Claude Bolling, French pianist who fused jazz and classical music, dies at 90

An enthusiast from the childhood of Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and other eminent figures of American jazz, Mr. Bolling grew up listening to their music on the radio until World War II intervened. Jazz was practically banned by the Nazis in my country, it said to the Hartford Courant. So I got most of my jazz from 78 rpm recordings.

Mr Bolling said Ellington welcomed him as a member of his family when they met in the 1960s, when the Frenchman embarked on his career as a conductor. Describing the effect of Mr. Bollings’ music, trumpeter Louis Armstrong was renowned for declaring that my heart will never forget the sounds he made.

These sounds were not daring. Mr. Bolling was generally carved out of traditional jazz, but they won him a steady following in Europe and the United States for decades.

Beyond his tours and recordings, Mr. Bolling was a prolific composer of sheet music for French television and films such as Borsalino (1970), a gangster film set in Marseille in the 1930s and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, and The magnificent (1973), a shipment of spy sagas starring Belmondo and Jacqueline Bisset. In the pop genre, Mr. Bolling arranged music for Brigitte Bardot and Juliette Grco, among other French stars of the time.

In the United States, he was best known for his cross compositions, which he recorded with classical musicians including flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Emanuel Ax. Writing in the New York Times in 1982, music critic Allan Kozinn describes Mr. Bolling as the peloton leader in the crossover world.

Many musical purists despised the genre, disdaining Bach’s interpretations of the synthesizer and Luciano Pavarotti’s performances in which the sweaty Italian tenor belted to Neapolitan standards. Mr. Bolling distinguished himself, Kozinn observed, because rather than touching standards, he created his works.

Mr. Bollings’ composition strategy is to give his classical soloist a fully composed part, written in a style filled with baroque and classical gestures and allusions to featured instrument repertoire and idiomatic uses, Kozinn wrote. Meanwhile, his own piano, bass and percussion trio interact with a light jazz counterpoint. It is a formula that seems to have always been successful.

Mr. Bollings’ most famous crossbreed number was his Suite for flute and jazz piano, recorded with Rampal on a 1975 album that was nominated for a Grammy for Best Chamber Performance. The album went on to become one of the best-selling classic recordings of all time, landing on the Billboard charts and staying there for 10 years.

His blend of jazz and classical music was successful, he says, because he stayed in his lane and allowed his classical collaborators to stay in theirs.

There are no syncopations, no blue notes and no feeling of jazz in their parts, there told Kozinn. These things are reserved for piano, bass, and drums. Have I ever been tempted to stretch their parts in jazz? No why should I? It would spoil the contrast.

As classical musicians, these musicians are so good, and they handle melody and expression so well, he continued. Yet they rarely get the chance to do that with new pieces, because contemporary classical music is good, you know what it is. So even though I started writing these songs just for fun, I now realize that they serve another purpose. They allow these performers to add new material in a classical style to their repertoires, music with a lot of melody and, due to the jazz element, a new kind of sound.

Claude Bolling was born in Cannes, on the French Riviera, on April 10, 1930. His father was a hotel manager.

With the exception of a wartime stint in Nice, Mr. Bolling spent much of his education in Paris, where he said he gained an appreciation for jazz in nightclubs and music halls. . He told the Jerusalem Post that by the time he became interested in classical music he was too old to enroll in the conservatory and therefore had private lessons.

In his teenage years he won an award from the Hot Club de France, an organization founded to promote jazz in France. According to his website, he formed his first orchestra at 16 and was 18 when he made his first record.

During the early years of his career he performed with visiting American jazz musicians, including cornetist Rex Stewart, trumpeter Buck Clayton and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Such was his allegiance to Ellington that the French writer Boris Vian nicknamed Mr. Bolling Bollington.

He first experimented with cross music in 1970, when he was invited to perform an original composition on television. He proposed a four-handed performance with a friend of his, classical pianist Jean-Bernard Pommier, and the two concluded that the combination of their talents worked.

The Guardian reported that Mr Bollings’ wife, Irne Dervize-Sadyker, died in 2017 after nearly six decades of marriage, and that her survivors include two sons, David and Alexander.

Mr. Bolling jokingly described some scholars of classical music as more royalist than the king when it comes to claiming superiority over jazz. For his part, he cared little about the labels that others affixed to his opus.

I don’t mind what people say music is, or isn’t, it told Kozinn. I don’t write plays that are very concerned with … presenting the image of genius. I write music just for fun. I try to maintain a certain level of taste and quality, of course. But my main goal is to make the musicians happy, and if possible, to make the audience happy too.