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Full of ideas, always taking risks as great as his talent, Jean-Marc Padovani has always and still is getting better, from his first southern love affairs to his latest feverish tribute to Charles Mingus.
This Nîmois by adoption deeply conserves the warmth that cradled him and lends his saxophone just as well to the paso-doble or the Flamenco, as to a more “classic” jazz, alongside musicians such as Barthélemy or Texier, played in quartets or quintets.
Photograph : All rights reserved.
Saxophonist and major French Jazz composer, Jean-Marc Padovani, born at the start of the 1960s in Villeneuve-Les-Avignon and living in Nîmes, has always nourished his love of Jazz with southern feeling – incandescent lyricism, brassy tearing, melancholy, sensuality.
It was through the guitar, which he started playing when he was twelve, after 7 years studying the piano at the Conservatoire, that Jean-Marc Padovani took his first steps with southern music. For four years he devoured the scores of the greatest Brazilian composers and plunged into Flamenco. However a passion for Jazz steadily growing in him he decided to take up the saxophone. He did not however repudiate his taste for sunny music, for straight away he decided to join the group Cossi Anatz, which brings together twelve musicians and blends jazz and traditions from Africa and Occitanie.
The early 1980s saw the start of his personal experiments. In 1982 he formed a quartet with Philippe Deletrez (ts), Claude Barthélemy (gt) and Denis Fournier (dms). With this quartet he recorded a first album in 1983 with some choice guests: Henri Texier, Jean-Louis Ponthieux and Siegfried Kessler. The atmosphere was warm and joyful, the record peppered with feverish rhythms and spirited improvisations. In 1986, he recorded with Michel Godard, who had just been revealed by Marc Steckar’s Tubapack, for an intense tribute to Mediterranean music. The following year the two of them formed a quintet with Bobby Rangell (as, fl), Bruno Chevillon (b) and Jacques Mahieux (dms). For this formation Padovani wrote compositions linked to the Mediterranean universe and even went to Algeria to record One for Pablo.
Following his inspiration, as ever, he created in 1987 Tres Horas de sol, a show for “Banlieues Bleues”, which was subtitled Jazz-Flamenco and was a great success. Based on the rites of the Corrida, this show mingled texts by Picasso and Lorca, read by Enzo Cormann, playwright and director. He renewed this experience in 1989 with Le Rôdeur, based on a text by Enzo Cormann, and accompanied by a trio bringing together Gérard Marais on the guitar and Youval Micenmacher on percussion. The experience was completed by the homage that Padovani decided to render to Mingus with his album Mingus Cuernavaca (Label Bleu, 1992) where Enzo Cormann recounts the last hours of the brilliant double-bassist-composer.
From 1993 Padovani directed a Brass Band, the Minotaure Jazz Orchestra, in a creation born in September at the Arles Feria: ten brass instruments revisit the paso-doble and recover the luminous accents of Feria (annual fairs in the south of France) music. He then came back to the quartet and recorded Nocturne in 1994 on Label Bleu.
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