Artists' Residencies 2010/2011

At the age of 73, Archie Shepp is old enough to remember the complete history of jazz, but he also carries with him the entire tradition of Afro-American music, yet at the same time he tears down its borders, and dares to create encounters with other musical worlds.
“Pantsula” is a South African urban dance, and six members of the Via Katlehong Dance Company from East Rand, will join him to perform on stage. This dance, which came into being in South Africa’s townships, is the urban expression of a new generation, like hip-hop in the USA and Europe.

An inimitable and highly influential trumpet player, Hassell is best-known for inventing an aesthetic approach that he has called Fourth World – a sort of fusion of techniques borrowed from the worlds of electronic music, avant-garde and world music. The festival invites him to explore the traditional trance music of the Maghreb countries of North Africa, in a first-ever encounter with Camel Zekri, an outstanding guitarist of
Southern Algerian origin.

In the space of just a few years, this young pianist has quite simply set the standards for his generation to aim at, thanks to a number of major successes as a recording artist. Isn’t experimenting with boundaries first and foremost all about demolishing the walls that sometimes seem to rise up between different branches of aesthetics? Alexandre Tharaud, exploiting a simple and brilliant idea that occurred to him after recording works for the piano by Domenico Scarlatti, an Italian composer who lived in Andalusia, and whose writing is imbued with the music of Southern Spain, invites Alberto Garcia, one France’s greatest flamenco voices, who has a voce a mano, to join him on stage.

A unique project: the Octurn ensemble immerses itself in the authentic world of ritual chanting, as performed by the monks of Gyuto Monastery. The score written for Octurn’s musicians melts into these hypnotic states.
For this project, the Tibetan chanting monks have agreed to change their traditional way of working, with a view to exploring and experimenting with new techniques. This ritual chanting, introduces Octurn to an extremely sophisticated culture and philosophy which, though several thousand years old, is now threatened with extinction…