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Uzeste Musical

"It was in 1978, says Bernard Lubat. Uzeste called me back to my business. There I started all over again. All the steps of the evolution of jazz, all the disturbances in contemporary music, in Uzeste I decided to do them again my way, to invent them again, to go across them again."

From the summer manifestivities, year after year, the Compagnie Lubat invents in the countryside of Gironde a pole of creation and diffusion, not only of its work, but open to many arts : theatre, poetry, dance, video have their place in Uzeste.

Uzeste musical, a "village of the arts at work" is born, with its Estaminet, bar and place for performances, its House of the Walking Memory, bookshop and library, its publisher Editions du Tilleul and its music label Labeluz, its workshops running all year and its music school, and its meadow occupied each month of August by a main feast ("hestejada" in occitan) with concerts or debates with the public.

More infos

• Latitude
• 44° 26′ 33″ Nord
• Longitude
• 0° 19′ 21″ Ouest

 Music  

Listening RadioUz

Listening LabelUz

Bernard Lubat

For years now, Bernard Lubat, the man of many instruments — an amazing drummer, pianist, accordionist, sound effects man, and political and poetic agitator defying easy classification – has been building his unique musical opus, deep and wide, and also improvising, constantly shuttling between music, its demands and constraints, and life with its movements and random elements.
Lubat has designed an enchanted, but materialistic universe. Amazing energy radiates from him. The man is an agitator and an immense musician. He is inherently controversial, a man with countless shadows, including the shadows of Thelonious Monk, Luciano Berio, Kenny Clarke (who taught him some of his greatest secrets), Bach and Schoenberg.

In the 1960's while Lubat accompanies on famous singers, Montand, Brel, he plays with Stan Getz, Eddy Louiss, Claude Nougaro. He's part of the band Double Six. He also works in contemporary music with Diego Masson and Luciano Berio. He discovers free jazz that will inspire him.
In 1977 he creates the Compagnie Lubat de Gasconha, a band that received some of the best French musicians, and with which he plays most of the time. Bernard Lubat now also plays with jazzmen Michel Portal, Louis Sclavis, choreographer Régine Chopinot, poet Bernard Manciet, Edouard Glissant, visual artist Pascal Convert, actors André Benedetto, Richard Martin…

"All my life I’ve been playing around with roots – the roots of bop, blues, black music, and so on." The other reference for Lubat the musician is “serious” music, or, even better, contemporary music which shattered the coziness of the 1960s: "I feel I am at a guilty and egalitarian meeting point between these two worlds. It’s not one versus the other, but one within the other…" "Whenever I play these days, there are all these ghosts, there in the room, having a drink, listening to me a bit, and laughing. That’s my way of living with them, because everything they’ve given me is still very much alive in me."

Another root grew and developed 30 years ago with his friends in the “Compagnie Lubat” at the festival in Uzeste, a peaceful little village in Gascony that has become an impressive breeding ground for aesthetics and politics, with plenty of concerts all year long, plus workshops and "trans-arts" courses.

Bernard Lubat has an explanation of the Uzeste venture: "It started in 1978. For ten years I’d been a studio shark, recording anything and everything, from morning to evening, or all night – it was a real overdose: so Uzeste brought me back to my real business. I started all over again there: all the different stages in the jazz revolution, all the upheavals in contemporary music. I decided to do all that over again, my way, to reinvent things, to go through them again."