Interview with Aurelien Bouly: Like concrete and grass: Video

Jazz interview with a bad musician, as if guitarist Aurelien Bouly. An interview by email in writing. 

JazzBluesNews.com: – First, let’s start out with where you grew up, and what got you interested in music. How exactly did your adventure take off? When did you realize that this was a passion you could make a living out of?

Aurelien Bouly: – I started guitar at 6 in a family of gypsy roots fanatic of jazz in the Parisian suburbs. I grew up with the double culture: the gypsy culture, and the urban culture. This mixture built me ​​with a certain equivalence between the “inside” and the “outside”, like concrete and grass. I have since my earliest memories always wanted to become a professional musician, it was my dream.

JBN: – How has your sound evolved over time? What have you been doing to find and develop your own sound?

AB: – Django’s music has always been present in my house, but Pat Martino and George Benson have increasingly taken on an important role. my sound is a mix I think, but it’s not just the guitarists who influence me, the be-bop vocabulary is my favorite mode of expression.

JBN: – What routine practices or exercises have you developed to maintain and improve your current musical proficiency, in terms of both rhythm and harmony?

AB: – Tonal music’s improvisations were my main work in my youth. So my work is more and more directed towards improvisation in an increasingly simple or almost modal harmonic context and especially on rhythm or polyrithmy which is much more wanting in this type of music.

JBN: – Have you changed through the years? Any charges or overall evolution? And if so why?

AB: – Yes definitely, with each new project, my personality evolves, perhaps purifies, a path to peace…

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JBN: – In your opinion, what’s the balance in music between intellect and soul?

AB: – This is a question that is difficult for me to answer, because it is a constant alternation with me, and the balance I am not sure I have found.

JBN: – There’s a two-way relationship between audience and artist; are you okay with delivering people the emotion they long for?

AB: – I like to present my work to you on my record, but I prefer to serve it to you live 1000 times, our concerts are never the same, the energy transmitted to me by my friends, the other musicians all connected, transports me and when I feels the public returns this energy to me, the magic operates.

JBN: – How can we get young people interested in jazz when most of standard tunes are half a century old?

AB: – Jazz at the time was popular music let’s make popular music accessible to young people, it’s up to us, jazz musicians, to come and get them to come and make them listen to things we know, but in a jazzy way. I find the current jazz scene extraordinary, with extremely talented musicians getting younger and younger!

JBN: – John Coltrane once said that music was his spirit. How do you perceive the spirit and the meaning of life?

AB: – The philosophy of John Coltrane which is more and more spiritual over his way. He is a role model for me. I am absolutely a found of “Love Suprême”, which is one of my favorite records. I wanted in my way from above Okun to convey the spiritual side that there could also be in Love Suprême. More in Afro Blue and Mister Dinino.

JBN: – If you could change one single thing in the musical world and that would become reality, what would that be?

AB: – Communication, the way to make yourself known, the distribution of music, the importance of business in the face of passion.

JBN: – Whom do you find yourself listening to these days?

AB: – Domi and JDBeck, Robert Glasper, Yussef Dayes, in Latin jazz: Alain Perrez, Brenda Navarente

JBN: – Let’s take a trip with a time machine: where and why would you really want to go?

AB: – I would like to be a musician in the 80s asideman of Miles for example, or in the 60s to listen to my idols played live.

Interview by Simon Sargsyan