The first thing worth knowing before you press play is that Petrucciani sounds like someone who genuinely loved playing piano — not in a showy way, but in the way where you can tell the music is actually making him happy while he's doing it. There's a warmth to his touch that's immediately recognizable. He came up listening to Bill Evans and Duke Ellington, and both of those influences are in there, but he processed them into something that sounds distinctly his own. His lines are melodic almost to a fault — he never gets so abstract that you lose the thread.

He grew up in Orange, in the south of France, playing in his family's band as a kid. His father and brothers were musicians, so he was immersed early. By his teens he was playing professionally, and by his early twenties he'd relocated to the United States, where he caught the attention of Charles Lloyd. Lloyd essentially brought him to American audiences, and the recordings they made together in the early 1980s are worth tracking down if you want to hear Petrucciani before he fully hit his stride as a leader.

His Blue Note recordings from the mid-to-late 1980s are where most people start, and that's reasonable. Trio in Tokyo (1999) catches him live and at full force, but Michel Plays Petrucciani (1988) is a good early entry point — it's a solo record that shows how much he could do without anyone else in the room. His compositions have strong, hummable themes, and he could stretch them out or compress them without losing the feeling of the original idea. That's harder than it sounds.

What he did harmonically was interesting but never alienating. He used extended chords and could be harmonically adventurous, but the music never became an exercise in complexity for its own sake. He wanted you to feel it. That makes him easier to recommend to people who are new to jazz piano, but it would be a mistake to think of him as simple — the craft underneath those appealing surfaces is serious. Musicians who played with him consistently talked about how much he could hear and how responsive he was in real time.

He died in New York in January 1999 from complications related to his condition. He was 36. The catalog he left — somewhere around two dozen albums as a leader — holds up well. He wasn't trying to reinvent the idiom or make some big statement. He was trying to play beautifully and make something people would want to listen to. He mostly succeeded.