Thierry Maillard is an adventurer of music, which Michel Petrucciani did not fail to spot very early on. A pianist, composer and arranger, he started music at age eight. At fourteen, he entered the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris to study harmony, counterpoint, piano and accordion, and he received his teaching diploma at age seventeen. A tenacious composer and orchestrator, he has recorded thirteen albums as a band leader. Trained classically, he quickly discovered jazz and its freedom of expression at the end of his studies. Subsequently, he revealed a new musical genre imbued with his lived experience and encounters that harmoniously blends writing for classical, jazz and world music. He came onto the scene in 1998 with his first album Paris-New York, recorded in New York, with Dennis Chambers on drums and John Patitucci on bass, on the label Verve Emarcy. A passionate musician, he has collaborated with big names in jazz such as Biréli Lagrène, Dennis Chambers, John Patitucci, Chris Minh Doky, Bobby Shew, Michel Portal, André Ceccarelli, Bernard Lubat, Didier Lockwood, Dominique Di Piazza and Matthew Garrison. His love of strings and orchestration naturally led him to combine jazz trio playing with strings, doing so on three occasions. It was a foregone next step and ultimate goal for Thierry Maillard to collaborate with a full orchestra, which he accomplished in April 2015 with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. A musician and composer without limits or boundaries, Thierry Maillard is not afraid of radical changes of direction in music. He thus navigates classical orchestral, trio and solo piano playing spectacularly. In 2017, he released a piano solo album, Alone, a stirring homage to three giants, Brassens, Brel and Ferré. In 2018, he realised a dream when he formed the Thierry Maillard Big Band and put out the album Pursuit of Happiness. On 19 June 2020, another album for Big Band was released, ZAPPA FOREVER, for twenty-three musicians.

© Jean-Baptiste Millot