FM
Biography
Jacques Coursil was born (* 1938 in Paris; † 25. June 2020) but moved to New York in 1965. “In 1965, just around the assassination of Malcolm X, this is a natural propensity of a person of me like, having been in Africa, Senegal, West Africa, now I got to see the United States. I sold my library, I was not old at the time, I was 28 but I had a lot of books so I sold my books, paintings and I started playing almost immediately.” Coursil is nostalgic for those early days in New York, a much different time for the city. “New York has changed considerably. It was extremely appealing. For years, I slept three hours a day. I would go to the theater at 1 am because someone was having a rehearsal there, someplace in a warehouse. I would meet all sorts of people. People were friendly, open, not keeping their stuff for themselves.” This environment was a particularly expansive one. The October Revolution in Jazz was still fresh and the movement of free players in New York was substantial. The young trumpeter, whose experience was more traditional, found the city invigorating and in line with his philosophical thinking, concepts that would serve him in his then future career. “I had a lot of things intellectually also to unlearn all the time. This is how knowledge goes, it doesn’t pile up, it takes out what was only beliefs and it gets clearer and clearer or maybe it becomes the opposite, it becomes more chaotic because you discover a fact you believed was true was not... What I am interested in is how people listen, not what they want to listen to... The human is a musical animal basically. So I am not trying to play things for him that he wants but things that he can hear in his range, his capability of listening.”
Coursil played around a lot during the ‘60s and appeared on two recordings for the ESP label - the home for the New York avant garde. Sunny Murray’s eponymous debut and Frank Wright’s second disc for the label, Your Prayer, are monumental documents of the genre. Coursil even recorded his own disc for ESP in 1967 with Marion Brown but it remains unissued because, as Coursil says, “I was afraid he would publish the record under Marion Brown’s name. I think he was about to do that. I would have been extremely mad, not that I have anything against Marion, but this is my record with compositions that I wrote, very funny bebop Ornette Coleman type of stuff.” For those who lump Coursil squarely in with the free movement, hearing him talk about his influences belies that notion: “When I was a kid I was studying the cornet. You cannot match the French masters on the cornet. Those guys are too much, especially the tradition of the 19th century. And then came Armstrong, no rubato, no virtuoso at all but such a timbre, such a clarity of timbre. You hardly know those people before him existed... vanished into the garbage can of history.”
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