Born in Paris in 1973 and raised in the middle class suburbs, it’s on the clotheslines at the end of the garden that Jean-Sébastien Mariage gets introduced to the guitar, well before the transmutation of his BEPC in black Stratocaster, changed very quickly for the Gibson Les Paul he has not dropped since. At 17 and up to 23, he follows the improvisation workshops of the one he still considers today as his music master, Patricio Villarroel. From his brief stint at the Sorbonne, a musicology course, he will remember little more than having heard, during the acoustics lessons, recordings of songs by Amazonian Indians or Vatican bells: it is that at the same time, true musical adventure began - first professional experience at age 19 with a dance company, then meeting at 20’s Frederick Galiay, bassist with whom he founded Chamæleo Vulgaris, and first concerts under the aegis of Instants Chavirés. He goes on concerts, then thinks it would be good for him to enter the concervatory (sic), since that’s where you learn to play concerts: he studied classical guitar for six years , until the national contest in 2000. There followed a good twenty recordings and hundreds of concerts, solo or in various formations, stamped free improvisation, free rock, even free jazz or noise, with the greatest achievements of French and international improvisers - not to mention collaborations with dance (Karol Armitage or Yukiko Nakamura), theater, poetry and visual arts, but also with composers such as Rhys Chattam, Elianne Radigue, Stephen O’Malley, Frederick Galiay, Peter Ablinger…. In short, a journey is, according to, purist or monomaniac: there has never been, there is, and there will never, probably, that the guitar, he can only do that, but knows how to do everything with it - especially what he is the only one who can do, of course. To know: calmly, with authority, to emerge from the chaos a matter, whatever it is to accept it, to welcome it even, then conscientiously to work it, to polish it… but always to the maximum, and then to a blow of one make him make throat. Leave the earth. Tear the time.

Photo : Bruce Milpied © 2008