We hear that the French haut-intellectual music crowd—Boulez and IRCAM and that whole hyper-complex avant-garde scene—used to use Michel Legrand’s name, during his ‘60s heyday, as a snarky putdown of anything they deemed kitschy (i.e. any music that didn’t sound like Boulez’s. So easy to imagine them puffing a Gauloise and sneering “Legrandisme” under a curled lip as they dismiss any piece with a major chord or a hummable tune). Kind of a Gallic Bacharach, his cool, sophisticated pop soundtracks have earned him three Oscars, one of them for perhaps his best-known tune in America: “Windmills of Your Mind,” written for that incomparable 1968 period piece The Thomas Crown Affair, where it accompanies Steve McQueen flying a glider. But his peak was 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the bittersweet film/opera in which Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo, the two most beautiful people on the planet, drift out of love. Legrand comes to Jazz Alley with bassist David Finck and drummer Lewis Nash for an evening of intimate piano jazz.

Sept. 4-5