ALLEGRE LES FUMADES - Gard Le Mardi 8 juillet à 21h00 Théâtre de Verdure Soirée Talents en Région !!
MEZCAL JAZZ UNIT
Emmanuel de Gouvello (bass), Christophe Azema (saxophones), Jean Marie Frédéric (guitare), Daniel Solia (batterie)
Mezcal Jazz Unit mené par le bassiste Emmanuel de Gouvello, promène depuis 1986 son jazz métissé d'un continent à l'autre. Au fil des rencontres et des créations avec des musiciens traditionnels ou jazz d'Europe de l'Est puis d'Asie ou d'Afrique, se dessine une identité sonore particulière. La musique mélodique, ondoyante, tour à tour énergique et mélancolique, portée par des rythmes empruntés à l'Afrique, à l'Inde fait la part belle à l'improvisation. Le traditionnel se mêle au contemporain, le jeu lyrique et percutant du saxophone de Christophe Azema, la guitare aérienne et ciselée de Jean Marie Frédéric portent cette musique de création anticonformiste et conviviale comme une invitation au voyage.
Après une tournée aux USA et une création au Vietnam, Mezcal Jazz Unit revient dans la région en formule quartet.
Le guitariste Ulf Wakenius ; il joue le mercredi 23 juillet et le jeudi 24 juillet à Junas pendant le grande Festival: Rencontre avec le Cercle Arctique
“Music is life and death. A life without music is meaningless. It’s very important because it can carry you through your life, in good and bad times —Ulf Wakenius”
Happenstance may play a role in turning dreams into reality, but anyone who's ever realized a burning ambition will appreciate just how much hard work has paved the way. Two phone calls out of the blue almost twenty years apart opened doors to Swedish guitarist Ulf Wakenius, that in the first case he could only have dreamt about, and in the second, he could never have imagined.
In 1997, in fairly dizzying circumstances, Wakenius suddenly found himself in pianistOscar Peterson's quartet, with whom he would go on to tour the globe countless times during the jazz legend's final decade. In 2005, an equally unexpected invitation to play four concerts in Seoul with Korean singer Youn Sun Nah blossomed into a highly successful collaboration that has garnered international awards and, more surprisingly in the world of jazz, gold record sales.
Yet nothing comes from nothing. Wakenius has long been in demand and for good reason. For twenty years prior to the gig with Peterson, Wakenius had honed his craft, from jamming with friends as a teenager in his native Halmstad in the 1970s to recording with bassists Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen and Ray Brown. Wakenius' own group in the early nineties boasted drummer Jack DeJohnette, trumpeter Randy Brecker, pianistNiels Lan Doky, and bassist Lars Danielsson with whom Wakenius would reunite fifteen years later in Sun Nah's touring quartet.
Since signing to ACT Music a decade ago Wakenius has produced some of the most personal and arresting music of his career. The all-acoustic Momento Magico (ACT Music, 2014), his fifth recording for Siggi Loch's label, may be his best yet. Its music embraces the world that Wakenius has traveled far and wide, and represents as well a kind of resume of the guitarist's key influences.
The idea behind the title is simple enough, as Wakenius explains: "It refers to certain moments that you experience during your life; things that you dreamt about and then suddenly you experience it. Those kinds of moments can happen anywhere and you just carry them with you, like small diamonds in your memory. Like playing duo withPat Metheny or playing with Oscar Peterson at the Hollywood Bowl, or with Youn Sun Nah at Jarasum—they are magic moments."
Magic Moment is rare in Wakenius' discography, being only the second unaccompanied solo recording he has ever made, following The Guitar Artistry of Ulf Wakenius (Dragon, 2002). The idea to record another solo album had been brewing for a while: "It kind of developed over time," says Wakenius. "I've been playing with Youn Sun Nah a lot all over the world as a duo and at the beginning of the concerts I always play a couple of solo pieces before Youn comes on stage. So, I've had a lot of time to experiment with different tunes and concepts and try to get different sounds out of the acoustic guitar in a natural way. People said 'Why don't you record it?' and I thought I had enough interesting material to record a solo album."
The opening track on Momento Magico is drummer Magnus Ostrom's heartfelt tribute to his former partner in e.s.t, pianist Esbjorn Svensson, who died tragically in a scuba-diving accident in 2008. Svensson's death came as a huge shock to Wakenius, who had been recording Love is Real: Ulf Wakenius Plays the Music of Esbjorn Svensson (ACT Music, 2008) at the time: "We were colleagues for many years and we knew each other pretty well. We met on and off all the time," says Wakenius. "
Wakenius had been a huge fan of e.s.t.: "I love the music. I love the tonal world of Esbjorn Svensson. The 1970s was Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra, Pat Metheny was the 1990s and I would say that arguably e.s.t. was the sound of the 2000's. What they did, as I see it, was they mixed traditional piano trio jazz with classical music, English rock like Radiohead and contemporary sounds. They were in their own orbit, so to speak. They started to play for rock audiences, which was unusual for a piano jazz trio." Wakenius explains.
