Michel Petrucciani: a tiny man with a towering talent
Small man, big talentI had not heard of Michel Petrucciani before I started making a film about him; nor had I made a documentary for 25 years. But every documentary is a journey of discovery, and I finished it with a sense of wonder.
Petrucciani was born in Orange, in the south of France, in 1962, with every bone in his body broken. Diagnosed with osteogenesis imperfecta – or "glass bone disease" – he only ever grew to 99cm. He could not walk and was not expected to live beyond the age of 20. His bones fractured constantly. But he was blessed with two things: he had immense charisma, and he was a musical prodigy.
He never went to school. He stayed in his room for his whole childhood, and played jazz piano for 10 hours a day, under the guidance of his tyrannical father, a local musician and jazz fanatic. By the age of 13 he sounded, according to one critic, "like a 38-year-old world-weary black man lost in a piano bar somewhere in Mexico".
Petrucciani became famous locally, and started to make records, but he dreamed of America. So on his 18th birthday he upped and left with a friend, whom he persuaded to carry him. He ended up in California where by chance he met jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd. The meeting was to change his life. Stunned by his talent, Lloyd came out of retirement and they toured together for the next four years: and Michel, aged 20, married his first wife.
Petrucciani was immensely attractive to women. And he knew it. It wasn't good enough for him to find a woman he liked (and who could carry him), he had to betray them (hundreds of times if possible). Drugs, women, food: his appetites were enormous, his desire to experience everything insatiable. He lived fast, too fast: but he wanted to taste it all.
It was when he went to New York that he really found himself. In the 80s it was a jazz mecca, and all the greats were playing there. And Petrucciani was playing with them. He signed to Blue Note Records (the first European to do so) and made albums with, among others, Wayne Shorter, Roy Haynes, Jim Hall, John Abercrombie, Jack DeJohnette. And still his body broke. Even while he was playing, tendons snapped, shoulder blades fractured, fingers shattered. He just continued, seemingly oblivious to the pain.
In late 1989 he met the woman who was to become the mother of his child, Alexandre, who was born with the same condition as him. Petrucciani was devastated; but at the same time, it was an affirmation, the acceptance that he craved. "I don't regret being born," he said. With his new family he returned to France, and it was there that he became a real star. His compositions became more elegant, his style of playing more simple and profound. The series of records he made at that time are some of the finest in the history of jazz.
He could not keep away from New York, however, and he couldn't keep away from the fast lane. By now he was playing more than 200 shows a year, to audiences of thousands, and his body was deteriorating fast, ravaged by the disease that was slowly asphyxiating him. In January 1999 he was rushed to hospital in New York City. He was 36 years old. "Two years older than Charlie Parker," as he liked to point out. He didn't recover. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, next to the tomb of Chopin.
Was he one of the greats of jazz? I think so. What he communicated was the essence of humanity itself, with all its frailties and contradictions and imperfections. If that's not great art, what is?
Michael Radford's film Michel Petrucciani screens at the Cannes film festival on 14 May.