiance which seemed, in Petrucciani, triumphs of the mind and the heart over the body. Petrucciani, a musician of rare power and expressive confidence, suffered--truly suffered, in lifelong pain--from osteogenesis imperfecta, the "glass bones" disease. For most of his thirty-six years, Petrucciani could not bear the weight of his own body without leg braces or crutches. He never grew past the height of three feet, and he typically weighed about fifty pounds. He was as fragile as his art was robust, his life as tenuous as his music is durable.

Over the course of this year, Dreyfus Jazz, the French-American label, will issue remastered, repackaged, and in most cases expanded versions of the ten albums that Petrucciani recorded for the label in his last years, as well as a two-DVD set of documentary and concert footage not previously released in this country. The series is an overdue reminder of the ecstatic power of Petrucciani's music. I cannot think of a jazz pianist since Petrucciani who plays with such exuberance and unashamed joy. Marcus Roberts and Michel Camilo have greater technique; Bill Charlap and Eric Reed, better control; Fred Hersch has broader emotional range; Uri Caine is more adventurous. Their music provides a wealth of rewards--but not the simple pleasure of Michel Petrucciani's. With the whole business of jazz so tentative today, you would think more musicians would express some of Petrucciani's happiness to be alive.

The power Petrucciani communicated, as a pianist, was the force of a will, a muscularity of the mind. He admired and emulated Duke Ellington, but had to simulate the effect Ellington and some other strong pianists have achieved by using more of their bodies than their hands. (Ellington, like Randy Weston today, put his lower arm weight into his playing to give it extra heft.) Petrucciani generated power through the speed of his attack. His force was willed; but, in the determined gleefulness of his playing, it never sounded forced.

Giddily free as an improviser, Petrucciani trusted his impulses. If he liked the sound of a note, he would drop a melody suddenly and just repeat that one note dozens of times. His music is enveloping: he lost himself in it, and it feels like a private place where strange things can safely ensue. Today, when so much jazz can sound cold and schematic, Petrucciani's music reminds us of the eloquence of unchecked emotion. "When I play, I play with my heart and my head and my spirit," Petrucciani once explained to an interviewer. "This doesn't have anything to do with how I look. That's how I am. I don't play to people's heads, but to their hearts. I like to create laughter and emotion from people--that's my way of working."

Born in Orange, near Avignon, in 1962, Petrucciani was raised in Montelimar. Essentially the Texas of France, Montelimar has a people who take fierce pride in their southern identity, distrust those northern elitists, speak with a twangy accent, and revel in the telling of tall tales. "Michel was really into bullshitting," remembers one of Petrucciani's friends, the French journalist Thierry Peremarti.”

Michel would lie to your face. That's one of the reasons he didn't get more press. He pissed off a lot of people. He was from the south--you talk, you talk, and you say nonsense." In 1980, Petrucciani told a People magazine reporter that he had raced Harleys with the Hell's Angels and had gone hang-gliding with eggs between his toes.

There are four categories of osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), a family of disorders involving genetic dysfunction in collagen production. The first is Type I, which is so subtle that it frequently goes unrecognized and untreated. Type II is the most severe, usually lethal upon birth; the victims' bones crumble at first touch. Petrucciani was born with a moderately acute kind of OI in a group overlapping Type III and Type IV: his bones were so weak that they fractured more than a hundred times during his childhood. Any kind of movement was difficult and usually painful. Petrucciani could not walk at all until adolescence, when his bones strengthened somewhat (like those of all teenagers, including OI sufferers). He had physical deformities typically associated with OI: distorted facial features, a protruding chin, bulging eyes, and curvature of the spine. In most cases like Petrucciani's, life span is diminished, and in those instances where the patients reach middle age, deafness usually occurs.

"He was in pain all the time," recalled his father, Tony Petrucciani, a part-time guitarist in the Grant Green mold. "He cried. I bought him a toy piano." The keyboard looked like a mouth to Michel, and he thought it was laughing at him, so he smashed it with a toy hammer, and his father got him an old full-size upright abandoned by British soldiers at a military base. From the age of four, Michel spent virtually all his free time, which was abundant, at the piano.