"Then I and Siggi Loch came up with the idea to record e.s.t.'s music. I like impossible challenges. I thought e.s.t. is pretty awkward on guitar, because it's so piano-based so I'll try that." Wakenius contacted Svensson and asked the pianist if he would be interested in writing some string arrangements for the CD: "Esbjorn loved the idea," relates Wakenius, "and he started to write some arrangements."
Then one Saturday in June, tragedy struck: "My wife called me and she said: 'Esbjorn Svensson is dead.' I couldn't believe it. For me it was a big shock and very hard to grasp," explains Wakenius. "He was so vibrant and alive. He was very special. He was a great ambassador for Swedish jazz. It was a big loss. So what started as a collaborative album became a homage to a pianist that had left us."
DU 23 AU 26 JUILLET, DANS LE VILLAGE ET LES CARRIÈRES DE JUNAS. LA 21E ÉDITION PART À LA DÉCOUVERTE DU JAZZ DU CERCLE POLAIRE ARCTIQUE. FRISSONS ESPÉRÉS.
Quand on est au sommet, on ne peut que redescendre. Le refrain est connu, mais pas toujours agréable à fredonner. Il en est qui s'y refuse tout simplement. Ainsi, le festival Jazz à Junas qui, l'an dernier, avait fêté son 20e anniversaire de la plus magistrale manière (Jan Garbarek, Steve Swallow, Tigran Hamasyan, Philip Catherine, Jon Hassel), n'est-il toujours pas redescendu. Dans tous les sens du terme. "Cette édition-anniversaire nous a marqués... Au point que nous avons souhaité en prolonger encore la magie, tant pour notre public que pour nous", avoue le directeur du festival Sébastien Cabrié.
Le terme jazz serait-il d’origine catalane et occitane ? Cette hypothèse apparaît insolite sinon farfelue si l’on s’en tient aux traditionnelles étymologies. On les sait diverses et controversées mais si elles s’accordent parfois sur les connotations sexuelles du vocable, elles ne retiennent jamais cette origine.
Cette autre filiation m’a été suggérée par Pere Pons, le rédacteur en chef du magazine spécialiséJaç devant lequel je m’étonnais, lors d’une rencontre à Barcelone, de cette graphie insolite. Devant mon scepticisme, ce journaliste avait argumenté. Ce terme présent dans les deux langues aurait, à l’entendre, été importé outre-Atlantique au début du XXe par des travailleurs occitans venus donc du Sud de la France et émigrés en Louisiane. Et Pere Pons de compléter cette affirmation par une analyse étymologique selon laquelle le terme signifiait originellement la litière animale. Désignant plus généralement une couche rustique, ce terme aurait donc par extension fonctionné comme un synonyme de « bordel », dont ces travailleurs célibataires étaient probablement des pratiquants réguliers dans les bas-fonds de la Nouvelle-Orléans, où naissait alors le jazz.
J’étais resté à l’époque pour le moins perplexe. A mon retour, j’avais été cependant été troublé lorsque, évoquant cette hypothèse inattendue devant des proches, ceux-ci m’avaient assuré de l’existence du terme dans le vocabulaire catalan du Roussillon mais aussi occitan, renvoyant parfois même dans cet espace linguistique aux lieux dissimulés où se consommaient les adultères. Je n’avais pas pour autant prolongé l’enquête.
Quelle n’a donc été ma surprise lorsque lisant une interview d’Archie Shepp dans Libération (7 septembre 2012) à propos de sa nouvelle création d’Attica Blues présentée à la Villette, j’ai pu voir la thèse occitano-catalane confortée par le saxophoniste. Interrogé sur son refus ancien et bien connu du terme jazz, il répondait en effet à Dominique Queillé : « Je ne suis pas le seul, Max Roach, Yusef Lateef et d’autres contestaient aussi ce mot qui viendrait de « jass » en occitan. »
J’ai alors relancé ma recherche en sollicitant cette fois des amis linguistes et spécialistes de la langue occitane à l’Université de Montpellier. Ils ont procédé à une recherche pour me fournir un document de référence : l’entrée du terme jas (avec un s donc) dans le Trésor du Félibrige de Frédéric Mistral. Idem pour le catalan, pour lequel une amie m’a fait parvenir l’entrée du terme dans un dictionnaire de référence.
