Jacques Demierre

studied at the University of Geneva, the Conservatoire Populaire (piano, jazz piano, electro-acoustic music) and the Geneva Conservatory (music theory). He gave up classical piano playing at an early age and turned to improvisation via avant-garde rock and jazz. As a pianist he has played with Dorothea Schürch, Radu Malfatti, Hans Koch, but also with Martial Solal, Han Bennink, Joëlle Léandre, Carlos Zingaro and Ikue Mori. He regularly gives solo concerts and works in a trio with Lucas Niggli and Barry Guy as well as with Urs Leimgruber and Barre Phillips. He has taught Sylvie Courvoisier, Malcolm Braff and Michel Wintsch.

As a composer, Demierre also moves in the border area between jazz, free improvisation and contemporary music; in his compositions, he is interested in how notated and improvised musical traditions can be brought together. His Concierto barocco from 1985 is for voice, narrator, three soloists and jazz ensemble. In Exponnoncence, the singer (Françoise Kubler at the premiere in 1986) sings texts by William Blake, while the piano (himself) and cello (Alfred Zimmerlin) improvise on quotations from Olivier Messiaen, Luciano Berio, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and other classics of New Music; a second piano (Irène Schweizer) is used for free improvisation.

In 2003, he wrote 17 (seventeen short pieces for four improvising musicians, using only words as a starting point for the musicians’ improvisation). Demierre works as a freelance journalist for the magazine Contrechamps.