Bireli

In my last post I talked about chopsmeister Andreas Oberg. Well, here's an even bigger one. Bireli Lagrene. What's to say about him. He's a phenomenon. If there were an interstellar jazz guitar contest, my vote for the planet earth's contestant would most certainly go to Bireli. He's the virtuoso of virtuosos. The prodigy of prodigies. He was playing Manouche guitar at 7 and recorded his first album in this style in his early teens, But, surprisingly, he looked way further than the gypsy guitar. "Django helped me to see what was happening elsewhere" he likes to recall. And there he was, in the 80s, playing with Jaco:

During the next few years, Lagrène toured with Al Di Meola, Paco de Lucía, and John McLaughlin, all of them guitarists, and played with Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, and Stéphane Grappellii. He joined Larry Coryell and Vic Juris in New York City for a tribute to Reinhardt in 1984, and went on tour with Coryell and Philip Catherine. He also performed with Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, the Gil Evans Orchestra, Christian Escoudé, and Charlie Haden. In 1989 he performed in a duo with Stanley Jordan. 

I remember the first album I heard from him. It was his 1992 "Standards" album. NHOP is on it. He was 26 when he recorded that album. Click here to listen to it. Still a fantastic album.

A few years later he appeared on the Jazz in Marciac festival with his own trio. There is still some footage of that mind blowing set on Youtube fortunately:

I'm not going to expand on his career further. Of course you know about his duets with Sylvain Luc. His countless apperances at Samois, Marciac and Montreux. His impressive discography. These days he is one of the biggest stars in contemporary and gypsy jazz. A musician's musician that can very intimidating to listen to or watch. He switches from Gypsy jazz to Fusion to Bebop to Metal, Blues, to bass guitar to double bass to jazz violin and jazz singing just like that ... I have never seen anything like it. And he does it all well if not ridiculously well. The man is a force of nature.

In 2012 he recorded an album with with franck Wolf (saxophones), Jean-Yves Jung (orgue Hammond) and Jean-Marc Robin (batterie). The title track is calles Mouvements and is basically a Bach like fugue. Here's a live rendition. It's fun to watch:

Here's a transcription of the album version. Listen and marvel. So happy I don't have to play shit like that for a living!