Nous dispenserons le lecteur de ces fastidieuses analyses lexico-sémantiques. Outre l’existence du terme en catalan et en occitan, ces documents confirment bien, par-delà les différents usages, le sens de « gîte » ou de « couche » rudimentaire, et accréditeraient donc la thèse hétérodoxe. Du moins si l’on retient l’idée qu’en vertu de ses connotations, le sens du terme aurait été déplacé du monde rural au bordel urbain, puis mis en usage et imposé en Louisiane par ces travailleurs venus du Sud de la France. Pour, au final, être étendu par un processus métonymique à la musique de jazz associée à ces lieux de perdition, dont l’un d’entre eux aurait été tenu par un Catalan.
Faut-il l’avaliser ? Nous nous en garderons bien. Mais nous ouvrons le débat. Occitanophones, catalanophones, jazzophiles ou non, historiens du jazz, experts et érudits de tous poils, à vos plumes.
Horace Silver, a pianist, composer and bandleader who was one of the most popular and influential jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Wednesday at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 85.
His death was announced by Blue Note Records, the company for which he recorded from 1952 to 1979.
After a high-profile apprenticeship with some of the biggest names in jazz, Mr. Silver began leading his own group in the mid-1950s and quickly became a big name himself, celebrated for his clever compositions and his infectious, bluesy playing. At a time when the refined, quiet and, to some, bloodless style known as cool jazz was all the rage, he was hailed as a leader of the back-to-basics movement that came to be called hard bop.
Hard bop and cool jazz shared a pedigree: They were both variations on bebop, the challenging, harmonically intricate music that changed the face of jazz in the 1940s. But hard bop was simpler and more rhythmically driven, with more emphasis on jazz’s blues and gospel roots. The jazz press tended to portray the adherents of cool jazz (most of them West Coast-based and white) and hard bop (most of them East Coast-based and black) as warring factions. But Mr. Silver made an unlikely warrior.
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His albums included “Song for My Father,” which featured his father on the cover.CreditBlue Note Records
“I personally do not believe in politics, hatred or anger in my musical composition,” he wrote in the liner notes to his album “Serenade to a Soul Sister” in 1968. “Musical composition should bring happiness and joy to people and make them forget their troubles.”
And Mr. Silver’s music was never as one-dimensional as it was sometimes portrayed as being. In an interview early in his career he said he was aiming for “that old-time gutbucket barroom feeling with just a taste of the backbeat.” That approach was reflected in the titles he gave to songs, like “Sister Sadie,”“Filthy McNasty” and “The Preacher,” all of which became jazz standards. But his output also included gently melodic numbers like “Peace” and “Melancholy Mood” and Latin-inflected tunes like “Señor Blues.”“Song for My Father,” probably his best-known composition, blended elements of bossa nova and the Afro-Portuguese music of the Cape Verde islands, where his father was born.
His piano playing, like his compositions, was not that easily characterized. Deftly improvising ingenious figures with his right hand while punching out rumbling bass lines with his left, he managed to evoke boogie-woogie pianists like Meade Lux Lewis and beboppers like Bud Powell simultaneously. Unlike many bebop pianists, however, Mr. Silver emphasized melodic simplicity over harmonic complexity; his improvisations, while sophisticated, were never so intricate as to be inaccessible.
Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver was born on Sept. 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Conn. His father, who was born John Silva but changed the family name to the more American-sounding Silver after immigrating to the United States, worked in a rubber factory. His mother, Gertrude, was a maid and sang in a church choir.
Although he studied piano as a child, Mr. Silver began his professional career as a saxophonist. But he had returned to the piano, and was becoming well known as a jazz pianist in Connecticut, by the time the saxophonist Stan Getz — soon to be celebrated as one of the leading lights of the cool school — heard and hired him in 1950.
“I had the house rhythm section at a club called the Sundown in Hartford,” Mr. Silver told The New York Times in 1981. “Stan Getz came up and played with us. He said he was going to call us, but we didn’t take him seriously. But a couple of weeks later he called and said he wanted the whole trio to join him.”
Mr. Silver worked briefly with Getz before moving to New York in 1951. He was soon in demand as an accompanist, working with leading jazz musicians like the saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. In 1953, Mr. Silver and the drummer Art Blakey formed a cooperative group, the Jazz Messengers, whose aggressive style helped define hard bop and whose lineup of trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums became the standard hard-bop instrumentation.
After two and a half years, during which Mr. Silver began his long and prolific association with Blue Note, he left the Jazz Messengers, which carried on with Blakey as the sole leader, and formed his own quintet. It became a showcase for his compositions.
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Another album by Mr. Silver is “Further Explorations by the Horace Silver Quintet.”CreditBlue Note Records
Those compositions, beginning with “The Preacher” in 1955 — which his producer, Alfred Lion of Blue Note, had tried to discourage him from recording because he considered it too simplistic — captured the ears of a wide audience. Many were released as singles and garnered significant jukebox play. By the early ’60s Mr. Silver’s quintet was one of the most popular nightclub and concert attractions in jazz, and an inspiration for countless other bandleaders.
