Attica Blues Big Band, the project - Planete-Aurora

Jimmy Owens
http://jimmyowensjazz.com
Legendary Jazz artist JIMMY OWENS (trumpet, flugelhorn) has
over forty-five years of experience as a Jazz trumpeter, composer,
arranger, lecturer, and music education consultant. His experience
covers a wide range of international musical achievement,
which includes extensive work as a studio musician, soloist, bandleader,
and composer of orchestral compositions, movie scores,
and ballets. Jimmy is one of the few trumpeters of his generation
who played as a sideman with such extraordinary Jazz leaders as,
Lionel Hampton, Hank Crawford, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Duke Ellington, Billy Taylor, and the Thad
Jones/Mel Lewis Band, among others. As a result, his musical and personal recollections are unique. He can
share personal recollections of being a sideman in some of the most exciting bands in the history of Jazz music.
His anecdotes are priceless: playing with Cootie Williams, Sweets Edison, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie in
an historic concert at Yale where Eubie Blake and Paul Robeson were in the audience; sitting in with Miles Davis
at the age of fifteen, and many others.
Throughout his long career, Jimmy has consistently emphasized in both his performances and recordings a deep
understanding of the blues as well as beautiful and articulate emotional projection on ballads. As a reviewer stated
in All About Jazz regarding Jimmy’s performance on One More: The Summary – Music of Thad Jones, Vol
2 (2006), an all-star recording on which Jimmy appeared – “Jimmy Owens … proves that he’s better than ever,
whether employing a breathy, vocal quality (Little Pixie), a smooth flugelhorn sound (Three in One), or brilliant
and elliptical Jones-like melodic ideas (Rejoice).”
Raphaël Imbert
http://www.ninespirit.org/
Born on June 2 1974, Raphaël Imbert grew up in an artistic background. At the age of 15, he
discovered the saxophone. It was love at first sight. Self-taught, he registered for the CNR jazz
class in Marseilles, taught by Pilippe Renault, and met the regional musicians he plays with the
most regularly (Emile Atsas, Jean-Luc Difraja, Vincent Lafont, Pierre Fenichel…).
With Jean-Jacques Elangué, he wins the first prize at the Conservatoire (music school), and
starts two bands, the Hemle Orchestra and the Atsas Imbert Consort, with which he will play
in many festivals ( Vienne, Nice, Fiesta des Suds in Marseilles, Théâtre des Salins…). Having
rubbed shoulders with these musicians, he enjoys composing in eclectic musical situations.
More personally, he develops his own vision of music and jazz, linked to the specific spitituality
Ellington, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and others, and to realize shows inspired by evocative
texts, using narration as a musical element per se (they will play to Théodore Monod, Amidou Hampatê Bâ, Martin
Luther King…). On the other hand, he develops a project of study of the sacred in jazz, and becomes laureate of the
Villa Médicis Hors les Murs. In 2002, he created the collective L’Enclencheur (in motion), with other musicians,
sociologists, journalists, music lovers, to defend a project of reflexion integrating jazz playing into a wider vision of
society. He taught at the Conservatoire in Marseilles, and now teaches at Ecole Départemental de Musique des Alpes
de Haute Provence.
He has been a member of the board of the” Orchestre National de jazz” since september 2004 and, in June 2005, he
won the 28th National Jazz Contest of La Défense in Paris.
Raphaël Imbert composes also for movies and television, for Philippe Carrese’s and Isabelle Boni-Claverie’s projects.
In 2005, Nine Spirit became the Nine Spirit Company, administrative and artistic structure to develop his ideas and
those of associated artists, such as singer / songwriter Marion Rampal.
Since 2004, Imbert joined as a student Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), under the direction of
Jean Jamin, and as such has been commissioned for a research in the southern of USA, for the IMPROTECH project,
funded by the ANR, in partnership with CNRS, IRCAM and the LAHIC.
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