Jean-Francois Charles

In the fall, we had the great pleasure of welcoming in Iowa artist & technologist Philippe Ollivier . During the final Loopers & Composers concert , as a prelude to this solo show, he performed a piece with the graduate students taking the course Interactive Music . All of the students used the advanced looper Logelloop . Here more about Philippe's 2022 adventure in the USA on his website .

Update: check out the Jamshid Jam album, featuring Ramin Roshandel on setār and Jean-François Charles on live electronics . Coming soon to the Englert Theatre in Iowa City: composer and setar player Ramin Roshandel and I perform on the Englert Stage. You can attend the concert safely from home on Wednesday, February 17th. Get your tickets now! Jamshid Jam Here is some information about that 30-minute show: According to Persian myths, Jamshid was the inventor of music . In Jamshid Jam , Charles and Roshandel attempt at, once again, discovering music. When Ramin Roshandel and Jean-François Charles improvise together, two traditions meet. Roshandel plays the setar; he has been trained in classical Persian music. Charles performs on live electronics; his improvisation background lies in European free jazz and avant-garde. In Jamshid Jam , haunting melodies and ancestral harmonies combine into a new imaginary folklore.

In November, composer & improviser Carlos Cotallo Solares and I recorded an homage to Jacques Dutronc's hit Les Cactus . This video presents an excerpt from the "live electronics only" track: Electronic Cactus video on youtube Check out here our electric guitar & live electronics duet .

Guitarist Steve Grismore is a great musician and educator, with ears wide open. Here is a little Bell Blender we created together recently. All electronic sounds made from Steve's guitar - and voice!

Situated in Brittany, France, the Logelloù is much more than a place: it is a unique artistic project combining creation, residencies, recording studio, and more. I was thrilled to be invited with Nicolas Sidoroff & Krystian Sarrau for a concert and projection of Dziga Vertov 's 1928 movie The Eleventh Year . We produced a collaborative soundtrack with Clélia Bobichon, Guillaume Hamet, and Sébastien Sauvage. Unfortunately, the concert & projection has been cancelled due to the spread of coronavirus. Along with the Logelloù staff, we hope to make this event possible again at some point in the future. In the meantime, don't hesitate to watch The Eleventh Year online.

Update: check out the Jamshid Jam album, featuring Ramin Roshandel on setār and Jean-François Charles on live electronics . According to Persian myths, Jamshid "invented music." I was thrilled on Saturday night to perform with Ramin Roshandel and his setar our Jamshid Jam : I was playing my own live remixing instrument, and we attempted to, once again, discover music. All of the electronic music is produced live, from the sound of the setar. We don't use any pre-recorded audio. Also listen to Jamshid Jam, alternate take , during one of our rehearsals.

I Hear IC is a series of concerts taking place in different venues in Iowa City. On Friday, I had the pleasure of performing with composers Carlos Cotallo Solares and Carlos Toro Tobon at The Mill: Carlos Toro Tobon is playing the Buchla Music Easel, I'm playing a feedback cymbal with DIY FX pedal, while Carlos Cotallo Solares is playing the guitar and his DIY guitar pedal. We took the stage after the High Water Mark's bluegrass and Jill Abrusio's songs & ukulele; the night ended with a group of great young musicians, Non Prophet: check out their video .

On Thursday, November 30th, took place the School of Music Audition Day, when High School students visit and audit to enter the School in next August. For the occasion, we performed with our guest Andrew Bentley and doctoral students Carlos Toro-Tobon and Carlos Cotallo-Solares. Here are excerpts from our Audition Quartet : Instruments Andrew Bentley plays a synthesizer made of guitar pedals (including the discontinued Pigtronix Mothership and Way Huge Ringworm ). The three other instruments have been built by the musicians around the axoloti DSP platform . Carlos Toro-Tobon's recycled guitar pick-up can be played with a drill: Carlos Cotallo-Sorales and I worked on the guitar pedal format:

Back online, the version of Treffpunkt ( Meeting Point ) bassist Franck Cottet-Dumoulin and I recorded in 2001. Treffpunkt belongs to the Aus den sieben Tagen series of text compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen (see also this page for more information about the cycle). The file I shared in 2007 had disappeared, and I was recently asked to make it available again. Cover from the 1973 Deutsche Grammophon vynile That request came just after we heard Nomi Epstein at the University of Iowa: she is a composer who works a lot with text and alternative musical notation in her own scores. With the a.pe.ri.od.ic ensemble , they gave a great performance of TIME WITH PEOPLE, an experimental opera by Tim Parkinson. Here is another take on intuitive music, where Franck Cottet-Dumoulin plays with pianist Jean-Marie Reboul :

Coming up on Wednesday! LOUi, the Laptop Orchestra at the University of Iowa meets poet and artist Gozo Yoshimazu . I just met this afternoon with him, his translators, and the organizers: the project is really exciting! Theater B, Theater Building, Wednesday April 19th, 2017, 7 p.m. Nima Hamidi, setar & live electronics Joseph Norman, electric guitar & live electronics Kris Peysen, electric guitar & live electronics Jacob Simmons, guitar & live electronics Carlos Toro-Tobon, Buchla analog Synthesizer & live electronics Special guest: Patricia Hartland, electric bass & more I hope to see you there! Update April 18: see the article in the Daily Iowan .

Come tomorrow at the Coin de la Rue café, rue Saint-Malo in Brest: I'll be performing with Bretagne musicians at the RRRR jam. In addition to a clarinet or two, I'll be using for the first time a new analog synth built with guitar pedals: Yes, you are right: before the analog signal path, I put a digital delay, to be used as a looper on a microphone input. But this mic is not necessary: the synth can also be used as a kind of a no-input mixer , with two ring modulators and a pitch-driven VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator). This synth constitutes the core live electronics set-up for my up-coming composition Electroclarinet 4 .

