It is the 1980’s. Composer and musician Georges Beckerich has some strong memories from his early beginnings in jazz, the learning/apprenticeship of this kind of music which immediately appeared to him as essential, existential.
Georges Beckerich made his first steps in the jazz class of Marseille conservatory directed by Guy Longnon. For us, he remembers his first encounter with him, a surreal one.
“I find myself in a little iron building, with a roof made of corrugated iron, like a prefab, in the middle of the yard. Guy is late. When he arrives and opens the room, I see music instruments, drums, amps, a piano in the center. Under the piano, there is a puddle, and in this puddle, a dead rat with its paws up, on his back. Several of us sit for the entrance audition. When Guy calls me, the glass of my watch exploded … If this is hell I would gladly go there !”.
Georges Beckerich expresses very clearly the reasons of his attraction for jazz and many musicians think like him. Here are his main sources of motivation that we share with the greatest number:
- – being free to act on all harmonic, rythmic and melodic aspects,
- – defining some new rules according to the standard “climates”,
- – listening to other musicians and being listened to by them second after second,
- – inventing, composing, arranging and having moment of grace where individual impro or collective impro brings us to both an artistic complicity and artistic complementarity that sharpens every sense. Mindfulness.
For Georges Beckerich, Jazz is pure and renewable energy.
