There was something about Michel Portal that always slipped away. Not by evasion, but by nature.
Even when he entered a room—with his bass clarinet seeming like an extension of his body—he gave the impression of already being somewhere else, in a place made of sounds that only he could hear firsthand.
Those who followed him over the years remember him as a man traversed by many lives. The first, that of classical training, had given him an almost monastic rigor: hours and hours of study, the discipline of breathing, the precision of gesture.
But it was enough to listen to him in concert to understand that that rigor was not a cage, but a spring. Portal was never satisfied with the right note: he searched for the necessary one.
In his youth, when French music oscillated between avant-garde and tradition, he moved like a tightrope walker.
He entered the realms of contemporary music with the same ease with which, the next evening, he would launch into a fierce improvisation in a smoky club.
Boulez, Stockhausen, Kagel: names that instilled fear in many, for him they were companions on a journey into the unknown. Yet, when he played with Lubat or Humair, it seemed as if all that baggage dissolved into a primordial, almost animalistic energy.
His collaborations were encounters rather than projects. With Joachim Kühn, for example, there was an understanding like electric shocks: two volcanoes recognizing each other.
With Bruno Chevillon, however, the dialogue became a subtle, almost telepathic thread. And then Galliano, with whom Portal found an unexpected lyricism, as if the accordion opened a window onto an imaginary Europe, made of squares, wind, and luminous melancholy.
Those who saw him work in film describe a different Portal: focused, silent, capable of finding the emotional color of a scene in a matter of seconds.
He wasn’t a musician who “accompanied” images: he inhabited them. His soundtracks for Tavernier or Corneau have that rare quality of someone who knows how to listen before playing.
And then there was the Portal of his later years, the one who seemed to have gathered all his lives into a single voice. In concert, he appeared more essential, more naked. He had no need to prove anything: every phrase was a distillation, a gesture that contained memory and future.
In MP85, the album many consider his testament, one hears a man who hasn’t lost his curiosity, who continues to question the world with the same urgency as when he was a boy.
Those who remember him today speak not only of the musician, but of his presence. Of his subtle irony, of the way he tilted his head when listening to others, of that shyness that coexisted with an almost ferocious inner strength.
Portal wasn’t a master in the academic sense of the term: he was a master because, by his side, one learned not to settle. To always seek another possibility, another path, another voice.
And perhaps this is what remains, more than the records, more than the concerts: the idea that music is not a territory to be conquered, but a place to be traversed. With courage, with restlessness, with wonder. As he did, until his last breath.
