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Death of Jacques Coursil, brilliant jazzman and little-known figure of black modernity

“Everyone has a chance. You just have to be ready when it arrives. ” This word from Paul Bley, which closes the cover notes of Black Suite, number 49 of the BYG-Actuel series, took on its full meaning some forty years later. In 2007, Jacques Coursil knew how to seize his chance, by publishing Clamor, a collection that finally allowed its author to be placed alongside mythical figures from the world of music. Jacques Coursil definitely stood there among the best trumpeters, somewhere between Jon Hassell and Don Cherry. “The trumpet, if it doesn’t sing, is scrap metal. She dances and finally she talks. You can hear the back of my throat. ” Listen for example to this sound on the introductory Naked lyrics, a melancholy of the future that will make us cry for a long time.

“Where you had to be”

Each word was weighed, each syllable counted with this Martiniquais who died in Belgium on the night of June 25 of a long illness, as they say. He was born in Montmartre in 1938: papa activist and mom sings. He will combine the two, in his own way. At 15, he goes to the conservatory to learn the clarinet, he comes out with a trumpet. The right instrument for him who understands jazz, “A creativity that turned the century upside down like the blues revolutionized poetry. So that was where we had to be so like me we were concerned with the revolutionary thing “. The hour is for decolonization, and Jacques Coursil flies to Dakar between 1958 and 1961, already frequenting the other father of this negritude which will not stop haunting him, invoking still in Clamor Frantz Fanon and of course Edouard Glissant, his friend whose he said he was “locksmith” of his complex thought.

“To speak of racism is to speak of something; to speak of race is to speak of nothing. ” The segregation he had given for crossing the Atlantic in 1965, because “Malcolm X was dead and free jazz had just been born”. He stayed there for ten years, working on composition around “serialization”, frequenting the galaxy of free jazz with multiple outlines. He recorded for drummer Sunny Murray, joined the Arkestra of Sun Ra for a while, and then Rashied Ali, Perry Robinson, Marion Brown… It was from this period that the two BYG-Actuel records date. And then after a return to giscardian France, he changes lanes: he studies mathematics and letters.

Two key dissertations, he will teach at the University of the West Indies and Guyana and the very famous Cornell, signing a reference book, the Mute Function of Language. Everything is said, or almost, for those who nevertheless continue to maintain an intimate relationship with their trumpet.

“Music springs again”

For better proof, when Jacques Coursil finally decides to return, he signs a terrible Minimal Brass in 2005 on Tzadik, multiple trumpet tracks all played by him. “While I was teaching literature, John Zorn, who had been my student for a long time, offered me this recording. I wrote it in a week, with the concept of wanting to hear all the harmonics together. ” It rediscovers a musical personality that looks like nothing or almost nothing. To the philosopher: “Music has been an underground river. Now it springs again and everything is fine… ” New discs will be released: in 2010, On a Trail of Tears, or he borrows the Trail of Tears, account of the terrible deportation of the Cherokees in 1838, to question these two memories, through his trumpet, and four years later Free Jazz Art, a duet with Alan Silva, subtitled “Session For Bill Dixon”, ultimate reference.

In this new century, the hair had grown, the line had emaciated, the verb had refined its soft radicality, cut like the sound of this “Caribbean who makes music”. Shade. It’s good about this still topical subject Clamor. The question of his identity, the pictures stuck on his mask, he who did not want to be “Slave of slavery”, the same who knew how to tell us the importance of history when it fits into the realm. This manifesto, which does not have its name, puts terrible inflections on everyone’s time. From now on, it will have to be heard at each event.


Jacques Denis

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