(in french...)
4000 posts in 12 years

Saturday 15 december » Roma Cata

Performance at Mains d'Œuvres on January 26 2019

Jean-Jacques Birgé (keyboard, electronics) will play with David Coignard (installations) and Laurent Stoutzer (guitar, electronics) at Mains d'Œuvres for project OSO.

Unissued CD RENDEZ-VOUS soon!

JEAN-JACQUES BIRGÉ & HÉLÈNE SAGE Rendez-Vous

On Austrian label Klang Galerie, gg283
French group Un Drame Musical Instantané was founded in 1976. They present an original, unclassifiable, inventive music, which drifts from jazz to electronic sounds and contemporary music. Klanggalerie has started an extensive re-issue programme with these unqiue avantgarde pioneers which will bring back their classic albums but also side projects like this one. "Rendez-Vous" was recorded in 1981 but never released. This is what group founder Birgé has to say about the recording: "I met Hélène when she was doing a performance at Espace Palikao in Paris with choreographer Lulla Card Chourlin. She was singing whilst driving an old Mercedes Benz, trying to run over Lulla, and playing double bass on its roof! I proposed her to record some improvisations at Studio GRRR as I've always done with new musicians and as I'm still doing. The connection was so great, as one can hear on this record 37 years later, that I asked her to join the 15-piece orchestra of Un Drame Musical Instantané which had just been founded. She brought some crazy stuff into the group, playing strange instruments she had invented herself. She is a wonderful flute player, but I asked her to play all kinds of instruments and also to sing, leaving her often free to improvise besides the written score. In the next years we both played as a duo and she became the fourth member of the Drame. When I listen to these pieces today, I'm surprised by the high degree of composition, the quality and variety of our inventions. The mix of acoustic and electronic instruments sounds totally contemporary, plus with the energy of youth and the absolute love for innovative forms."
Full tracklist: 1. Rendez-Vous 2. En Rappel 3. Aquatics 4. Rings 5. Good For Nothing 6. Why Not 7. Grasse Matinée.
Price: € 17,-/copy incl. worldwide shipping, to be issued by the end of the year

Le Centenaire sous la plume de Jean Rochard

Wonderful text by Jean Rochard on natomusic

The 100th Anniversary in The Wire

Article in THE WIRE (Nov. 2018, #417, p.69, Modern Composition by Julian Cowley) :
Parisian Jean-Jacques Birgé has been making records, directing films and running the label Grrr since the mid-1970s. Now, with this exuberant hour-long project, he peers ahead to 2052 and celebrates the centenary of his own birth. A coda, marking his eventual death, has been composed by Sacha Gattino who salutes the playful ness of his friend's creative life, audible in their shared love of toy instruments and everyday sounding objects. A chiming music box, recorded during Birgé's childhood, provides a point of departure for his delirious romp through time. Skilfully crafted montage captures the flavour of each decade. Chanson xith lilting accordion, searing electric guitar or synths and orchestral pomp provide temporal markers, but within each frame a host of sounds are layered and scrambled. Birgé's kaleidoscopic imagination has produced a widly entertaining electroacoustic chronicle, oozing joie de vivre, naturally.

Face B @ La Maison Rouge on Oct. 27

Reservations are opened on the site of La Maison Rouge. You may assist to the return of Face B by Daniela Franco, Saturday October 27. Vincent Segal (cello), Antonin-Tri Hoang (alto sax, bass clarinet) and Jean-Jacques Birgé (keyboard, Tenori-on, Lyra-8) will improvise on images by the Mexican artist. Daniela Franco designs "covers of rare records which have disappeared". Have they ever existed? She also uses pictures following musical and graphic themes which every one will interpret his/her own way.
→ Face B | Performative Archive at La Maison Rouge-Fondation Antoine de Galbert, 10 bd de la Bastille, 75012 Paris, Saturday October 27 at 4 p.m. and 5.30 p.m., reservation if there is still some place : reservation@lamaisonrouge.org


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Website created in 1997 / Last update : monday, 10th december 2018 / French Daily Blog / © Jean-Jacques BIRGÉ / info@drame.org / Credits