From Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the 2010s, from ragtime to big band, he has been one of the most famous classical jazz performers. A composer also for variety, he has also written numerous film scores. He died on Tuesday, December 29, at the age of 90.
By
Pianist, composer and conductor, Claude Bolling, died Tuesday, December 29, at the Saint-Cloud hospital, announced on Wednesday 30, his entourage to Agence France-Presse. He was 90 years old. His long career began at the end of the 1940s, in the bubbling jazz of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and had been carried out until the mid-2010s. From ragtime to big band swing, he was the one of the most famous classical jazz performers, while working for variety, film music.
Born in Cannes (Alpes-Martimes) on April 10, 1930, Claude Bolling precociously shows artistic talents, first for drawing and painting, then for music. His parents moved to Paris a few years after his birth. On vacation in Nice, with his maternal grandparents, when war declared with Nazi Germany on September 3, 1939, he will stay there for the time of the Occupation.
With his grand- mother, he learned the piano for the first time, then with a neighbor. He discovered jazz during this period. He meets Marie-Louise Colin, who plays piano, trumpet and drums in female orchestras from the Côte d’Azur. With her, he improved his practice and his knowledge, both in classical music and jazz.
First professional steps
In the winter of 1944, it was the return to Paris , released on August 25, 1944. Bolling took courses in harmony, classical composition, and regularly frequented the jazz clubs of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, began to play here and there. He made his first professional steps with the Steffy Club Gang, named after a chic place in the 16 th arrondissement. At the slightest coming of American musicians for concerts in Parisian halls or clubs, he is part of the public, asks the pianists for advice. Great foundational shock, for him, who will place Duke Ellington at the highest level of his inspiration, the arrival of the pianist’s big band at the Théâtre de Chaillot, from April 12 to 16, 1950. In his memoirs, Bolling Story, written with Jean-Pierre Daubresse (ed. Alphée / Jean-Paul Bertrand, 2008), Bolling remembers going to the door of his hotel room, to tell him his admiration, but “panicked”, having given up at the last moment. The meeting and the beginning of a friendship between the two musicians will take place at the end of October 1958.
Bolling records his first records in the summer of 1948. He assembles a septet which presents a show with burlesque numbers, covers of songs from the 1920s and 1930s, his compositions, in an inspiration ranging from New Orleans jazz to the swing of large orchestras – besides Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey are at the top of his influences. The team will stay for more than a year and a half at Club Saint-Germain. He also took part in recording sessions for visiting musicians, including cornetist Rex Stewart, trumpeter Roy Eldridge – with whom he recorded his first music for the cinema, in 1952, that of the documentary Autour d’une trompette – , clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton (in 1953)…
You have 60.54% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.