Two musical evenings celebrating the 20 years of the Léo Ferré space . On stage Wednesday, Nov. 12th, 9 p.m.: Nikolaz Cadoret, harp & electronics Jean-Philippe Le Coz, tuba & trombone François Lucas, saxophone, oboe, English horn & electronics Céline Rivoal, accordion Christian Sarrau, saxophone & electronics Jean-François Charles, clarinets & electronics And of course, our host: Thierry Tremintin, drums

Today is the Fête de la musique in France and around the world, as every 21st of June since 1982. Tonight, I'll be performing Electroclarinet 5 and excerpts from Electroclarinet 6 , as well as improvised music with saxophonist Stéphane Sordet . We are playing at the invitation of the contemporary music ensemble Ensemble Sillages . Here is the schedule: Brest, SNCF train station 5 p.m. Jean-François Charles: clarinets, objects & electronics; Stéphane Sordet: saxophones. Brest, rue Étienne Dolet Stage shared with Penn ar Jazz and the Brest Conservatory 5 p.m. jazz students from Brest conservatory 7:15 p.m. ensemble Sillages Stéphane Sordet/Jean-François Charles 8 p.m. Christophe Rocher & Frédéric Briet (creative jazz) 8:30 p.m. Plus d’amour 9 p.m. Moon swing 9:50 p.m. Rrrr + duo Lucas / Trémentin (free jazz/impro) 10:30 p.m. Duo Descofar (revisited celtic music) 11:15 p.m. No pilot (repetitive electronic noise)

After the September improv session Saint-Malo street , you are invited: tomorrow, jam at the Au Coin d’la Rue solidarity space in Recouvrance, Brest, France. More info on Au coin d'la Rue's web site . Friends will be playing sax, electric harp, voice, and unexpected sound objects; I might play contrabass clarinet & basset horn, we shall see. Hope to see you there - with your instrument / dancers, actors & other artists welcome too!

A couple of pictures from last week's concert with the Brest conservatoire's jazz orchestra and Chicago musician Douglas R. Ewart . The concert took place on October 20th, it was part of the fantastic Atlantique Jazz Festival . The jazz orchestra at the conservatoire is led by two great jazz musicians: trumpeter Philippe Champion and saxophonist Krystian Sarrau . The Brest conservatory 2013 jazz band Red Hills started with an improvised clarinet & flute duet Singer extraordinaire Zalie Bellacicco rendered the text beautifully At the end of the day, Douglas seemed pretty happy with the concert I was thrilled to share this musical moment with all of the musicians. Red Hills , the composition we performed, was inspired by mountains in Douglas Ewart's native Jamaica.

On September 14th, during the Journées du patrimoine , we met with professors from the Brest conservatory in Rue Saint-Malo . The non-profit organization Vivre la rue had organized a nice festival there. Many thanks to saxophonist Xavier, who took a few shot with his phone. Here they are, featuring Nikolaz Cadoret (electro-acoustic harp & live electronics), François Lucas (biniou, oboe, and other instruments), Stéphane Sordet (saxophone) - I was playing clarinet & live electronics.

Vincent Vigon is a mathematician, and a long time friend of mine. We studied together at the Insa de Lyon , in the Musique Études section. Come listen to his group Tadja - I'm gonna jam with them, too. Concert is this Thursday, April 19th, at 8:30pm at the Xanadu bar in Strasbourg. By the way, how does Tadja sound? Here is how they describe their music - en français dans le texte : Musique azimutée Est-Ouest, Celtique-Yiddish Musique Trad relookée, mixerisée, micro-ondée

Concerto cadenzas may be written or improvised. Today, the performer of a classical concerto often plays standard cadenzas, composed in the style or transcribed from earlier performances. As we are going to see today, there are also more adventurous approaches. Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote cadenzas for Mozart's clarinet concerto & flute concerto No. 1, and for Haydn's trumpet concerto. The recording is available: Stockhausen conducts Haydn & Mozart (with his own cadenzas) . Beethoven improvises for Mozart... (details at the Beethoven Gateway ) For Harvard professor Robert Levin , himself an amazing improviser, a cadenza to a classical concerto is a real one only when it is improvised. And he is a master at re-creating the magic of improvisation within a given style. The new cadenza: modern, composed & improvised, with live electronics, too! The approach pianist Seda Röder took for Beethoven's Emperor concerto inherits from both the composer's and the i...

Armand Angster is my clarinet master. Listen to him talk (in French!) about his ensemble Accroche Note , improvisation, and working with composers. He was the guest of Anne Montaron in the program Le Portrait (France Musique radio) on November 22nd. You can stream the half hour program until December 22nd: Armand Angster on France Musique . Armand Angster and his contrabass clarinet

Yesterday afternoon, the Fulbright Association Massachusetts Chapter organized its annual Afternoon of Music. This relaxed event took place in Harvard Eliot House Library. Amateur and professional musicians performed a colorful program including pop music, traditional music, classical music, contemporary classical music, and jazz. I brought a basic setup to perform a pedagogical and musical presentation with clarinet and live electronics. Program Maximo Gurméndez , piano, guitar, voice, sang in English and Uruguayan: Don't let the sun go down on me (Elton John) and Al otro lado del rio (Jorge Drexler) June Park , piano, violin, performed a Haydn piano sonata, a new composition of hers "Nighttime Wanderer part 2", and a Korean song I performed semi-improvised music with clarinet and live electronics (Max/MSP/Jitter on my laptop, an amp, here you go) Cédric Hanriot , piano, invited Ben Powell , violin, to perform a Bill Evans standard and a Waltz of his own. Carlos O. M...