Like Blakey, Miles Davis (with whom he recorded) and a few others, Mr. Silver was known for discovering and nurturing young talent, including the saxophonists Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson and Michael Brecker; the trumpeters Art Farmer, Woody Shaw, Tom Harrell and Dave Douglas; and the drummers Louis Hayes and Billy Cobham. His longest-lived ensemble, which lasted about five years in the late 1950s and early ’60s, featured Blue Mitchell on trumpet and Junior Cook on tenor saxophone.
As interest in jazz declined in the ’70s, Mr. Silver disbanded his quintet and began concentrating on writing lyrics as well as music, notably on a three-album series called “The United States of Mind,” his first album to feature vocalists extensively. He later resumed touring, but only for a few months each year, essentially assembling a new group each time he went on the road.
“I’m shooting for longevity,” he explained. “The road is hard on your body. I’m trying to get it all over with in four months and then recoup.” He said he also wanted to spend more time with his son, Gregory, who survives him.
In 1981, Mr. Silver formed his own label, Silveto. His recordings for that label featured vocalists and were largely devoted to what he called “self-help holistic metaphysical music” — life lessons in song with titles like “Reaching Our Goals in Life” and “Don’t Dwell on Your Problems” that left critics for the most part unimpressed.
Jon Pareles of The Times wrote in 1986 that Mr. Silver’s “naïvely mystical lyrics” made his new compositions sound like “near-miss pop songs.” On later albums for Columbia, Impulse and Verve, Mr. Silver returned to a primarily instrumental approach.
Mr. Silver was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1995 and received a President’s Merit Award from the Recording Academy in 2005.
Many of his tunes became staples of the jazz repertoire — a development, he said, that surprised him. “When I wrote them,” he said in a 2003 interview for the website All About Jazz, “I would say to myself that I hope these at least withstand the test of time. I hope they don’t sound old in 10 years or something.”
Rather than sounding dated, his compositions continued to be widely performed and recorded well into the 21st century. And while he acknowledged that “occasionally I hear an interpretation of one of my tunes that I say that they sure messed that one up,” he admitted, “For the most part I enjoy all of it.”
Avec Élodie, nous serions très fiers de vous faire découvrir un super concert + le superbe travail de nos élèves. J'espère que ce vendredi 20 juin, à Lodève, je retrouverai de nombreux amis pour une belle soirée !
Louis Winsberg (guitare), Rickye Gresset (guitare), Antonio El Titi (guitare)
Très attaché à la recherche sur la mélodie et l’harmonie, le guitariste Louis Winsberg s’est d’abord produit au sein du Sixun. Connu pour sa curiosité et son éclectisme, il a également participé à de nombreuses collaborations : Dee Dee Bridgewater, Sadao Watanabe, Stéphane Huchard, Claude Nougaro, Maurane…
Pour le projet « Gipsy eyes », il s’est entouré de deux virtuoses de la guitare : d’un côté, Rocky Gresset avec son jeu « à la Django Reinhardt », de l’autre, Antonio El Titi, digne héritier de Paco de Lucia : des branches du même arbre qui ont donné des musiques aussi différentes que le jazz manouche et le flamenco !
A ne pas rater !
Tarifs : 15€ / 13€ (adhérents Jazz à Junas) gratuit pour moins de 16 ans
Du duo au sextet en passant par trio et quartet, les musiciens vont se succéder dans les différents espaces de l’Ever’in (extérieurs et intérieurs) avec un concert par heure à partir de 19h jusqu’à un « bœuf » final Round about Midnight.
Se produiront : Marc Roux, Guillaume Séguron contrebasse / Nicolas Karatzaferis, Philippe Lemoine saxophone / Samuel Silvant batterie / SextetAtelier jazz d’Aramon / Tom Gareil vibraphone / Philippe Deschepperguitare.
Après s’être produits dans des configurations diverses, vers 22h30, les 4 membres du quartet « Philadelphie » investiront l’espace bar :
Philippe Deschepper Samuel Silvant Guillaume Séguron Philippe Lemoine
Ne manquez pas ce rendez-vous ! « Jazz à tous les étages »
Les Petits Loups de Jazz à Junas qui ont débuté avec Olivier Caillard en 2008, poursuive cette année leur aventure avec le slameur Benoit Bastide alias Bozo, qui a travaillé toute l'année avec les élèves de l'école d'Aujargues sur l'expression écrite et orale, la diction et l’improvisation verbale.
Une première expérience Slam dans la continuité de leur apprentissage de l’improvisation pour le regroupement Junas-Aujargues que nous pourrons entendre lors du concert du 14 juin où Les Petits Loups de Jazz à Junas seront accompagnés par Bozo bien entendu mais aussi par Jérôme Gerbeck (beatbox, percussions).
En partenariat avec la commune de Junas et la Communauté de Communes du Pays de Sommières
