Jean-Marie Machado

Born in Tangier in 1961 and raised in Morocco, Jean-Marie Machado has built a career as a French pianist and composer situated at the crossroads of jazz, Mediterranean music and an often orchestral approach to writing. He studied piano with Catherine Collard, taught himself jazz and popular music, and emerged on the jazz scene in the mid-1980s with Trio Machado, founded with Louis and François Moutin. From the early 1990s Machado broadened his compositional work with Vibracordes, a project blending jazz, strings and percussion, notably featuring Naná Vasconcelos and musicians from the French scene. His trajectory alternates between small groups and larger ensembles, from solo work to duos with Ramón López or Keyvan Chemirani, as well as the Quartet Lyrisme (created in 2001) and the nonet Danzas (launched in 2006). Machado’s writing combines a sense of motif, restrained lyricism, Iberian influences and a taste for timbre, with a marked interest in fado, chanson and certain colors of French music. This orientation appears on albums such as Father Song (1988), Vibracordes (1990), Lyrisme (2001), Andaloucia (2005), Sœurs de sang (2007), Caminando (2008) and Fiesta Nocturna (2010).