DIDIER BALLAN

Didier Ballan is a jazz pianist.
Impassioned early by the Masters of the be-bop, he creates a group in 1984 very popular on the scenes of Bordeaux, the "Mahjong quintet".
From 1989, he meets some known American musicians, Marc Turner, John Stubbelfield, Craig Bailey, Kenny Rampton, with which he performs in France and Europe. In 1993, a decisive meeting will widen his musical horizon. In company of François Jeanneau, great soloist and composer, first musical director of the ONJ, Didier Ballan will explore the original and innovative universe of french jazz. Some concerts will unit a musical complicity rich of promises.
Didier Ballan teaches jazz piano in music schools and organizes improvisation workshops in the Aquitaine area.
His curiosity for the research will push him to find the amphitheatres of the university of Bordeaux 1, human ecology and ethnomusicology department.
Impassioned by world musics, he studies and familiarizes himself with the various modes of this vast repertory.
This work brings a singular touch to his compositions
This opening towards all the musical forms of expression becomes the object of a thesis "Why the music rather than the silence" which he presents with succes. It obtains a international human ecology certificate.
While continuing various collaborations in a traditional jazz contest, Didier Ballan has the will not to remain locked up in only one musical system: "To open the vast field of the discovery of the other". While being detached from the specific codes of the jazz, it goes to the meeting of new territories with musicians of different musical cultures: "to open on the coloured screens of the interbreedings of all horizons". Such are the principles which guide Didier Ballan in his musical adventures: "By the diversity of the sound landscapes, I would like to widen the expressive pallet, of major energy to an infinite softness; the improvisation is offered then like a means of rebounding on the unsolved screens of the musical experiment, being guided as well by the interior disorders as by the resonance of the natural forces collected, controlled, fusioned".
All this research finds their result in the album "Munduk", first fondamments of a work in becoming. The music of Didier Ballan is not limited to the live representations. Cinema and theatre are the new territories where, from now on, he also expresses his talent.