Laurent de Wilde

Born in Washington in 1960, French pianist Laurent de Wilde began as a self-taught musician before moving to New York in 1983 to deepen his study of jazz. He remained there for nearly eight years and recorded his first albums as a leader between 1986 and 1995. His work was initially rooted in an acoustic register nourished by bop, hard bop and the piano-trio tradition, then evolved from the 2000s toward an aesthetic in which improvisation dialogues with repetitive pulses, electronic textures and more open forms. Laurent de Wilde has performed in a variety of formats — from solo to trio, from piano-and-voice or piano-theatre duos to expanded ensembles — while keeping jazz as his central axis. His career also includes collaborations with Jacques Gamblin, Abd Al Malik and Ray Lema, with whom he developed a repertoire for two pianos. The author in 1996 of a book devoted to Thelonious Monk, Laurent de Wilde today divides his activity between his personal projects and a regular trio with Jérôme Regard on double bass and Donald Kontomanou on drums.