Jacques Coursil

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Jacques Coursil (born March 31, 1938 in Paris ; † June 26, 2020 ) was a French linguist and jazz musician ( trumpet , composition ).

Live and act

Coursil, whose family comes from Fort de France in Martinique , grew up listening to Caribbean music. From the age of seven he learned the violin, then switched to the clarinet and finally to the trumpet. From 1958 to 1961 he traveled through West Africa; in Dakar he lived in Leopold Senghor's house . Back in France, he began to study literature, but continued to occupy himself with music. After the assassination of Malcolm X , he moved to New York City in 1965 , where he stayed with Maynard Ferguson . He studied jazz with Bill Dixon (with whom he also performed in a duo) and with Jaki Byard and composition with Noel DaCosta . In 1966 he worked with Sunny Murray (on whose album Quintet he was also involved); During rehearsals he briefly played lead trumpet in Sun Ra’s Arkestra before performing with Bill Dixon, Rashied Ali and Marion Brown . 1967 Coursil had the opportunity to record a record under his own name for ESP-Disk , on which Marion Brown participated; however, it remained unpublished because of a legal battle between Coursil and Brown. In the same year he wrote his Black Suite in the Idiom of Free Jazz , which he recorded in Paris in 1969 with Anthony Braxton and Burton Greene and which was published by BYG Actuel .

In 1970 he returned to the United States, where he gradually withdrew from the music scene and increasingly occupied himself with linguistics and mathematics . He also gave French lessons there in the early 1970s; one of his students was John Zorn , whom he got enthusiastic about improvised music. In the mid-1970s he returned to France, where he continued his studies and initially received a doctorate in linguistics; Building on this, combining his linguistic knowledge with that of computer science and artificial intelligence research, he also submitted a scientific doctorate. After initially working as a university professor in Caen , he taught linguistics and Romance studies as a professor at the Université de Martinique from 1992 (until his retirement in 2002). He then worked as visiting professor at Cornell University in Ithaca (New York) and the University of California, Irvine .

From 2005 he was increasingly active as a musician again. Through renewed contact with John Zorn, he recorded his solo album Minimal Brass on Zorn's Tzadik label (2005). On his album Clameurs he deals with texts by Frantz Fanon , Édouard Glissant , Antarah ibn Shaddad (525–608) and Monchoachi (the Caribbean writer born as André Pierre-Louis; * 1946). In 2014 he recorded the album FreeJazzArt: Sessions for Bill Dixon with Alan Silva .

Coursil was also involved in Frank Wright's second album Your Prayer (1967) and Burton Greene's album Aquariana (1969); he also recorded with Jean Rochard and François Tusques (1981). He also worked with Archie Shepp 's label Archieball in Paris. In 2006 he worked with Archie Shepp and Gonzales on the album Identité en crescendo by the French rap singer Rocé.

Publications

Books

  • Grammaire analytique du français contemporain. Essai d'intelligence artificielle et de linguistique générale Caen 1992
  • La Fonction Muette du Langage Matoury 2000; ISBN 2-84450-090-0

Discographic notes

Lexigraphic entries

  • Todd S. Jenkins: Free Jazz and Free Improvisation: An Encyclopedia. Volume 1 . Greenwood 2004, ISBN 978-0313333132 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Jenkins writes differently from Coursil's website as the year of birth 1939
  2. ↑ Obituary. Liberation, June 26, 2020, accessed June 26, 2020 .
  3. ↑ This is how Coursil took his first recordings under his own name in 35 years.
  4. ↑ Review of the Minimal Brass album by dmute (French)
  5. ↑ Jacques Coursil, poétiques Clameurs (French)
  6. ↑ Hostipitality Suite
personal data
SURNAME Coursil, Jacques
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French linguist and jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 2020