JEF GILSON
Genres: World Fusion, Progressive Big Band, Hard Bop, Big Band, Avant-Garde Jazz, Post Bop, Third Stream, Jazz Related Improv, Composition, Bop • France

When Jean-François Quiévreux aka Jef Gilson died in February 2012, he was still unknown to most of his French countrymen, even to many of the French jazz world. Yet he began his professional career in the mid-’40s alongside Boris Vian, the famed novelist/musician who connected Duke Ellington and Miles Davis with the French scene, and remained in the game until 2002. In Gilson’s fifty-year career, he did virtually all possible jobs in music: composer, conductor, arranger, vinyl-cutter, pianist, singer, writer, sound engineer, producer, teacher, theorist, and label manager. During those fifty years, the French pioneer was either ahead of his time or consciously old fashioned. Who else in France can claim to have played bebop, modal, religious, Eastern, free, Afro, spiritual, blues, big band… And all of them using his own compositions, as Gilson almost never recorded standards. As a talent spotter, Gilson was the equal of Miles Davis, bringing forth numerous soon-to-be read more...