Jazz Album Review: Jean-Michel Pilc’s “Alive: Live at Dièse Onze, Montreal” — Flurries of Fascinating Ideas

By Michael Ullman

Jean-Michel Pilc is a talented pianist who expresses his happiness at just being alive via performances that treat the most revered standards in a manner that is wholly personal, even idiosyncratic —  yet memorable.

Jean-Michel Pilc, Alive: Live at Dièse Onze, Montréal (Justin Time Records)

In an interview, the 61 year old French pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, who now lives in Montréal, amusingly asserted that “I don’t think about music.” He explained that he wants music simply to flow through him. Nonetheless, in this live date he sounds like a thinker as well as a master of, if not flow, then of a continual flurry of fascinating ideas. Two sets from the Montréal club Dièse Onze have been issued by Justin Time Records: I am listening to the cd version of set one. Set two is available only as a download. In both sets, Pilc is joined by bassist Réme-Jean LeBlanc and drummer Jim Doxas. Pilc insists that he goes on stage without a set list or a plan. He performs what comes to him. What came to him in Montréal seemed to have been inspired by Miles Davis: he plays Davis’s “All Blues,” “Nardis,” which Davis wrote for Bill Evans, the ballad “My Funny Valentine” that Davis so loved, a dainty rendering of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and the Eddie Harris number Miles made famous: “Freedom Jazz Dance.”

As we can hear in a fragment of a rehearsal of “Freedom Jazz Dance,” Miles changed the form of the tune, adding a couple bars of a break after each phrase, ostensibly because he needed the time to catch his breath. Pilc starts his version with a stomping phrase that’s stated in the mid range of the piano, generating a grumbling echo deep in the bass. He then takes the break with cheerfully angular, boppish phrases, and then enters into a series of virtuosic, and varied, interchanges with the bass, sometimes playing rapid single notes lines and later, thick chords. Only after five minutes into the piece do we hear a recognizable version of Harris’s famous melody. It’s as if Pilc wants to dodge playfully before he reveals the theme. The result is that the performance is more like an unveiling than a direct statement. Later the pianist exploits a variety of techniques: intense downward scales, thumping chords, and passages in which both hands independently seem to be walking along different paths. It’s an exciting display. Towards the end of this ten minute Harris piece, Pilc quiets the trio down, and he and the bass play a repeated unison line that brings the rendition to a subdued close.

Pilc can be amusing as well. He begins John Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.” as a tango. Nothing could be less expected, except perhaps for the whistling solo that ensues. But then Pilc strives to made each piece his own, from the Beatle’s bathetic “Eleanor Rigby” to the frequently played “All the Things You Areand the ballad “My Romance.” He clearly becomes increasingly antic as the evening goes on: in his introductory choruses to “All the Things You Are” he repeatedly quotes “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” before turning the tune over to the drummer. Then he re-enters playing a phrase of the written melody so slowly he seems to be stretching taffy. Eventually things become intense, with Pilc playing the melody on his left hand while his right plays a seamlessly virtuosic line over the energized rhythm section. On “All Blues,” the pianist quotes “Bye Bye Blackbird,” and “A Love Supreme,” even-handedly paying tribute to Davis and Coltrane. This piece builds until around five minutes in. Then Pilc engages in a wild, even grandiose, two-handed journey up and down the keyboard which ends with a crash. It’s like witnessing a joy ride that comes to a screechingly bad end.

Pilc opened his studio album Threedom (Motema) with a version of “Nardis” that starts with him playing the first two notes of the melody as sharply as a pin prick. There is no doubt that he is being exacting about the melody. Live, though, he begins “Nardis” wistfully, with single notes played pianissimo. He seems to be evading the melody in favor of a kind of misty lyricism. There’s plenty of other surprises in these sets, including a dainty, even comically prissy version of the waltz “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Somehow he even makes “Eleanor Rigby” swing. The first set also includes two fine Pilc originals, “11 Sharpand “Alive.” It’s a satisfying return to the stage for a talented pianist who expresses his happiness at just being alive via performances that treat the most revered standards in a manner that is wholly personal, even idiosyncratic —  yet memorable.


Michael Ullman studied classical clarinet and was educated at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the U. of Michigan, from which he received a PhD in English. The author or co-author of two books on jazz, he has written on jazz and classical music for the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, High Fidelity, Stereophile, Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, and other venues. His articles on Dickens, Joyce, Kipling, and others have appeared in academic journals. For over 20 years, he has written a bi-monthly jazz column for Fanfare Magazine, for which he also reviews classical music. At Tufts University, he teaches mostly modernist writers in the English Department and jazz and blues history in the Music Department. He plays piano badly.

1 Comment

  1. Barbara Scales on March 26, 2022 at 9:50 am

    Such a deeply observed and insightfully written review!

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