Reborn
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Tony PETRUCCIANI:
“I can say that he is a great artist who deserves to be recognized.” A true concentrate of energy, passionate, lyrical, completely immersed in his art, Morgan Roussel puts his impressive technique at the service of stage performances of infectious intensity and feeling. It transports the listener and fascinates the viewer. |
/ Pianist
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"Improviser rather than jazzman, just as capable of confronting the scores of a classical repertoire as of composing himself, Morgan Roussel is one of those "precocious children" who have found refuge in art." (Benjamin Ferret - Sud Ouest)
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Reborn - the project |
Musician, what else? |
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-Reborn... It's all in the name.
This project was born in September 2019. It is the result of many things. My life as a man being deeply linked to my life as musician, I had come to the end of a road. After 8 years spent paying tribute to Michel Petrucciani, in a solo repertoire, and after having produced on major stages all over France, festivals, theaters, (with the approval of the whole family of Michel Petrucciani and his exclusive agent worldwide and of his biographer who dedicated a chapter in Michel's official biography released in 2011) I decided to end this adventure artistic. At that time, my life was one huge question: "Now what am I going to do, what do I feel like to tell about?" Everything was complicated, my life, the composition... I couldn't write a single note. I was locked in a daily life filled with emptiness. So I decided to take a step back. Before being a musician, I am a music lover. So I plunged back into listening to Mahler, Ravel, Copland, Debussy, the Beatles, Michael Jackson (the one and only), Simon and Garfunkel... but also Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Weather Report, Steps Ahead etc... (non-exhaustive list) It was a click... I was never able to choose between classical, pop, jazz, rock... Music can have no borders... It is everything, PLURAL... I am a concert performer, improviser, composer and orchestrator. Each of these disciplines has shaped who I am. It's September 2019 and a theme comes.... It was gone...The piece that will be born from it is Reborn in September. From then on, everything came back, was authorized to me. A creative fever of 18 months of writing to achieve to this repertoire that I am offering you today. Finally, I will add that REBORN is a project outside the frameworks, which brings together universes plurals. It's a tribute to my heroes. Those who rekindled this flame and my love for stage. Music is listened to but also watched. Reborn is above all designed for the stage, a living space and magic. I wish you a good journey in the universe of REBORN. Morgan Roussel |
My journey… It is very difficult for me in a few lines to summarize more than thirty years of my life (I am 37 years old). Music is a daily life, an emergency to learn, a refuge, a laboratory, a painful path (often), but
as magnificent (sometimes) as the music is infinite, uncompromising and what is more, vital. From a very young age, I listened to Ravel, Debussy, Beethoven, Mozart, Bartok, Copland, Arvo Part, Steve Reich (and consort), Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Dire Straits, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye (Motown etc.) film music (Moricone, Barry, Goldsmith, Williams, Zimmer, Horner, Newton-Howard, Newman etc…) then Michel Petrucciani (who was my greatest upheaval of musician), Keith Jarrett, Weather Report, Pat Metheny, Steps Ahead (Michael Brecker etc…), Duke Ellington, Paul Desmond, Coltrane etc. Not to mention this parental heritage, with my mom, jazz, and my dad, classical and rock. (the transmission starts there). I wanted to be a musician. The piano, the study of this demanding instrument. A friend with whom I could build myself and develop my musical language. The rigor, the daily work for hours, studying the works of the great masters (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn etc…), putting my emotions, my life at partition service. My master Jean-Paul Sevilla, with whom I was able to go even further thanks to his in-depth knowledge of the repertoire, to our exchanges around interpretation, music in general, is a legacy major as a concert performer. We work on it intellectually, but we play it biologically. Improvisation has been around since childhood. The moment, an idea, an accident, a chord, a few notes. It happened to me (today still and always) often when working on a classical work to stop on a chord and improvise for hours, letting my fingers run. Jazz is a culture that leaves a major part to improvisation. To be in a sincere approach, I therefore wanted to learn, as a teenager, jazz...Harmony, theory, scales, a necessary vocabulary which again allowed me to discover many things. When at the age of 16 I learned of the death of Michel Petrucciani, it was a shock (as said above) and I had a promise, that one day I can pay tribute to him solo. 8 years to perfect the piano technique, a titanic work, collage and arrangement. Like Lucio Berio, and his sinfonia, I took several excerpts from Michel's pieces to then break it all down and superimpose new motifs, resulting in an original and new work…. This repertoire, “tribute to Michel” earned me the support and the total endorsement of the latter’s family. It was an extraordinary but also painful experience… The piano solo being a very demanding exercise, it requires daily asceticism. I was starting to to feel a void, lack. Maybe it was time to turn the page. Orchestration. The orchestra is an instrument which, unlike the piano, is full of colors and multiple timbres. To handle this magical ensemble, I threw myself body and soul into the study of instruments (instrumentation) to then try to combine them together. It's orchestration. It is a major science of music as it is intimately linked to the work of a composer. From a young age, I compose. Whole days trying on my first synthesizers to find such a sound with such a melody. It was the start of a great adventure… My work as an orchestrator allowed me to make an obvious link with painting. Ravel, for example, was one of the greatest orchestrators, a brilliant colourist. The most beautiful evil music orchestrated will not sound. I was able to orchestrate piano pieces by Schubert, Copland, Beethoven, Casella, Villa-Lobos, Dutilleux, John Adams (American composer, minimalist music based on repetition whose founding fathers are Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass) . This job gave me to understand that to orchestrate is to translate and restore to the orchestra what the music expresses on the piano. Despite all this baggage, I was missing something. Both in my life as a man and in my life as a musician. From this painful period was born REBORN. |
