Jacques Bolognesi, known to colleagues as "Bolo", was a French trombonist, accordionist and pianist who spent more than five decades in Paris big bands, studio sections and small groups. He was born on January 6, 1947, in Gap, in the Hautes-Alpes, and passed away on November 1, 2026, at the age of 79, a little over two months before his eightieth birthday. He worked mainly as a section and solo trombonist in French jazz orchestras, and in his last decades he was one of the players credited with bringing the accordion back into French jazz.

He grew up in his father's cobbler's shop in Gap, a meeting place for the town's Italian immigrants. The accordion was his first instrument, at the age of five; he studied piano with Madeleine de Valmalète and at the Grenoble conservatoire, and took up the trombone, in his home town's municipal band according to one biography. After moving to Paris he won a first prize at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in 1969. The biography published by Frémeaux & Associés also says he took part in the creation of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Momente, and Discogs lists him on a 1992 recording of that work.

From the end of the 1960s he was a busy Paris trombonist. Franck Bergerot's tribute in Jazz Magazine remembers hearing him in the trombone sections of Claude Cagnasso's orchestra (on record from 1969), of Ivan Jullien and Jean-Claude Naude (1971) and of Claude Bolling (1973). Discogs credits him on the big-band records of Ivan Jullien, among them Porgy and Bess (1971), made with the organist Eddy Louiss, and Secret Service (recorded in 1971, issued in 1972), and on trombone throughout the double album Swing Session + Jazz Party by Claude Bolling's Show Biz Band, in a section with Benny Vasseur, Charles Verstraete and François Guin. In the 1980s he joined Martial Solal's big band, which Discogs documents on the 1981 and 1984 big-band records and on the 1984 set of André Hodeir's music, and in December 1997 he played in Solal's Dodecaband for its Ellington programme, issued as Plays Ellington (Dreyfus Jazz, 2000). With Michel Legrand he recorded Legrand Grappelli (Verve, 1992), alongside Stéphane Grappelli, and played in Legrand's big band, whose February 1995 recording for Verve (issued in 1999) has him soloing on trombone on "Ray Blues". Hodeir's cantata Anna Livia Plurabelle, recorded in September 1993 under Patrice Caratini's direction, has him in the trombone section next to Denis Leloup and Éric Louis, with Sylvain Beuf and Marc Ducret among the players.

In 1987, at the urging of Antoine Hervé, he joined the Orchestre national de jazz, which Hervé was then directing. On O.N.J. 87 the Discogs credits give him accordion, trombone and bass trombone: he plays accordion on "Sous les lofts de Paris" and trombone on "Tutti", in a band that also included Glenn Ferris on trombone, Nguyên Lê on guitar, André Ceccarelli on drums and Jean-Marc Jafet on bass. By then the accordion had come back into his playing. One biography says a meeting with Henri Guédon, a Caribbean trombonist, led him back to it, and he took part in the Paris Musette anthology of musette accordion music made for the La Lichière label in 1990, where the first disc credits him with accordion, piano and the arrangement of "Depuis que les bals sont fermés" (recorded with the guitarist Didi Duprat, the singer Cathy Renoir and the bassist Yves Torchinsky, according to Franck Bergerot's tribute). The series is credited with reviving the musette tradition, and the label's biography says it sold more than 100,000 copies. Discogs also lists him on a second volume, Swing et manouche (1993), and for the rest of his career he worked on both instruments.

He also led his own groups. The big band Caravanserail grew out of a Monday-night band and was led and arranged by him from 1989 to 1991; its 1989 album Caravanserail - Grand Orchestre credits him with the direction and an accordion feature, and has the young pianist Bojan Z in the line-up. In 1994 he formed BoloVaris with the accordionist Francis Varis (first a duo, then a trio with the percussionist Pierre "Tiboum" Guignon, later a quintet with the guitarist Marc Fosset and the bassist Jean-Luc Ponthieux); the group's album Bolovaris (1994) and the trio record Ivry Port (1997) are listed on Discogs. He was the pianist and accordionist of the Swiss ensemble Piano Seven from 1995 to 1999, performed with Michel Godard's tuba group and the trombonist Dave Bargeron, and from 2004 led an ensemble of seven Paris accordionists.

For his sixtieth birthday in 2007 he formed trios with Fosset and the bassists Ponthieux or Pierre-Yves Sorin and recorded Hermetotico for La Lichière, by then a Frémeaux & Associés label. Later records include In Vino Very Jazz (2016), made at his home in 2015 and 2016 as a tribute to the guitarist Serge Cotulelli, and a run of digital albums listed on Apple Music under his name in 2021 and 2024, among them Staff and Bolo's Songs. Bergerot's tribute also lists collaborations with Ute Lemper, Cesária Évora, Kazumi Watanabe, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Higelin and Paul Simon, on whose The Rhythm of the Saints (1990) Discogs credits him with trombone on "Proof".

Bolognesi's reputation rested on section playing and quiet soloing rather than on a leader's catalogue: Bergerot recalls the Paris big-band trombone sections of the 1970s as a small circle of dependable section men and occasional soloists, and places him among them. His accordion belongs to the line of Gus Viseur and Jo Privat, passed on through Marcel Azzola and Richard Galliano, but he played it in jazz settings, from a big-band feature on O.N.J. 87 to the guitar-and-accordion trios of Hermetotico. The scope of his career is wider than jazz. Discogs files more than 600 entries under his name, most of them session appearances on French variety, Caribbean and African pop records, and his Wikipedia entries and Jazz Magazine's tribute treat him first of all as a jazz musician, which is how this profile treats him.