Petrucciani was twelve years old and looked like a toddler when his father started carrying him into jam sessions around the south of France. He was thirteen when he made his professional debut at the Cliousclat Festival in the southern district of Drome. "My European promoter told me, 'We got to do a tour with this little cat,'" remembers Clark Terry, the trumpeter. "I didn't believe him. When I heard him play--oh, man! He was a dwarf, but he played like a giant. I said, 'Listen, little guy--don't run away. I'll be back for you.'" Within two years, Petrucciani would be performing regularly in French jazz festivals, first with the expatriate American drummer Kenny Clarke and shortly after that with Terry.

During his first years performing and recording professionally, Petrucciani's specialty was youthful over-compensation. His piano playing, though already tinged with the romantic lyricism that would later distinguish it, tended toward defensive demonstrations of virtuoso technique and speed. Without having yet come to a mature understanding of what he wanted to say, he said little but did so really, really fast. He projected swaggering, roguish macho--a youngster's fantasy conception of continental virility. He called everybody "baby" and wore a yachtsman's cap. "He acted tough and pushy, and his playing was tough and pushy," says the writer and trombonist Michael Zwerin, who was living near Petrucciani and met him when the pianist was fifteen. "He knew how to say 'motherfucker' in French."

A fellow named Jean Roche lived near Zwerin and the Petruccianis, and he had experience with audio recording. (When Olivier Messiaen decided to experiment with bird sounds in his music, it was Roche who hid in trees and recorded the chirping.) Roche came into a bit of money and spent a sizable portion of it building a lavishly equipped recording studio near his home in the rural south. To give himself practice at engineering, Roche offered some nearby jazz musicians free access to the studio. Zwerin, Michel and his brother Louis Petrucciani (a bassist), and the French-Italian drummer Aldo Romano, who was vacationing at his parents' home nearby, spent most of a week there making Michel's first album, aptly titled Flash. "It's kind of sloppy and everything needs another take, but it swung, and it certainly shows off Michel well," says Zwerin, who served as titular leader of the sessions.

"We were sitting there wondering what to play," he remembers. "It was kind of hot. And Michel said, 'Anybody know "Giant Steps"?' Neither Louis nor I wanted to admit we didn't really know it. So there was this great silence. And Michel said, 'Well, I do!' And he pounded into a solo version of it at a very fast clip, and it was really amazing. That to me is Michel--'Well, I do!' Man, a confidence you wouldn't believe."

From the moment Petrucciani found he could excel at the piano, I think, what he could do overcame what he was as his source of identity. I play jazz piano, baby, and I do it faster and more fancily than anybody. I do, therefore it doesn't matter what I am.

Near the end of his life, Petrucciani looked back on his early career and called Aldo Romano his "guardian angel." The drummer, a generation older than Petrucciani, describes himself as Petrucciani's second father and remains proud of having helped Petrucciani pull away from the first one. "He wanted to see the world," recalls Romano. "But Michel was very fragile, and so everybody in his family was afraid. And also you have the problem of his father, because his father was an idiot. He didn't trust anybody. He wanted to keep him as a partner, to play music with. He was very jealous. So I had to fight to take him to Paris, because his father didn't want me to, because he wanted to keep him, like you would cage a monster."

After a brief visit to Paris and a return home in the autumn of 1980, Petrucciani moved into Aldo Romano's house in Bezons on the western perimeter of Paris and began his life as an adult professional. His music took on a new warmth and delicacy, a confidence in place of cockiness, and his grown-up personality--not just an emulation of his gangster heroes, but his own amalgam of southern French wile, musical sensitivity, and the bright, sparkling energy often associated with his genetic condition--began to emerge.

Petrucciani, who was always aware of the limited life span of OI sufferers, worked fast. Through an introduction by Romano, Petrucciani signed a recording contract with Owl Records, a French independent run by Jean-Jacques Pussiau, a former photographer, and he recorded six albums within three years. "He was always in a hurry," recalls Pussiau. "He said, 'Jean-Jacques, I don't want to lose time.'" The albums--especially the last two, Note 'n Notes and Cold Blues (both recorded in 1984)--are irresistibly precocious records, over-stuffed with ideas. Though most of this music is now difficult to find, there is an easy-to-get compilation of fifteen exemplary tracks, The Days of Wine and Roses: The Owl Years (1981-1985).

