Focus Paris

The print media wasted no time upon release of his debut album, “Where I Come From”. The German news weekly Der Spiegel: “Fabulous start for a mega-talent.” NEUE MUSIKZEITUNG, a trade magazine for the music biz, voted it Debut of the Month, and “Münchner Konzertgesellschaft”, a non-profit association famed for promoting classical music and now Jazz as well, awarded him its Jazz Incentive Prize. Numerous appearances, for instance at the Rheingau Musik Festival or at ‘hot’ Jazz clubs throughout Germany, had audiences thundering for more.

Transversales Disques presents Pharoah Sanders Live in Paris (1975). A never-before released ORTF recording performed live at studio 104, Maison de la Radio, Paris. First official release with the full permission and cooperation of the National Audiovisual Institute. Mastered from the original master tapes.

At last, 13 films from one of the great and most personal documentary filmmakers have been collected in a boxset, including many not available before on home media.

Mid-16th-century Paris was a very active and innovative musical center, with profane vocal polyphony as a major focus under the aegis of such figures as Clément Janequin and Claudin de Sermisy.

Impressionism remains wildly popular. Crowds flock to exhibitions by its greatest artists: Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro. But as Sebastian Smee shows in Paris in Ruins, a book of great narrative sweep and vivid detail, Impressionism was a complex reaction to an age of violence and war.

This album explores the experience of foreigners in France. I see myself as belonging to a long genealogy of American artists who moved to Paris to escape the USA, a country that does not support its creators. Unlike my illustrious predecessors, I arrived in France during a pandemic that paralyzed the Parisian artistic scene.