Jacques Schwarz-Bart – review

The tenor-saxophone player Jacques Schwarz-Bart , 48, is of mixed parentage, with a mother from the French West Indies and a Jewish father. Totally committed to music, he started drumming aged four at Les Abymes in Guadeloupe and was soon initiated into gwo ka , biguine and Haitian tradition, guided by Anzala, one of the island's top percussionists. Whether you blow or not, the secret is the beat, even if that means reconciling jazz and voodoo rhythms. So how does his music take shape? "I practise in a studio, on my own," Schwarz-Bart explains. "I expect a studio to sound alive. I need that organic feel. Then I work through all my techniques. The first thing is to stabilise the sound, find my voice. Sometimes I start improvising on a harmonic scale, or maybe make up tunes in my head. I try to enlarge my vocabulary, to produce new phrases. I do this for at least two hours a day, depending on my inspiration. He attributes his personal discipline to his father. "Rigour," he says, "is the key to discipline." As Nietzsche puts it, this is "dancing in chains", a mixture of ice and fire. He sees Haitian music as both a religion and a culture. "I'm not pushing voodoo, but I can't see the point in music without mystique," he adds. "Reaching beyond our immediate perception of life, we can sense networks, invisible forces, a living world that defies cognitive analysis." With other musicians he seeks this subconscious exchange, the ability to anticipate what the others have yet to play; in fact, "any shift in the perceptive centre of gravity that enables us to communicate with the audience". In short, he wants to live out his dreams as if they were reality, and experience reality as a dream. This article originally appeared in Le Monde