"We had an exceptional relationship," Pussiau says, "because I carried Michel in my arms very, very often. That creates a very strange intimacy. You know what it is to hold your child in your arms? I could feel his heart beating against my chest. I used to go on the stage and pick him up, and he was full of sweat. I would carry him away, and his sweat would soak through our shirts and onto my skin. Sometimes, when I used to carry him, he would bite my ear. We'd walk into a restaurant, and he'd chomp."

Petrucciani found success easily in France. "We did a tour together (in France), and the first place we played was packed," remembers Lee Konitz, with whom Petrucciani recorded a fine duet album, Toot Sweet, in 1982. "I said, 'Oh, man--my time has finally come.' Then I realized this little guy was the big attraction. He had just skyrocketed." The Petrucciani-Konitz duets, reissued here on the Sunnyside label, capture the maturing Petrucciani in a mode of harmonic exploration. That is to say, he is doing his best Bill Evans (especially on the first track, "I Hear a Rhapsody," which Evans himself had done as a duet, with the guitarist Jim Hall).

In 1981, Petrucciani had himself fitted for leg braces and crutches, rendering him independently ambulatory (at short distances) for the first time in his life, and he left for America, breaking away from both his family and Aldo Romano. "He didn't feel free with me," says Romano. "So he had to kill his second father somehow to move on. He needed to escape. He needed to go very far, as far as he could go, and that was California."

Petrucciani may or may not have stopped in Manhattan for a while. Although I have been unable to find anyone who actually saw him in New York this early, musicians have circulated stories that Petrucciani would tell about his first stint in the city. In one, he scammed his way to New York on bad checks, then had to hide out in Brooklyn with the help of Sicilian family connections. In another, he played piano for trade in a midtown brothel, where he learned the secrets of love. (Music-parlor prostitution in 1981? Where were the riverboat gamblers and runaway slaves?)

In Northern California, Petrucciani met his last mentor: Charles Lloyd, the saxophonist and self-styled mystic who had dropped out of the music scene for most of the previous decade. Petrucciani, then eighteen, visited Lloyd, then forty-three, at his house in Big Sur, and they began playing together. Lloyd decided to return to the road, with Petrucciani as his pianist. "Michel was like a son, and I loved him," Lloyd told me. "In his youthful innocence I recognized a quality one does not often find in another human being. Every inch of his small frame was filled with creativity and intelligence." Put another way, "Michel kicked Charles in the ass," says Peremarti. "Michel had something special, and Charles saw that right away. It made him pick up the saxophone."

By late summer, in 1984, Petrucciani was ready for New York. "He was one of these total natural cats who could just sit and play with anybody, any time, any tune, whatever we were playing," recalls the saxophonist Joe Lovano. "Michel was the most magical cat I ever knew, man. When all the 'young lions' stuff was happening, Michel was the youngest, baddest lion out there. But because of his condition and he was from France or whatever, he didn't get tied in with all those cats, and he blew them all completely away."

The first time I saw Michel Petrucciani, a friend of his was carrying him into Bradley's, the tiny piano-jazz club in Greenwich Village where I spent most of my nights and salary in the 1980s. I had grown up in suburban New Jersey with a neighbor my age who had osteogenesis imperfecta. His name was Joey Bascai. His parents pulled him around in a wagon, but he used to like playing baseball. His father would pitch to him carefully, since a wild throw to his chest or head would have been devastating; he could swing the bat and do it well, and the rest of us kids would take turns as his runner. When I saw Petrucciani's friend walk past me with Petrucciani in his arms, I read all my old feelings about playing ball with Joey into his eyes: a vertiginous mixture of exhilaration in being part of the kicky little guy's fun and terror in the knowledge that it could end horribly in an instant. The bar crowd cleared a path from the door to the piano, and Petrucciani screamed, "Get out of my way, motherfuckers!"

Over the next few years, I saw Petrucciani a dozen times at Bradley's and the Village Vanguard. He recorded roughly an album a year for Blue Note, including some gorgeous work with Wayne Shorter and Jim Hall. Power of Three, the trio album they recorded live in Montreux in 1986, may well be the most robustly emotive work of jazz recorded in the 1980s. Petrucciani's music had reached full bloom. He was improvising with loving, playful winks at every style from Harlem stride to free jazz, and he was composing tuneful, idiosyncratic pieces indebted but not wholly beholden to Monk and Ellington.

