Jacques Coursil

The ranks thin when it comes to certain instruments in genres of jazz. With the avant-garde and free jazz of the '60s and beyond, there were some trumpet players of great distinction and some enjoyable middling players, but on the whole it would hardly have been considered a crowded room compared to the number of saxophonists on hand. Jacques Coursil was technically one of the finest brass players to create avant-garde jazz in the '60s and '70s, including two brilliant albums as a leader that were released by the French BYG label. His music also possessed a great sense of intellect and vivid emotional charisma, and he drew some fine collaborators into his circle, such as alto saxophonist Arthur Jones and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton, who was lodged in Paris during the period when Coursil recorded and was always vocally enthusiastic about the trumpeter. In terms of the global jazz village, Coursil had something of an exclusive passport. He was a black man and firmly part of the black jazz tradition, yet he was born in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, and was thus totally part of the European jazz scene as well. Added to this is the fact that his parents were from Martinique, in the West Indies, and as a child he was introduced to these musical traditions as well, including old Creole songs. His father pushed him to study violin at the age of nine, but he was eventually dismissed as untalented. He decided to try again at 15, and by then was under the spell of New Orleans masters Sidney Bechet and Albert Nichols, both residents of Paris at that time. Indeed, the carefree melodic probing of the great New Orleans players remained part of Coursil's improvising and the wall-shattering precision tone of these elderly horn players attempting to break through the...