IJC feat. Greg Hutchinson & Luca Aquino / French Electronic @ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

For this particular jazz/take, Niels Lan Doky created arrangements inspired by the groundbreaking Miles Davis album from 1959, “Kind Of Blue”, a masterpiece that aside from Davis himself also featured fellow-innovators John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans among others. Using the exact same instrumentation as on the “Kind Of Blue” album, with three horns - trumpet, alto saxophone and tenor saxophone - and a classic jazz rhythm section instrumentation of piano, acoustic bass and drums, the concert took us through jazz sextet arrangements of themes by French electronic music artists Daft Punk, Air, Jean Michel-Jarre, Justice and David Guetta. The sextet was made up of some of today's top instrumentalists inncluding trumpeter Luca Aquino and alto saxophonist Fredrik Kronkvist, tenor saxophonist Gábor Bolla from Hungary, Danes Tobias Dall on bass and Thomas Clausen on piano - and guesting with us for the first time, the great American drummer Greg Hutchinson, whose reputation as one top jazz drummers in the world today makes his appearance eagerly anticipated. Born in 1970, Hutchinson made a name for himself in the 1990s touring worldwide with artists such as Betty Carter, Roy Hargrove, Ray Brown, Joe Henderson, Joshua Redman, Johnny Griffin, Mark Whitfield and Jimmy Smith, among others.

They performed a captivating set of the following songs:

Equinox Part 4 (Jean Michel Jarre)
D..A.N.C.E. (Justice)
Love Is Gone (David Guetta)
Titanium (David Guetta)
Sexy Boy (Air)
Something About Us (Daft Punk)
Genesis (Justice)
As encore: Alone In Kyoto (Air)

For most people, the idea of French electronic music starts with Jean-Michel Jarre’s pioneering work and massive commercial successes in the late 1970s. However, notable early French artists and composers in electronic music include Maurice Martenot, the inventor of the electronic musical instrument Ondes Martenot in 1928, and Pierre Schaeffer, the developer of the Musique Concrète in 1948, a new experimental form of composition not restricted to the normal musical rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, and metre, and which arguably contained early forms of what later would become known as “sampling” and now a staple ingredient in modern popular music. Perhaps it is France’s general sophistication in the arts and the country’s legacy of great classical composers that is partly responsible for the very compositional and nearly scientific approach applied to the development of French electronic music by its earliest pioneers (coincidentally, Jean-Michel Jarre’s father, Maurice, was also a famous classical composer and conductor). Decades later we now enjoy an impressive panorama of French electronic music led by artists such as Air, Daft Punk, Justice and David Guetta - solidly established worldwide as specifically French.

If you missed the show you can enjoy a selection of photos from the concert below taken by the talented photographer, Kannan Palanisamy.