‘Power of Three’: Michel Petrucciani’s Masterful Montreux Live Set
The 1986 live performance sees three world-class jazz musicians at the top of their game.
On July 14, 1986, Blue Note recorded a remarkable concert at Montreux Jazz Festival – a piano-guitar-saxophone trio featuring Michel Petrucciani, Jim Hall, and Wayne Shorter, for an album released in May the following year as Michel Petrucciani Power of Three Live in Montreux. “This record remains an exceptional encounter,” Petrucciani recalled a decade later.
Wayne Shorter had an outsized impact on the record, musically and otherwise. As Petrucciani once recalled: “The titles of my albums are almost always mine. However, Wayne came up with the great title of ‘Power Of Three’. Wayne is a science fiction fan, and he was reading a book called Power Of Three. He simply said, ‘Hey, that’s us, power of three.’” Shorter is a legendary jazz musician, of course, starting his career with Art Blakey’s band and playing regularly with Miles Davis. On Power of Three, Shorter played tenor saxophone on his own composition “Limbo,” and switched to soprano saxophone for the version of Petrucciani’s composition “Morning Blues.” The French pianist was friends with Shorter and said it was “very flattering” to have him on one of his records, as he considered him “one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.”
Listen to Michel Petrucciani Power of Three Live in Montreux now.
Shorter was also full of admiration for Petrucciani. “Michel was a great musician, and great, ultimately, because he was a great human being, and he was a great human being because he had the ability to feel and give that feeling to others… He gave to others through his music.”
A piano-guitar-saxophone trio is an unusual concept and it works so well here because it featured an all-star summit at their peak. The three highly accomplished musicians complement each other beautifully on Hall’s blues-infused composition “Careful.” They also performed the guitarist’s tune “Waltz New,” which appeared as an extra track on the CD release, along with an additional inclusion, a version of the 1931 jazz standard “Beautiful Love.” The Montreux concert was also filmed and released on DVD in 2005.
In a 2011 interview for the Smithsonian, Hall also paid tribute to Petrucciani, the son of the Sicilian jazz guitarist Antoine Petrucciani and his French wife Anne. “I had a lot of affection and admiration for Michel,” Hall said of the pianist who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta (glass bone disease). “We had a guy with us on the road to carry Michel on to stage. He had special foot pedals that clamped on so he could reach them with his feet. On stage, he would just make it happen.”
Petrucciani said that he always preferred to play the entire concerts without applause between tunes, hoping the audience would save their appreciation for the end. He joked that he liked to play extended tunes for that reason. The Montreux concert captured on Power of Three concludes with the two longest tracks: a 12-minute version of Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” (the Frenchman was a massive fan of Ellington, paying full tribute with his 1994 album Promenade with Duke) and an 11-minute interpretation of Hall’s calypso tune “Bimini.” Hearing these two tunes alone makes it clear that the pairing of Petrucciani, Hall, and Shorter was an inspired one. “When I play, I play with my heart and my head and my spirit,” Petrucciani explained. “I don’t play to people’s heads, but to their hearts.”
Listen to Michel Petrucciani Power of Three Live in Montreux now.