"I've never been around anyone who loved to live like Petrucciani--and live life to the fullest," says Mary-Ann Topper, his manager during his breakthrough years in New York. "He said to me, 'Mary-Ann, I want to have at least five women at once, I want to make a million dollars in one night' - things that were probably impossible. But had Michel ever thought that anything was impossible, he would have never done anything he did." 

As Petrucciani himself said, "I'm a brat. My philosophy is to have a really good time and never let anything stop me from doing what I want to do. It's like driving a car, waiting for an accident. That's no way to drive a car. If you have an accident, you have an accident--c'est la vie." Fond of wine since his early adulthood in Paris, Petrucciani was now widely known to be drinking to excess and said to be enhancing his appetite for alcohol with cocaine.

In his last years, Petrucciani worked at a manic pace, performing more than a hundred solo piano concerts per year- 140 in 1998 alone. Too weak to stand with crutches, he was now using a wheelchair regularly. "He was working too much--not only recording and doing concerts, but he was always on television, and he was always doing interviews," recalls Bernard Ivain, Petrucciani's manager in his final years. "He got himself overworked, and you could see it. He pushed too much." Late in 1998, Petrucciani decided to slow down. "He couldn't keep up that pace anymore - he was physically exhausted," says Francois Zalacain. A few days into the new year, he was admitted to Beth Israel Hospital in New York, and he died there, of a pulmonary infection, on January 6, 1999.

Among the musicians Petrucciani phoned in his last days was Wayne Shorter. "He and I talked, and he said he comprehended that he was sick- that was an important thing," recalls Shorter. "There's a lot of people walking around, full-grown and so-called normal - they have everything that they were born with at the right leg length, arm length and stuff like that. They're symmetrical in every way, but they live their lives like they are armless, legless, brainless, and they live their life with blame. I never heard Michel complain about anything. Michel didn't look in the mirror and complain about what he saw. Michel was a great musician - a great musician - and great, ultimately, because he was a great human being, and he was a great human being because he had the ability to feel and give to others of that feeling, and he gave to others through his music. Anything else you can say about him is a formality. It's a technicality, and it doesn't mean anything to me."

David Hajdu is music critic for The New Republic. 

Michel Petrucciani: A Career of Urgency - Jazz Pianist Extraordinaire

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

For most of the year following the death of Michel Petrucciani in January 1999, somewhat reflexively, I played his music on a regular basis.

Over the past two decades since his passing, I noticed that I periodically return to it - particularly the solo piano recordings - and engross myself in them for long periods of time.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed this tendency as one day, my wife asked: “Why do you like his music so much?”

 

The search for the answer to this seemingly simple question led to the multi-part piece on Michel that recently featured on JazzProfiles.

 

The problem with finding an answer to my wife’s question is summoned up in this statement about the evanescence and significance of Jazz by the esteemed critic, Gene Lees:

 

“Jazz, to a degree that depends on your ability and willingness to submit to it, gets you beyond the process of conscious judgment, of verbalizing, of observing yourself in the act of listening and thinking about your responses, which very act can make those responses evaporate. It opens, as it were, the doorway to the soul and gives the music direct access to the inner person.  At the same time Jazz combines a flowing rhythmic pulse with extraordinary emotional expressiveness and intellectual invention.”  [Foreword, Jazz Lives: 100 Portraits in Jazz. Buffalo, NY: Firefly, 1994].

 

However, while preparing the multi-part piece allowed me another excuse to steep myself in Michel’s music, and notwithstanding Gene Lees’ caveat about conscious judgment and trying to verbalize the act of listening to Jazz, the time has come to attempt to answer my wife’s question.

 

Louis Armstrong once declared: “The music either speaks to you or it don’t.”  Louis’ declarative statement may be the ready answer to my wife’s question – Michel’s music simply “speaks to me.”  But why? Why is it that the playing of some musicians appeals to some listeners more than others? What about Michel’s playing and his music do I find particularly appealing?

