Michel was born in the hamlet of Orange, in the Cote d’Azur, France, in 1962. His father, Tony, a jazz guitarist, gave him a toy piano when he was three or four years old, which the young boy smashed up because, “the piano keys looked like teeth that would bite me”. He could not have known it, but he only had thirty-six years to live his life. From the time he met Charles Lloyd in 1981 to his death in 1999, he only had eighteen years or less to pack in all his musical ambitions and aspirations.