If you only know one thing about Martial Solal, it's probably that he wrote the score for Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard's film. That's a fine entry point, but it undersells him badly. Solal was one of the sharpest pianists Europe ever produced, a guy who could take apart a Thelonious Monk tune or a Rodgers and Hart standard and put it back together in a shape nobody saw coming, all while keeping a sense of humor about it.

He came up in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s, playing with visiting American musicians who passed through the city — Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt circles, that whole postwar Paris jazz scene where European players finally started finding their own voice instead of just copying records. Solal had already absorbed bebop's vocabulary, but his harmonic instincts ran closer to classical composition than most bebop pianists ever bothered with. He loved displacement — playing a phrase slightly ahead or behind where you expect it, cutting a tune into pieces and handing them back out of order. It sounds technical because it is technical, but in his hands it never felt cold. It felt like wit.

Americans noticed eventually. He played Newport in 1963, recorded with Lee Konitz, worked solo and in trios for decades, and kept writing — film scores, orchestral pieces, whatever interested him. What's remarkable isn't that he was prolific, plenty of musicians are prolific. It's that his playing kept getting more adventurous as he aged rather than settling into a comfortable late style. His solo piano records from his seventies and eighties are some of his most daring work, full of odd meters and harmonic left turns that younger players would be proud to pull off.

Start with Live at the Village Vanguard (2007) if you want to hear what all this sounds like in practice — him alone at the piano, turning standards inside out with that dry French wit intact even at eighty. Or go earlier to Martial Solal Trio (1959) for a younger, punchier version of the same mind at work. Either way, don't expect comfort music. Expect a guy who thought reharmonizing 'All the Things You Are' for the hundredth time was still worth doing properly.