APPROACH & PROJECTS
"I like meeting people", says Jean-Baptiste Boussougou. "By means of my music, I multiply the occasions to reach out to others and to form bonds with the public as much as with other artists." In dynamics of encounters and exchanges, he plays live and pursues projects with artists from other artistic backgrounds ; dance, theatre, fine arts... Today, Jean-Baptiste Boussougou is the composer and artistic director of 3 projects : DIWAN (trio), MOURIM (duet) et SOULOMES (solo). Although they share a common philosophy, each project unfolds its own aesthetics and its own personnality...
Diwan
Diwan means "to germinate, to rise up out of the ground" in Breton and designates in Persian a place where people talk about music, poetry, litterature and wisdom. From New York to Benares via Africa, Diwan is a caravan for an urban voyage throughout traditions and shows off a multicultural geography from one continent to the other.
Khalid Khouhen, as a tabla, daf and oriental gnawa percussions musician of note, Serge Pesce, guitarist (guitar with an exceptional palette of sounds), and Jean-Baptiste Boussougou at the Double-Bass, bolon and marboula all form the Diwan trio.
The DIWAN project has been selected by the CAC 2016 jury and is therefore supported by the Regional Council of Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur.
Album released in november 2015
on the Facing You / IMR label
Distributed by Musea, Les Allumés du Jazz, Improjazz.
Digital distribution : Believe
Mourim
Jean-Baptiste Boussougou was born in Gabon, Henri Roger in Egypt. 2 countries, 1 continent evoking wide-open spaces, sounds and silences. Jean-Baptiste invites Henri to join him and let the piano and double-bass converse, surrounded by his voice and by the sounds diverted from traditional instruments like the oud, the agoni, the ney, the sana, the thunderbox.
The title of the album and its music are inspired from the word 'mourim' that in Ipunu (a language from Gabon) means 'heart' or 'with heart'. It is all about the encounter of 2 men whose heart beat at the rhythm of music and about the fusion of their imagination fueled by the story of their lives. The musical exchanges are sometimes light-hearted, sometimes melancholic... the traditional baseline freely flies away towards wide-open spaces.
Soulomes
Jean-Baptiste Boussougou, double-bass player and poly instrumentalist delivers a new musical space : the one of our world, in which frontiers, as well as men, shift.
As a student of Kudsi Erguner, his approach is fueled by music from Istanbul, with the oud, as well as musics from Africa (from Mali with the ngoni, and from Morocco's gnawas with the guembri). The quest of Jean-Baptiste Boussougou is the fruit of this encounter. Cultures are not frozen... He uses the Western artistic codes to cast an Afro-contemporary eye on today. At the double-bass, his jazz and contemporary pieces are punctuated by a pointillist bow with repetitive tones, a more profound accent, an ignited vibration. Alone on stage, he explores all the colors of his double-bass, playing in loops, in saturation, in delay.
Soulomès (meaning "lone man" in occitan) is shown in concerts.