 

 Perhaps a place to search out an answer to this more difficult question is with a recognition that as far back as I can remember, when listening to Jazz pianists I have always been fascinated with those that play the instrumental orchestrally.  My earliest favorite pianists - Erroll Garner and Dave Brubeck – approached the instrument as though they had a symphony orchestra at their fingertips.

 

The other quality that I have always found appealing in pianists is those who play the instrument percussively and with a flowing metrical pulse so that their improvisations have lots of rhythmic phrases and a very pronounced sense of swing; the kind that you can easily tap your foot to.

 

The music of Michel Petrucciani fits into both of these categories: it is at once orchestral and percussive with a heightened, unrelenting sense of swing.

 

One of my earliest recollections of Jazz piano being played in this manner was on the 10” Columbia House Party EP entitled He’s Here, He’s Gone, He’s Garner!  It contains an 8 minute version of Erroll playing The Man I Love that moves from a stately Brahmsian introduction, to a majestically slow representation of the melody before it moves into chorus after chorus of up-tempo, pulsating and original improvisations whose conclusion always leaves me exhausted from the excitement they generate in my emotions.

 

Erroll plays his usual four-beats-to-the-bar left hand self-accompaniment, but his right hand is all over the middle and upper register of the piano with block chord phrases, rhythmic riffs interchanged with drum fills and single lines that weave a powerful elucidation of bop phrases.

 

Pianist Dick Katz, in his splendidly instructive essay entitled “Pianists of the 1940s and 1950s” that appears in editor Bill Kirchner’s The Oxford Companion to Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], provides this description of Erroll Garner:

 

“Unique is an inadequate word to describe Erroll Garner. He was a musical phenomenon unlike any other. One of the most appealing performers in Jazz history, he influenced almost every pianist who played in his era, and even beyond. Self-taught, he could not read music, yet he did things that trained pianists could not play or even imagine. Garner was a one-man swing band, and indeed often acknowledged that his main inspiration was the big bands of the thirties – Duke, Basie, Lunceford, et al. He developed a self-sufficient, extremely full style that was characterized by a rock-steady left-hand that also sounded like a strumming rhythm guitar. Juxtaposed against this was a river of chordal or single note ideas, frequently stated in a lagging, behind-the-beat way that generated terrific swing.” [P. 365]

 

Like Garner, and given his prodigious technique, Michel also offers what I think of as a complete piano listening experience in which the full range of the instrument comes into play.

 

Indeed, many of the qualities that Dick Katz ascribes to Erroll Garner’s style are also those that I find appealing in Michel’s especially the percussion phrasing [in this case, not the ‘strumming rhythm guitar’ but either bass lines or counter-rhythmic riffs] played in the left hand against which Michel “… juxtaposed a river of chordal or single note ideas ….”  Michel is one of the few pianists who, although formally trained and not self-taught, had the ears and the imagination to rival Garner’s creativity. 

To carry the analogy even a step further, Petrucciani’s often played, show-stopping treatment of Caravan may have had its inspiration in Erroll lengthy version of the tune that he performed on the Columbia album by the same name [CL 535].

 

I like the sound of Jazz piano that is played in a highly arranged manner.

Zan Stewart offers this perspective in his insert notes to pianist Bill Cunliffe’s Satisfaction CD [Azica AJD-72208]:

 

“Pianists and guitarists are indeed fortunate in that they play an instrument that can function both as a solo voice and as an orchestra. This of course allows for that most unusual of personal music expression to be realized: an unaccompanied solo statement embodied within the full harmonic resources of a large ensemble.”

 

Another pianist who plays in this style and who was an early influence on my tastes in Piano Jazz is Martial Solal. 

 

Turning to the previously cited Dick Katz essay, he had this to say about Solal:

 

“One of the most striking and original pianists in Europe is Martial Solal. He is revered abroad but has not achieved fame in the United States for a variety of reasons beyond his control. Solal takes elements of Tatum, Garner, Powell and Monk and combines them with his personal advanced harmonic and rhythmic concepts to achieve an unusual virtuoso style. He also has an acute sense of abstraction; and his work demands close attention to appreciate its nuances. Blazing speed is always at the service of real musical ideas, and he knows how to use both hands creatively. Solal can generate remarkable swing, even though his rhythms can be convoluted.” [p. 368].

