Jean-Francois Charles

Looking for the studio album? Visit www.electroclarinet.com Thanks Dominique Rybakov, for her picture, and her listening!

Accordionist Céline Rivoal, a teacher at Brest conservatory, is passionate about new music, written or improvised. During the electrocution festival , on Friday, March 27th, Céline is playing the French première of Testo , by Composer Davide Ianni . This piece is written for accordion & live electronics, with quadrophonic sound projection. Note that this composition used to be called Forme in Scia - you may listen to a recording in Davide Ianni's Listening Room . Davide studied with Joshua Fineberg , a great composer and connoisseur of spectral music. You can hear this in Davide's music, with his careful attention to timbre, to how the electronics and the live accordion fade in and out of each other. Davide programmed the live electronics are made with Max . Accordion explained to composers Davide worked with accordionist Luca Piovesan. Download his free e-book: accordion4composers . He also just released a new album: Luca Piovesan - Sul Tasto (amazon.com link).

Composer Julien Vincenot will be in Brest at the end of this week, for the electro[]cution interactive music festival, organized by the Ensemble Sillages. Saxophonist extraordinaire Stéphane Sordet will perform Julien's composition silent_data_corrupt during the Electrolib concert on Friday, March 27th. Excerpt from the first page of the score. Julien Vincenot composed this work for alto saxophone and live computer (appellation by the composer) during his Cursus year at Ircam . Here is the video of the premiere, with saxophonist Nikita Zimin: I'm looking forward to meeting with Julien again - last time was during last year's July 2015 Prisma meeting at Ircam.

I'm playing the bass clarinet tomorrow in Lorient, for a concert dedicated to Gershwin, Kurt Weill and Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto . Orchestra conductor Laurent Goossaert is great: he is pushing the orchestra to its very best. Rhapsody in Blue should sound really good - of course, I still have a special feeling for the 1932 version we performed with Ryan Bañagale & the Dudley Jazz Band. To learn more on Gershwin and the Rhapsody as a composition and an evolving arrangement, make sure you read Ryan Bañagale's book Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon .

On Sunday, March 1st, I'm playing the bass clarinet in the Ensemble Sable & Ciel, for the Ravel's Concerto pour la main gauche . I would like to invite you, but the concert is sold out. Conductor Joël Doussard designed a concert of French Music, with Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande orchestral suite, and both the Concerto en sol and the Concerto pour la main gauche by Maurice Ravel . Pianist François Dumont will perform both piano concertos! Bass clarinet in A Ravel is calling for a bass clarinet in Bb and a bass clarinet in A. Given the cost/benefit ratio of the instruments, the bass clarinet in A has almost entirely disappeared. I am convinced that the timbre difference between an A and a Bb bass clarinet is less than the difference you have between bass clarinets from two manufacturers, or between two clarinetists playing the same instrument, or between 2 mouthpiece/reed combinations played by the same performer. But the bass clarinet in A did exist. For more i...

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 .

When working with the music students for the Désordre Electro-jazz project , I suggested some music to listen to, including a couple of electro-saxophone options. Here is a selection of my electric saxophone recommended listening: Gaël Horellou & NHX; Guillaume Perret & the Electric Epic; Matthew Burtner with his metasaxophone; Colin Stetson with well placed microphones around his saxophone. NHX I met Gaël Horellou when we arrived at the Lyon's National Institute for Applied Sciences, in the Music Studies section. He was as dedicated to music at the time as he is still now. Here is an excerpt of his NHX project: Guillaume Perret & the Electric Epic I like Guillaume Perret 's conception of the electronically augmented saxophone, a true electro-acoustic instrument, where both the acoustic sound & the electronic audio processing contribute to the musical expressivity. It's interesting to note that Guillaume Perret chose to work with several sidemen ...