For my own wonderful bandleader!

After first winning world-acclaim as a jazz performer, pianist-arranger and conductor Claude Bolling wrote music for films and backed Brigitte Bardot, Sacha Distel, Juliette Greco and other vocalists in commercial recording sessions. Later still, however, he was to win even greater renown for some ingenious semi-classical ?jazz essays? in cross-over. 

Bolling?s more recent career as a performer, albeit intermittent and secondary to composing, has also produced some significant successes, notably in 1991, when his collaboration with Stéphane Grappelli on the album First Class won both the Django d?Or and Prix du HCF awards. With his Show Bizz Band Bolling toured the United States in 1989, 1991 and 1996 and Central America in 1995 and 1998 and he has variously joined forces with the Illinois Jacquet and Mercer Ellington orchestras, his ongoing interest in the music of his idol prompting him to make the first complete recording of Ellington?s Black, Brown and Beige (1989) and to perform, in Paris in 1996, the suite A Drum is a Woman.