Martial Solal was born August 23, 1927, in Algiers, then the capital of French Algeria, to Algerian Jewish parents. His family's French citizenship dated to the 1870 Crémieux Decree, which had granted citizenship to Algeria's Jewish population two generations earlier, so Solal was born French rather than becoming French later in life. That citizenship was stripped from Algerian Jews by the Vichy government in October 1940 and not restored until 1943; Solal was expelled from school in the interval, in 1942, solely because of his Jewish ancestry. His mother, an amateur opera singer, pushed him toward clarinet, saxophone and piano as a child, but he was largely self-taught from that point on, working out what he heard on the radio by ear. At fifteen he was already performing publicly for United States Army audiences in Algiers.

He settled in Paris in 1950 and quickly found work alongside Django Reinhardt and American expatriates including Sidney Bechet and Don Byas, becoming part of the house-band circuit around Club Saint-Germain-des-Prés with drummer Kenny Clarke. He had begun recording as a leader by 1953, and in 1955 the Académie du Jazz awarded him the Prix Django Reinhardt for his early contribution to French jazz piano, the same prize named for a guitarist he had briefly worked alongside two years earlier, on what turned out to be Reinhardt's final studio sessions in the months before his death in May 1953. That same year, 1955, Solal was the pianist on bandoneon player Astor Piazzolla's first European recording date. He formed a working quartet by the late 1950s and occasionally led a big band, and in 1956 he was heard on one of the earliest records ever issued under the name of pianist Claude Bolling.

Solal moved into film scoring at the turn of the 1960s and eventually wrote more than 20 scores, most famously the jagged, stop-start music for Jean-Luc Godard's debut feature À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960), recorded with trumpeter Roger Guérin, saxophonist Pierre Gossez, vibraphonist Michel Hausser, bassist Paul Rovère and drummer Daniel Humair. Further film work followed for directors including Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri Verneuil, Édouard Molinaro and Jean Becker, along with a score for Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus and one for Orson Welles's adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial.

His first sustained American exposure came in 1963, when he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival with bassist Teddy Kotick and drummer Paul Motian; festival promoter George Wein then booked the trio into New York's Hickory House for what stretched into a ten-week engagement. Time magazine took notice, calling him "an amazingly adept virtuoso who pursues unconventional harmonic flights with an imagination that is rich to the point of bursting," and Solal became a frequent visitor to the United States over the following decades even as his main working life stayed centered on Paris. From 1968 he built a long recording and touring partnership with alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, documented across more than half a dozen duo and quartet albums into the early 1980s, and he paired off across the 1970s and 1980s with a rotating cast of duo partners: bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Stéphane Grappelli, Toots Thielemans, Michel Portal and pianist Joachim Kühn among them. He led a 25-piece big band in the 1980s and, at the turn of the 2000s, a 12-piece "Dodecaband" whose album-length reworking of Duke Ellington material included a 15-minute Caravan.

Solal kept recording and touring into his nineties. He held residencies at the Village Vanguard, documented on NY-1: Live at the Village Vanguard (2003) and a solo Live at the Village Vanguard (recorded 2008, released 2009 on CAM Jazz) that earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, and in 2008 he cut the trio album Longitude with brothers François and Louis Moutin on bass and drums. Later duo records paired him with saxophonist David Liebman (Masters in Bordeaux, 2017; Masters in Paris, 2020). An international jazz piano competition bearing his name, held roughly every decade in Paris under the Concours internationaux de la Ville de Paris and chaired by Solal himself, has counted future French pianists Baptiste Trotignon (winner, 2000) and Paul Lay (finalist, 2006) among its honorees, and Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan took third prize there in 2002. France made him a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1990, an Officier de l'Ordre national du Mérite in 1998 and a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1997, and Denmark's Jazzpar Prize went to him in 1999.

His final concert, at the Salle Gaveau in Paris in 2019, was released posthumously as Coming Yesterday: Live at Salle Gaveau 2019. Solal died December 12, 2024, in Versailles at 97, survived by his wife Anna, son Éric, vocalist daughter Claudia Solal, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Asked at 95 how he wanted to be remembered, he said he hoped to be seen as "a composer who has worked a lot in the service of improvisation, the freedom of invention that only an instrumental technique at the highest possible level can allow."

Solal's playing drew on Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum as early influences, then Erroll Garner, Bud Powell and Bill Evans, filtered through a parallel classical education in Bartók, Stravinsky, Alban Berg and Olivier Messiaen that surfaced directly in his two piano concerti and his chamber and film-scoring work. French writer Jean-Pierre Thiollet called his approach to jazz "brilliant, unique and intellectual," and Solal himself described his guiding technical principle as making the most difficult passage look effortless. Critics repeatedly reached for comparisons to Tatum on sheer technique while noting a harmonic language and rhythmic placement that were entirely his own: reviewing a 2001 Village Vanguard set, Gary Giddins wrote that Solal's virtuosity "avoids adverbial flourishes, preferring the kind of two-finger hammering that Gershwin wrote into the piano arsenal in Rhapsody in Blue," and critic Francis Davis likened his speed to Tatum's while calling his rhythmic accents thoroughly modern. Columbia producer George Avakian went further, calling him flatly "Europe's greatest jazz musician." Solal's own piano competition, held in his name in Paris roughly every decade, has helped shape a younger generation of French jazz pianists, and unaccompanied solo performance became one of his signature modes, prized by critics as much as his celebrated long-term partnership with Lee Konitz.