Biography Benoît Delbecq

Benoit Delbecq (born in 1966) is a Paris-based French pianist and keyboardist who has created his own music using ideas and techniques from contemporary classical (Cage, Ligeti, Nancarrow), jazz, Pygmy polyphony, European improv and other sources. In his solo work, he prepares the piano with various materials such as eraser bits and carved wooden twigs, and improvises on short, overlapping vamps and patterns; the result is a complex, spacious sound that hardly seems to be emanating from a single instrument.

Highly acclaimed in Europe, Benoit Delbecq leads or co-leads a number of bands and has releases on Songlines, Plush, Naive, Deux Z and other labels. About Delbecq 5 Pursuit, Popmatters.com said: "...in the best sense, the newest in the new. It manages to push boundaries, sound fresh and smart, and be thoroughly and thoughtfully entertaining."

TReif - songlines.com

- Delbecq figures today among the most inventive musicians on the European scene...Enlightened experimenter of a music decidedly personal in the way it links apparently contradictory influences from the freest improvisation and the ultra-sophisticated constructions of contemporary composers such as Ligeti or Conlon Nancarrow, Delbecq has succeeded in transcending this apparent dispersion in a coherent universe, at once limpid and mysterious, that draws its liberty from a conceptional rigour which has few equals in contemporary music....A music of nocturnal poetry, apparently fluid and deceptively slack, all minute shimmerings and the play of braided textures, controls the flows and effects of superimpositions (of intensity, speeds, materials), something on the order of inspiration. -

Stephane Ollivier, Les Inrockuptibles-2000.

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