Claude Bolling (1930-2020) is a great ambassador for the kind of European jazz which might be called Ellingtonian. He is also a stunning pop composer and arranger, thanks to his fruitful collaboration with Brigitte Bardot.

Over four prodigious decades, film-directors have also given Bolling the opportunity to stray from the beaten track by deploying a whole palette of romanticism, and not only the deepest of emotions: tension, violence and fantasy are also to be heard in his music. Listen to the (very) original soundtracks which bear his signature (Flic story, Le Gitan, L’Année sainte), and you can hear the renaissance of an entire era of French filmmaking: Deray, Delon, Belmondo, the typical sound of the thrillers made in those years, the timbre of a player piano… In a word, from "Chicago Piano" machine-guns to the tribulations of parody-spy Bob Saint-Clar in Le Magnifique, the name Claude Bolling is associated with a lyrical, swinging spotlight pointed at the silver screen of our musical memory.

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