Jacques Coursil 1938–2020

Trumpeter-composer-educator Jacques Coursil, who has died at the age of 82, was a polyglot who excelled in an impressively wide range of disciplines that took him from jazz club to lecture theatre over an eventful period of some 50 years.

Born in Paris to Martiniquan parents, Coursil was one of the few Europe-based musicians to venture to New York in the late ‘60s and become part of the avant-garde or ‘New Music’ scene that would then in turn find receptive audiences in the ‘Old World’, notably in his hometown of Paris. Coursil studied with Noel Da Costa and played with such luminaries as Frank Wright, Marion Brown, and Sun Ra & The Arkestra, before returning to France where he made two fine albums, Way Ahead and Black Suite for the pioneering BYG label.

On both of these works, which feature top French and American players such as Arthur Jones, Anthony Braxton, Claude Delcloo and Beb Guerin, Coursil performs excellently, with an adventurous vocabulary that moves from austere understatement to abundant flourish, while his composing is equally expressive, particularly on spacious adagios that simmer with unresolved tension.

In the ‘70s he made a dramatic left turn in his life when he returned to New York and studied philosophy of mathematics before going on to teach both literature and linguistic theory in Paris. For the next two decades he would commit himself fully to academia, and he began teaching at the University Of The West Indies in Martinique where he distinguished himself through extensive work in the field of modern semiotics.

During this period he was still playing but his profile as an artist was low, and it was an invitation by John Zorn, his former student, to record for his Tzadik label in 2005 that brought Coursil back to the studio. The albums that he made between 2005 and 2010, Minimal Brass, Clameurs and Trails Of Tears were hugely ambitious offerings that explored advanced breathing techniques and in the case of his final set the misery inflicted upon Native Americans by the Indian Removal Act.

As somebody who had lived in Senegal and become an associate of the black liberation leader-poet Leopold Sédar Senghor and also written music for the texts of the revolutionary Martiniquan writers Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant Coursil was a brilliant intellectual as well as improvising musician. His unstinting desire to convey the realities of a post-colonial world ensure his legacy is one of great significance.