The mysterious Eric Regert

I have two favorite keyboardists. The first is Red Garland(we used his song Soul Junction as my wife’s wedding processional)who’s too often overlooked among the top tier of jazz pianists. Still, he played with Miles Davis’s first quintet and cut plenty of his own sides. There’s a difference between overlooked and unknown.

Unknown better describes my other favorite keyboardist. He has played, as far as I can discover, on exactly two tracks, both by Air. That may not seem like much, but these are two of my favorite songs ever, and the keyboard solos are what put them over.

The first is “Cassanova 70.” The organ solo starts at about 4:25 and is about the funkiest thing you ever heard. It’s not just the notes or the playing, either, but the sound that Eric Regert gets, raw and slippery.

The only thing that’s anything like it is the organ solo that runs throughout “La Femme d’Argent,” a slinky paradise of a song that I wish were the background whenever I enter a room (and which I used at my wedding for exactly that).

And that’s it. That’s all the Eric Regert you’re going to get. I can’t find anything else about this guy. He arrived fully formed on two Air songs from the late nineties, and then he disappeared. His entire list of credits on Allmusic.com is for those two songs on various compilations.

Do you have any favorite musicians or artists like that? People who came and went and never amounted to much, but left an indelible mark?