Claude Bolling (b. 1930)
Suites for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio Nos. 1 & 2
After first winning world-acclaim as a jazz performer,
pianist-arranger and conductor Claude Bolling wrote music for films and backed
Brigitte Bardot, Sacha Distel, Juliette Greco and other vocalists in commercial
recording sessions. Later still, however, he was to win even greater renown for
some ingenious semi-classical 'jazz essays' in cross-over. Born in Cannes,
Southern France, on 10th April 1930 he has spent the greater part of his life
in Paris where, as a child prodigy, his formative musical influences were many
and varied. After a broad initial training with the pianist, trumpeter and
percussionist Marie-Louise 'Bob' Colin in Nice, where he lived during the years
of the Occupation, he discovered his passion for jazz while still at school.
Strongly drawn towards ragtime and (on records) the great early exponents of
jazz piano, he was particularly inspired by the stride style of Fats Waller. By
1944 he was already active semi-professionally in small groups and the
following year, in Paris, won an amateur jazz competition, organised by Jazz
Jot and the Hot Club de France.
Given his inordinate talent and avid interest, Bolling's
progress as a jazzman was sure and rapid. His youthful heroes Earl Hines and
Willie 'The Lion' Smith were among his private tutors, while Erroll Garner was
a prominent first-hand 'live' influence, and in 1946, aged sixteen, he set up
Les Parisiennes, an Ellingtonesque small group whose repertoire veered between
New Orleans revival, ragtime and bebop. By the close of 1948 he had accompanied
Chippie Hill at the Nice Festival and made his first recordings (with Rex
Stewart). The pressures of a professional career, however, soon made him aware
of a need for greater technical proficiency, and to that end he underwent
various courses of training with Germaine Mounier (classical piano), Leo
Chauliac (jazz piano) and Maurice Durufle (harmony), and with the Parisian
violinist, arranger, film-scorer and pioneering jazz critic Andre Hodeir. Apart
from a formal study of counterpoint and orchestration, he found renewed
inspiration in the voluminous back-catalogue of jazz 'scripture'.
Associated from the early 1950s onwards in concerts, at
festivals and in the studios with top visiting American swing-bop bands,
Bolling was swiftly recognised as a major force in jazz circles in France and
elsewhere. On and off-disc the list of his associates reads like a post-war
jazz Who's Who? and includes, among others, Don Byas and Buck Clayton (both
1951), Roy Eldridge (from 1950; they recorded the duo album Wild Man Blues for
Vogue in 1951), Paul Gonsalves (recordings 1964-65) and Lionel Hampton
(recordings 1953 and 1956), Thad Jones, the vocalist Carmen McRae and Albert
Nicholas (1953-55). For many years regarded as the foremost French ragtime and
boogie-woogie pianist, Bolling's own keyboard style derived at least in part
from such greats as Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. Admired by Louis Armstrong ('Your playing is something I'll
always remember', cooed the trumpet ace) he was also a some time protege of Duke
Ellington, another admirer of both his technical skill and feeling for the
idiom.
Often referred to as Ellington's 'spiritual son', in 1959
Bolling recorded a tribute album (Claude Bolling Plays Duke Ellington). In
1964-65 and 1969 he teamed with Cat Anderson (recording Cat Anderson, Claude
Bolling & Co. in 1965) and in 1968 and 1969 he recorded two solo albums,
respectively Original Boogie Woogie and Original Piano Blues. From the late
1940s he led small groups and at intervals between 1955 until the mid-1990s
fronted his own much-vaunted orchestra. In format essentially a big-band and
generically billed the Show Bizz Band, its varying ranks have included such
star sidemen as Gerard Badini, Roger Guerin, Claude Tissendier and Andre
Villeger.
From the 1960s onwards Bolling the composer-arranger also
wrote prolifically for films. Best known in that sphere for his contribution to
the Alain Delon-Jacques Deray gangster spoof Borsalino in 1970, he has more
than a hundred film and TV soundtracks to his credit. During the early 1970s,
complementing a steady output of mainstream jazz albums - including Original
Jazz Classics (1970), Original Piano Greats (1972), Swing Session (1973) and
Jazz Party (1974) - his long-held fascination with cross-over, an interest now
enshrined in a longer series of works juxtaposing standard classical and jazz
forms and rhythms, first bore fruit. In 1975, the same year as Suite for Violin
and Jazz Piano and Concerto for Classic Guitar and Jazz Piano came the
monumental, baroque-inspired Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio, first
performed (and subsequently recorded) by Bolling with its dedicatee, the
Marseilles-born flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922-2000).
Famed as a performer of eighteenth-century classics in
authentic style and the founder (in 1946) of the French Wind Quintet and (in
1952) of the Paris Baroque Ensemble, Rampal was the obvious choice as creator
of the suite, essentially a 'casting of jazz in a baroque framework' which
became an overnight, and largely unqualified, success. Whereas not a total
innovation in popular music terms, few questioned the work's obvious mainstream
jazz-over-classical origins and far from dismissing it as merely another
cross-over novelty, the critics immediately recognised its skilful marriage of
the two idioms.
Bolling and Rampal later played the Suite to an ecstatic
audience at Carnegie Hall and their première recording for CBS, in 1975, which
stayed an unprecedented 530 weeks in the US popular charts (including 464 at
No.1) and won the 1976 and 1977 Narm Prizes, received both gold and platinum
disc awards. Now a regular set-piece in conservatories around the world it has
become a staple of the flute repertoire.
Subsequently Bolling wrote other jazz-influenced
semi-classics, notably Suite for Chamber Orchestra and Jazz Piano (1978) for
the English Chamber Orchestra and Toot Suite (1981) for the trumpet-player
Maurice Andre, as well as a variety of similarly-inspired pieces tailored to suit other virtuosi,
including Elena Duran, Patrice Fontanarosa, Eric Franceries, Alexandre Lagoya,
Marielle Nordman, Guy Touvron, Yo-Yo-Ma and Pinchas Zukerman.
Bolling's more recent career as a performer, albeit
intermittent and secondary to composing, has also produced some significant
successes, notably in 1991, when his collaboration with Stephane Grappelli on
the album First Class won both the Django d'Or and Prix du HCF awards. With his
Show Bizz Band Bolling toured the United States in 1989, 1991 and 1996 and
Central America in 1995 and 1998 and he has variously joined forces with the
Illinois Jacquet and Mercer Ellington orchestras, his ongoing interest in the
music of his idol prompting him to make the first complete recording of
Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige (1989) and to perform, in Paris in 1996, the
suite A Drum is a Woman. In 1994, at the Caen monument, the Bolling big-band
opened a series of concerts marking the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Claude
Bolling's list of honours includes the Medaille d'Or Maurice Ravel and Officier
Arts et Lettres and he is a Chevalier of the French orders Nationale du Merite
and Legion d'Honneur.
Peter Dempsey