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About

I started playing music at the age of seven. I played the cello for a couple of months. Then my mother would always ask me to bring the violin home. She was not yet aware that the school didn’t have any more violin left so I played—big—cello instead. That was fun but after six months I heard this magnificent instrument—the saxophone—with all its flexibility. This sound was coming from the corridor of the school. I asked the man with the beard, who was going to be my first sax teacher if he could show me how to use it properly. I remember how good it felt tasting the alto sax reed, touching the pearl keys and handling the instrument for the first time. Then the first breath and the first note. Wow!

I fell deeply in love with jazz when I heard Charlie Parker and Phil Woods. At fifteen years old, I had already accumulated more than five hundred Jazz LPs. I listened to them all, over and over, all the time. Two years after, I was kicked out of the conservatory after three years of being an undisciplined student. Hee, hee, hee! The real schools, the real learning is on the stage where I started playing professionally at fifteen years old.

Freedom

The freedom of being who you really are, creative, spontaneous and unique is a blessing. I’ve always felt music was the only way I could express myself freely. I had to develop my own sound, articulation, etc. Discovering the music of Coltrane, Elvin, Tony Williams, and Albert Ayler was a turning point. It felt like a call. It took about 15 years to really understand this call and start focusing on my own identity. I realised how conditioned I was and I decided to un-condition myself (probably for the rest of my life). As a sage man said, “It takes two years for a child to learn how to talk and the rest of his life to stop talking.” Hee, hee, hee! As of this day, Improvising is the best way I have discovered in order to really connect with other musicians, with the Universe.