Philippe Saisse, Smooth jazz Artist

He is a multi-instrumentalist musician, and his music a diverse mixture of smooth jazz, new age, alternative rock, and jazz-fusion. Meet this week’s Featured Artist – contemporary/smooth jazz keyboardist, arranger, producer and composer Philippe Saisse

Born in Marseille, France

Genre: Smooth/Contemporary Jazz, Alternative Rock, Pop

Born in Marseille, and raised in Paris, France Genre: Smooth Jazz, New Age, Pop & Jazz Fusion   Master keyboardist, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, producer, and composer Philippe Saisse has the kind of career resume most artist would kill for. “I’ve played with David Bowie and the Rolling Stones and Chic and Nile Rodgers,” he explains. “I was on Chaka Khan’s I Feel For You, a seminal record that started a whole slew of things. I even did a tour with the American Ballet Theater.” He says all this not to boast (to which purpose he could also namedrop his work with David Sanborn, Al Jarreau, and Tina Turner among many others), but to establish his credentials as an artist who has always crossed musical boundaries.   This refusal to be categorized is at the forefront of his first GRP Records release (his fifth overall) Halfway ’til Dawn, a captivating collusion of styles that should succeed in delighting Saisse’s established fans while introducing him to new and younger ones. I’ve had success with the contemporary jazz thing,” he says of his core audience, “but I can’t really dwell on the one sound forever. I have to go on and do different things.”   To this end, Halfway ’til Dawn features forays into the sounds of world pop, sophisticated soul, drum and bass, and nineties fusion; collaborators include acclaimed African vocalist Angelique Kidjo, young American dance producers Jamie Myerson and Tom Salta, new soul singer Cara Jackson, and trumpeters Jeff Beal and Jason Golley. The result is a uniquely personal and yet truly international vision of modern jazz that should further establish Saisse as a musical broker par excellence.

Born into a musical family (his father was a singer-songwriter who worked for CBS Records in France), Saisse credits his variety in tastes to his childhood in Marseilles and Paris, where pop radio would encompass all manner of music. “The African sound, the Arab sound and all that stuff has never been far from the French culture,” he explains. “As far as I’m concerned there was no segregation growing up in France, because it was all part of everyday life.”   As a teenager, Saisse attended the Paris National Conservatory, where he studied piano, percussion, music theory, and composition. Upon graduating in 1975, taking First Prize in percussion and mallet keyboards, he accepted the prestigious Winter Scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. There he furthered his skills by studying advanced composition under Michael Gibbs and performing with his idol, vibraphonist Gary Burton, while soaking up the music of the era such as Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.   It was no surprise then that Saisse jumped straight out of Berklee into a successful session career, performing with Narada Michael Walden, Al DiMeola, Billy Cobham, Tom Scott, Steve Kahn, Alphonso Johnson, and other – “the people I used to worship as a teenager,” he recalls with glee. Soon his career was expanding in all directions. In addition to his solo career, Saisse has played keyboards on the Rolling Stones’ Harlem Shuffle and David Bowie’s Scary Monsters, as well as for the B-52’s, Vanessa Williams, Nile Rodgers, and Tina Turner.   He composed for David Sanborn, Al Jarreau, and Al DiMeola, was music director for Sanborn’s Night Music show on NBC, and produced Chaka Khan’s album Destiny.

Steered by the appeal of his complex yet seemingly effortless keyboard solos, Saisse’s Verve debut Masques firmly established him in the adult contemporary field. While the follow-up NeXT Voyage further endeared him to this audience, it also featured turntable scratching and spoken word, signs that Saisse wanted to expand his oeuvre. During vacations back to France in the early 1990s, he was introduced to such acts as world beat dance crossovers Deep Forest, which opened his ears further to the experimentation going on in clubs from Paris to New York. In particular, a holiday in the Alps saw him befriend a younger contingent, with whom he found that “I wasn’t able to play them my music, because they could not really relate to it. What I liked and listened to and what they listened to was not at all in the same vein as what I actually do. I thought, “There is a little discrepancy here.”   For Halfway ’til Dawn, Saisse arranged cross-generational collaborations that would honor both past and present. Twenty-four year old Philadephian Jamie Myerson produced “Fusionesque,” a mixture of ’70s solo styles and ’90s production qualities which Saisse describes as the pair’s way of saying “that what Chick Corea used to do was really cool, that we love these crazy pyrotechnic type of solos.” Similarly, “Kinetic Groove,” a collaboration with dance music programmer Tom Salta, provided Saisse with an opportunity to solo on his mini-Moog synthesizer for the first time in twelve years. Saisse describes “Strays,” named for jazz legend Billy Strayhorn, as “juxtaposing the street groove bass with some sophisticated Gil Evans type of horn arrangement on top.” “La Grande Jatte” and “Vol De Nuit” feature frenetic drum and bass rhythms, not programmed as usually the case in the genre, but performed live by drummer Tony V. “It was certainly a challenge to solo on top of these great grooves,” says Saisse. “It really was a blast, like going back to the ’70s and playing with Al DiMeola. No holds barred. That was the other thing about this record, I just did not put any kind of filter into my playing. I just went for anything, it was just, “This is what I do.”   Halfway ’til Dawn also features two stellar vocal tracks. Saisse teamed up with acclaimed Benin-born, Paris-based singer Angelique Kidjo for the delectable “La Vie,” which mixes African-flavored world beat with an electronica dance beat. The pair were introduced at the Grammy Awards by producer Russ Titelman, where Saisse, long a fan of Kidjo’s, was delighted to hear that she had performing one of his compositions in concert. And on “Love, Life and the Universe,” a soulful R&B ballad, Saisse introduces Cara Jackson (the first African-American Miss Arizona).

Outside of recording his solo albums in his Manhatten studio and taking his music to the concert stage, Saisse is in demand as a hired talent. He produced a comeback album for saxophonist Gato Barbieri, a new release by Jeff Golum, part of Kirk Whalum’s last CD, as well as fellow GRP recording artist Marc Antoine’s upcoming release. He has worked as arranger-producer for several Japanese artists and was the main writer for a Native American Indian project entitled Tribe. On Halfway ’til Dawn Philippe Saisse brings together many of the styles he has experienced during his over twenty years as a professional player. “This is a direction I feel is fresher,” he says of mixing new influences with contemporary jazz. “It’s just something that is very nature to me.”

For more information, contact: J’ai St. Laurent-Sm