RIP Claude Bolling (1930-2020)

By londonjazz on 31 December 2020 • ( Leave a comment )

Jazz pianist, conductor and composer Claude Bolling, (France Musique reports, link below) has died at the age of 90 at the Hôpital de Saint-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. Bolling wrote the film scores for films popular in France such as Borsalino, Philippe Le Broca’s Le Magnifique and Flic Story. He was born in Cannes on 10 avril 1930, he had his first band at 16 and recorded his first record at 18. A disciple of Duke Ellington, he started his own big band in 1956. It stayed in existence, remarkably, until the mid 2010s. He is considered a central figure in French jazz. The author Boris Vian nicknamed him “Bollington” in the 1960s, and was responsible for opening doors for him to gain a wider public; he worked as musical director for stars such as Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco and Henri Salvador. His versatility resulted in several occasions where he aligned the jazz piano trio with classical soloist, the most successful of which was a collaboration with flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, for whom he wrote “Suite for flute and jazz piano trio, a work which spent 530 weeks in the Billboard charts in the US, a record, and led to appearances at Carnegie Hall.

Publicity photo of Claude Bolling from his website

LINK: RIP Claude Bolling at France Musique Sebastian interviewed him in 2011 in the run-up to an appearance at the Wimbledon Music Festival. We reprint the piece here: The Wimbledon Music Festival includes something out of the ordinary this year: the 81-year French old composer and pianist Claude Bolling will be making a very rare visit indeed to the UK, playing a concert in the festival on November 14th. Wimbledon, I discovered in a brief telephone interview earlier this week, is an appropriate destination for Bolling. He has a proud family connection with SW19: his father-in-law Jean Le Sueur was a contestant no fewer than five times in the tennis championships in the years 1930-1946. Le Sueur, unfortunately, never made it beyond the last 32 at Wimbledon. Bolling himself, on the other hand, has had a massive career at the highest level in music for several decades. His IMDB entry lists around a hundred film credits, including nine film scores completed in just one year (1978). There are French classics like Borsalino with Alain Delon Jean-Pierre Belmondo in their prime as gangsters, for which Bolling wrote an unforgettable Joplin-ish theme. There have also been a multitude of jazz albums, and at for several years he also ran his own big band. Bolling is still playing regularly. He has a monthly trio gig at the Petit Journal in St.-Michel on the last Tuesday of each month. Does he still compose? “Not as much as in past times.” But he still brings new compositions to these monthly gigs. He will be appearing in London with the other members of this trio from Paris: his drummer for the past quarter of a century, Vincent Cordelette and regular bassist Pierre Maingourd. Bolling can be something of a musical chameleon. He is known for his ability to be able to adopt almost any jazz style in his piano playing, and as composer/arranger to give a jazz inflection to unlikely music. His big band recorded a swing version of the Marseillaise, there is a whole album of “swung” Mozart entitled ‘Jazzgang Amadeus Mozart’ and featuring works such as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. But the figure he kept coming back to as a key inspiration was Duke Ellington. “I was a fervent admirer of Duke. I had the good fortune to be friends with him over many years – it was a ‘grande amitié’ . He also got to play on the same stage with Ellington. He also talked about having led for many years one of the most significant French big bands. Bolling credits the promoter/journalist Frank Ténot with having had the original idea to establish a big band in Paris in the line of Tommy Dorsey and Count Basie . “Frank said he could get the musicians together. Professionals, with real knowledge of jazz. It was a very agreeable indeed to have them as interpreters “ The recordings by this band, says Bolling, were a major success, and that led to the creation of a regularly functioning big band with a weekly gig and appearances at big festivals. Bolling fondly remembers the modest beginnings in the rue de la Huchette, which led to larger concerts and successful jazz brunches at the hotel Meridien. “A lot of people came to those,” he reminisced. Another unusual direction which Bolling’s career has taken is the many collaborations with classical musicians. He has worked with guitarist Alexandre Lagoya, flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, cellist Yo Yo Ma. How did they come about, I asked? None of them, he confirmed, were really his instigation. “Classical musicians,” he told me, “ felt he need to escape from serious music “s’évader des musiques serieuses.” And he created the context to bring them closer to jazz. One of the most popular works of this kind will feature in the programme in Wimbledon, the Suite for flute and jazz trio, originally written for Rampal, and now a fixture in the flute repertoire. Soloist in Wimbledon will be Wissam Boustany. Bolling may be a very rare visitor to the UK, but the associations he has with our country are positive: “it’s a fascinating country, and when I had chance to play I was happy ” . He does have fond memories of recording film scores here such as Catch Me a Spy and Silver Bears. And there was a recording of the Suite for Chamber Orchestra. And he is full of high praise for our musicians : “les musicians anglais sont parfaits,” he says. He did, however, choose to avoid one question in our interview. What, I asked Bolling, did he consider the peaks, the biggest achievements of this extraordinary career. “Une apogée? No. It’s impossible to choose. Every concert is important. Next question?” His answer may not have helped our interview to get going, but it’s hard to hold it against him. And it also speaks volumes for the undimmed sense of purpose as a musician with which he still approaches every concert. Which can only promise great things for the Wimbledon on November 14th. LINK: Claude-Bolling.com

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