Chassol – Big Sun Live UK Premiere

‘I am so in love with this man’ (Gilles Peterson)

French pianist and composer Chassol visits Rich Mix to reveal the first UK performance of his dazzling fourth album ‘Big Sun’ – the crowning LP to his trilogy of ultrascores.

This multi-talented artist has developed his audio-visual ultrascores as a method for harmonizing and symphonizing real life - the ‘here and now’ - starting out in Creole-speaking New Orleans (‘Nola Chérie’, 2011) before pursuing its route through India (‘Indiamore’, 2013).

In March 2014, Chassol set out for Martinique - his family’s birthplace in the West Indies - which, for him, epitomised everything he dreamt of expressing, from the purely personal to the perfectly panoptic. Accompanied by production sound mixer Marie-France Barrier and sound engineer Johann Levasseur, the trio filmed and recorded a myriad of extraordinary encounters and created a highly evocative documentary that was to become the matrix of ‘Big Sun’.

Back in France, he composed, edited, rehearsed and created the 27 tracks of a 70-minute West Indian odyssey: a weaveworld of vast field recordings ranging from birdsong to Pipo Gertrude’s whistling, Joby Bernabés’ poetry (and a tête-à-tête with a female mountain-dweller), Sissido and Samak’s rap, Mario Masse’s flute and the Fort de France Carnival. The organic sounds of conch shell echoes and the music of the ocean to the hullabaloo of a game of dominos further serve to create an entire world blended by the artistry of Chassol.

Now, Chassol invites us on a strange yet superbly organized journey of discovery, illustrating a Martinique that shatters clichés, codes and musical genres, showcasing an interpretation of reality that forms a true musical masterpiece.