Fred Pallem

Born in Houilles in 1973, Fred Pallem has since the late 1990s developed a career as a French composer, arranger, conductor and multi-instrumentalist at the crossroads of jazz, film music, pop, rock and chanson. Trained at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris after a largely self-taught apprenticeship, Fred Pallem founded in 1998 Le Sacre du Tympan, a large ensemble that serves as his writing and orchestration forum, with a marked taste for expansive forms, fanfare colors, narrative themes and bridges between popular repertoire and jazz writing. His discography with Le Sacre du Tympan notably includes Le Sacre du Tympan (2002), Le Retour! (2005), La Grande Ouverture (2008), SoundTrax (2011), François de Roubaix (2015), L’Odyssée (2018), X (2022) and Cartoons, Le retour! (2024). In parallel, Fred Pallem composes for cinema, television, animation and live performance, and signs or supervises arrangements for artists from chanson and contemporary music. His work is distinguished by precise orchestral writing, a sense of timbre and a flexible way of cohabiting groove, melody and references to screen music.