Art Fell — Jazz Piano

Art Fell was born in 1935 in Bloomington, Indiana, and grew up in a house full of music. His mother, Rose, was a professional violinist who played in the Indiana University orchestras. His father, Irving, played violin for clubs and social gatherings around town. Art's older sister Roberta studied piano, and his younger sister Eleanor went on to become one of the best-known harpists of her generation. Art sat down at the piano at five and went on to study with Ernest Hoffzimmer, then head of the piano department at Indiana University.

He went to University High School, IU's lab school, and then to Indiana University. There he led a band, and he later received an ASCAP award for one of his own compositions. After graduating in 1957 he was commissioned in the U.S. Army. The Army taught him French at its language school in Monterey and posted him to France, to Orléans, La Rochelle and Verdun, which began a lifelong attachment to the country. Law school at Indiana University and Columbia University followed, along with a law practice in New York.

Africa: the piano goes along

In 1969 Art joined the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the next twenty years his day job took him across Africa, with postings in Abidjan, Yaoundé, Dakar and Nairobi, and the music went with him. In Abidjan in 1985 he met David Cross, a London-born trumpeter and singer. Both men had come to Africa for reasons that had nothing to do with music, and both had traditional-jazz roots going back to the 1950s. Cross led The International Jazzmen of Abidjan with Art at the piano, and the two have played together ever since.

Later, Art was playing with a band at an upscale resort in the Seychelles when a British industrialist invited him to record for his label, MacJazz. Art brought in David Cross. With two busy British session players, Bill Stagg on guitar and Mike Godwin on bass, they recorded Shake Your Blues Away (with Jazz) in 2006: 24 tracks and 75 minutes of vintage vocal gems and a few originals, in a single session with almost no rehearsal. The Syncopated Times later called it "a bit of an underground hit."

The south of France

After retiring from USAID in 1990 and working at the OECD in Paris, Art settled in the Montpellier area. When David Cross moved to nearby Adissan in 1999, the two formed the Duo International, and the Languedoc jazz scene has kept them busy ever since. Art has played with The Boys Band (with Jean-Pierre Nadai, Yvan Grégoire and drummer Jean Azéma) and with The Languedoc International Jazzmen (with Australian banjoist Tony West and tuba player Patrick Bourgain). He has played Le Lodge in Lattes, Kaf'kali in Montagnac and the Café de la Poste in Aspiran, and in Montpellier, Espace Martin Luther King, the Gazette Café and Le JAM, where the duo played Radio Aviva's 40th-anniversary Jazz Session in 2023.

A voice for the music

Away from the piano, Art is one of the region's keenest jazz storytellers. He has hosted Swing Doctors on Radio Aviva 88 FM for some twenty years. He writes "Les Éditos d'Art Fell" for the Jazz Club de Montpellier, on subjects from the blues and the washboard to Louis Armstrong and the record business. He was a regular European contributor to The Mississippi Rag, and he writes for The Syncopated Times. Bloomington still calls him back now and then. In 2004 he and his sister Eleanor gave a brother-and-sister café-concert, piano and harp, at Indiana University during the USA International Harp Competition.