Jacques Demierre (born 4 January 1954, in Geneva) is a Swiss improvisation musician and composer. [1]
Demierre studied at the University of Geneva at the Conservatoire Populaire (piano, jazz piano, electroacoustic music) and at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève (music theory). Soon, he gave up the classic piano and tended to the avant-garde rock and improvised jazz. As a pianist, he played with Dorothea Schürch , Radu Malfatti, Hans Koch and also with Martial Solal, Han Bennink, Joëlle Léandre, Carlos Zingaro and Ikue Mori. He performed regularly solo concerts and worked also in a trio with Lucas Niggli and Barry Guy and also with Urs Leimgruber and Barre Phillips. Sylvie Courvoisier, Malcolm Braff and Michel Wintsch were his students.
Demierre changed his way as a composer to the border of jazz, free improvisation and contemporary music, because he was interested in mixing the improvised music tradition with notated music.
Han Bennink is a Dutch drummer and percussionist. On occasion his recordings have featured him playing soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, trombone, violin, banjo and piano.
Jacques Loussier was a French pianist and composer. He arranged jazz interpretations of many of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, such as the Goldberg Variations. The Jacques Loussier Trio, founded in 1959, played more than 3,000 concerts and sold more than 7 million recordings—mostly in the Bach series. Loussier composed film scores and a number of classical pieces, including a Mass, a ballet, and violin concertos. His style is described as third stream, a synthesis of jazz and classical music, with an emphasis on improvisation.
Paul Bley, CM was a jazz pianist known for his contributions to the free jazz movement of the 1960s as well as his innovations and influence on trio playing and his early live performance on the Moog and ARP synthesizers. His music has been described by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times as "deeply original and aesthetically aggressive". Bley's prolific output includes influential recordings from the 1950s through to his solo piano recordings of the 2000s.
Fred Hersch is an American jazz pianist, educator and HIV/AIDS activist. He was the first person to play weeklong engagements as a solo pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York City. He has recorded more than 70 of his jazz compositions. Hersch has been nominated for several Grammy Awards, and, as of December 2014, had been on the Jazz Studies faculty of the New England Conservatory since 1980.
Vladislas "Vlado" Perlemuter was a Lithuanian-born French pianist and teacher.
Samson Pascal François was a French pianist and composer.
Vinko Globokar is a French-Slovenian avant-garde composer and trombonist.
Dominic Alldis is a jazz pianist, orchestral conductor, and arranger. He is also a business speaker and founder of Music & Management.
Jean-Jacques Kantorow is a French violinist and conductor.
Fred Van Hove was a Belgian jazz musician and a pioneer of European free jazz. He was a pianist, accordionist, church organist, and carillonist, an improviser and a composer. In the 1960s and 1970s he performed with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and drummer Han Bennink.
Gabriel Tacchino was a French classical pianist and teacher.
Salman Huseyn oglu Gambarov is an Azerbaijani jazz pianist and composer.
Francis Vidil, is a French classical musician, performer and music professor. Vidil is best known for his long-time affiliation with Versailles Conservatoire, where he became a Tenure Professor in 1996, as well as his numerous performances around the world. Currently lives in the city of Versailles. Vidil is one of the few performers in the world being able to play the organ and the trumpet simultaneously.
Tigran Hamasyan is an Armenian jazz pianist and composer. He plays mostly original compositions, which are strongly influenced by the Armenian folk tradition, often using its scales and modalities. In addition to this folk influence, Hamasyan is influenced by American jazz traditions and to some extent, as on his album Red Hail, by progressive rock. His solo album A Fable is most strongly influenced by Armenian folk music. Even on his most overt jazz compositions and renditions of well-known jazz pieces, his improvisations often contain embellishments based on scales from Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian traditions.
Boulou Ferré is a French virtuoso jazz guitarist, composer, arranger, and improviser. He is the brother of Elios Ferré, also a jazz musician, with whom he has recorded widely. His repertoire includes jazz and classical music. He is considered one of the greatest contemporary musicians of the manouche tradition and has contributed to the genre through his knowledge of both jazz and classical music and his interest in the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.
The Haute école de musique de Lausanne is a Swiss music school located in Romandy, the French-speaking western part of Switzerland. It is a constituent institution of the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland.
Jean-Pierre Drouet is a French multi-instrumentist percussionist and composer.
Armand Angster is a French clarinetist. With Françoise Kubler (soprano), he is the founder of the ensemble "Accroche Note", research and creative formation in contemporary music.
Jacques Di Donato is a French musician and improviser. A clarinetist, saxophonist and drummer, he works in various fields ranging from jazz to contemporary music, classical music and improvised music. He was a clarinet teacher at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon between 1984 and 2007.
Léo Chauliac, real name Léon Chauliac, was a French jazz pianist, composer and conductor.