$10 cover

9pm showtime

Didier Petit, Guillaume Roy, Davu Seru, Nathan Hanson and more:

Renowned French improvisers Didier Petit (cello) and Guillaume Roy (viola) make their Icehouse debut on March 31. Audience favorite Petit is familiar to Minnesota audiences for his multiple appearances at the Sur Seine Festival and other visits to the Twin Cities. The longstanding duo with Guillaume Roy will be joined by local jazz luminaries including Nathan Hanson and Davu Seru for a night of improvised music to remember.

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/didier-petit-mn0000823511/biography
http://guillaumeroyquartet.blogspot.com/

Didier Petit:

One of the finest players to have come out of Alan Silva's IACP school, cellist Didier Petit has been active on the French free improvisation scene since the mid-'80s. His playing style employs double-string arco technique. He is also often heard vocalizing on top of his instrument. He performs regularly with Parisian improvisers like Michel Doneda, Daunik Lazro, and Denis Colin, and has performed with Sakis Papadimitriou, Roger Turner, Marilyn Crispell, and Carlos Zingaro. He is the founder of the new music label In Situ.

Petit was born in a musical family. He started on cello at age six and attended the conservatory until age 15. At this point he turned his back on his classical upbringing. Hearing Sun Ra & His Arkestra and Alan Silva's Celestial Communication Orchestra had the power of a revelation and soon the cellist embarked on the avant-garde jazz train. He enrolled in the bassist's IACP. For the next ten years or so he studied there, then taught and performed administrative tasks, all the while playing in the CCO. Since that time Petit has played around the world with concert tours in China, Lebanon, and most recently Mexico. Whether playing solo or duo or in a larger context the connection that Didier Petit makes with his audience is immediate and deep.

Guillaume Roy:

Guillaume Roy is one of those musicians who now have enough experience to write the most beautiful pages of contemporary jazz and above all to improvise on stage in a spectacular fashion. For more than two decades, he has constantly explored the close relationship between writing and improvisation, sometimes confusing one with the other to offer music that is always innovative. 

Virtuoso and iconoclastic violist, in search of new relationships between orchestral formulas of Western inspiration and free improvisation, Guillaume Roy is today on all fronts of contemporary improvised music, constantly looking for new musical confrontations, artistic, and human. As a soloist, he worked with Antoine Hervé, Hasse Poulsen, Jean-Claude Asselin, Pierrick Hardy, Manuel Villarroël, Luc Le Masne, Denis Colin, Didier Petit, Bruno Wilhelm, Joëlle Léandre, Christophe Marguet, Hélène Labarrière, François Raulin, Marc Ducret.