 

And once again, my of the distinguishing characteristic that Katz ascribes to Solal style are also those that I find appealing in Petrucciani: “advanced harmonic and rhythmic concepts; his work demands close attention to appreciate its nuances; an unusual virtuoso style; an acute sense of abstraction; blazing speed in the service of real musical; convoluted rhythms; can generate remarkable swing.”  If the critic Whitney Balliett had not invented the phrase “sound of surprise” to generically describe Jazz, he would have almost certainly had to invent to describe Michel’s style.  When listening to Petrucciani’s music, I just never know what I’m going to hear next and often what I hear next I’ve never heard before.

 

For some inexplicable reason Martial’s debut LP on Capitol found its way into my Jazz record collection [to this day I can’t remember how it got there]. Dazzling displays of piano virtuosity abound on this Capitol recording simply entitled Martial Solal [T—10261], most especially the solo piano tracks which, coincidentally, include tunes that would become solo piano staples of Michel Petrucciani repertoire more than 30 years later such as Darn That Dream, ‘Round Midnight, Lover Man and Flamingo.

 

During my formative Jazz years, I seem to remember that a number of my musical mates more or less put down Martial style as “cocktail Jazz.”  I seem to recall that Ahmad Jamal was also lumped into this category at that time and, not surprisingly, many years later, Michel Petrucciani style was derided by some as too flowery and pompous!

 

And yet, in terms of what appeals to me in the piano stylings of all three – Solal, Jamal & Petrucciani – can be summarized by the following quotation from Max Harrison’s A Jazz Retrospect [New York: Crescendo Publishing, 1976]:

 

“What first attracted me to Solal’s music were dismissals of it as ‘not jazz.’ It may appear too easy a paradox, yet almost the best advice that one can offer people who want to find out about jazz is to attend to those whose work is supposedly ‘not jazz.’ Besides their music often being of high quality in itself, it may offer a rethinking of jazz essentials and even, in a few cases, indicate a new direction for the art.”

[Underlining mine, p.155].

 

Once he had evolved his own voice, Michel took piano Jazz “in a new direction” and this to me is where I derive my greatest satisfaction in listening to him play and is also part of the answer to my wife’s inquiry.  In over 50 years of listening to Jazz, I’ve never heard this before in the music.  What comes out of Michel’s music is new and takes the art in a different direction and I find a great joy in wondering what lies around the corner.

 

Trumpeter and Jazz historian Richard Sudhalter has noted:

 

“Jazz musicians are their music … the music can’t be subtracted; it’s the defining essence which sets musicians apart and makes them special and ultimately mysterious.”

 

I think that Sudhalter’s concept of mutual reciprocity is especially true in the case of musicians such as Michel who make an original contribution to the field of Jazz and help to shape it differently.  They absorb the tradition and their influences and take Jazz to a unique place in its continuing evolution.

 

I addition to his originality, Ben Sidran, in his NPR interview may have hit upon two other qualities that I find so appealing about Michel’s music when he describes it as “… a mixture of French élan and a New York ‘hipster.’”

 

And while these cosmopolitan elements from his time in both Paris and New York are easier to discern in his music, Michel also seemed to be never too far away from his provincial French roots.

 

To my ears the combination of these cultural influences are apparent in “Trilogy in Blois,” a piece that evolved over a period of time after Michel returned to take up residence in France in the 1990s.  It’s as though the evolution of the piece became a continual musical homecoming of sorts. And yet, there is nothing folksy or hokey about this musical suite; rather, it’s dramatic and romantic qualities seem to also reflect an overlay of New York sophistication.

 

Another appealing quality about Michel’s music is that it is full of humor, wit and charm; much like the man himself [another reaffirmation of Sudhalter’s premise of the inseparability of the two]. This funny side of Michel not only crept into some of his original compositions, but also into his naming of them for what else are we to make of “Even Mice Dance,” “Little Piece in C for U,” and “Chloe’ Meets Gershwin?”

 

Sometimes, when listening to Michel’s music I get the feeling that he’s purposely structuring his songs so that the impish, whimsical and playful qualities of his personality can find room to express themselves.

 

When I listen to music, I want to be entertained and without a doubt, Michel is entertaining. He loves to perform – “without a net” - in front of a live audience.  Francois Dreyfus “… encouraged Petrucciani to give interviews in many languages and to show the world his unmistakable charm.” 

 

As Pasqual Anquetil observed:

 

“He wasn’t one of those musicians who played only for his fellow musicians.  He knew that there is no such thing as a bad audience, only bad artists. ‘I always play for people. I hope that after every concert they go away happy and want to come back. My music isn’t intellectual; it’s sensual and full of song. Enchanting. I want it to beat with a heart and to be simple. … I’m just trying harder and harder to apply the lesson of the great masters – less is more.”

 

Power and speed are also attractively present in Michel’s playing. This power creates a percussiveness that I like in Jazz piano while the speed results in an enhanced pianism with notes flying by at a pace that few pianists can manage.  In other words, Michel can “really bring it” when he wants to through displays of amazing technique that leave me shaking my head in wonderment.

 

I know that I just heard it but sometimes I can’t believe my own ears. The never-ending inventiveness of his improvisations is a source of endless fascination for me.

 

Yet, his ballad playing is remarkably sensitive to dynamics with a softness and a gentleness that brings out the best in compositions whose intent is to inspire an emotional mood in the listener.

 

I also get pleasure from the Classical Music overtones that permeate many of Michel's original compositions and, occasionally, his improvisations.  While one might expect to hear allusions to Debussy and Ravel there are also many indirect references to Bach, Mozart and Bartok. I find Michel’s pianistic overlays of Classical Music into Jazz interesting as they seem to have a co-relationship to my preference for orchestrally played Jazz piano.

 

Yet, Michel’s playing is continually interesting to me because it is also representative of what the critic Don Heckman has labeled “… the more visceral elements of Jazz:

 

-         its rhythmic propulsion

-         its spontaneity

-         its passion”

 

As a part of his legacy, Michel also left us a fascinating body of original compositions that include up tempo burners like “Manhattan” and “Mr. K.J.,”  to medium tempo finger-snappers like “My BeBop Tune” “Training” and “Rachid” [played in ¾ time], Latin rhythm inspired masterpieces such as “Guadeloupe,”  “Brazilian Suites Nos. 1 & 2” and “Brazilian-like” and most of all, a bevy of reverie inducing ballads such as “Home,” “Colors,” “Hidden Joy,” and  “Love Letter.” These superb melodies constitute more of what I cherish about Michel.

 

Charles Aznavour once remarked: “We build our styles not on our abilities, but on our limitations.”

 

Perhaps, a corollary to this might therefore be – The fewer the limitations the bigger the style for this was certainly the case as far as Michel Petrucciani.

 

After reading my efforts in answering my wife’s question about why I find Michel’s music so enthralling, if you have no doubt concluded that he was a man of vast contrasts, you would be right.

Much about why I like the music of Michel Petrucciani so much can be found in this Pasqual Anquetil statement [from a translation by Charles Tobermann]:

“It is difficult to summarize a personality so rich and full of contrast in a few words. Like all great artists, he was everything and its opposite – at once joyous, cheerful, serious, tender, direct, available, attentive, charming, capricious, tolerant, violent, joking, crafty, festive, and bawdy – Rabelaisian in his enormous appetite for life. He was also incorrigibly sentimental who was never embarrassed to cry when emotionally moved. He was “Romantic, But Not Blue,” like the title of one of his last compositions.

 

Michel Petrucciani will remain one of the greatest lyrical artists of our day. Not just because he was a genius, but perhaps, because like nobody else, with his joy and pain, he knew how to get to the essence of sincerity and generosity with his trademark excess and truth. Francis Marmande clearly understood this in his article in Le Monde, ‘Perhaps because he was not like us, but rather as we should be – he played life’s game to the fullest.’”

 

During his solo recitals, Michel played a number of tunes in medley form before taking a brief break at which point he would ask his audiences in French: “It’s good?” As if, there was any doubt.

 

Yes, Michel, it is good.

Michel Petrucciani - Marvellous - Manhattan

Michel Petrucciani - Night Sun in Blois