Erwan Keravec is a highland bagpiper, composer and improviser. In seeking out the more unusual sounds, and ways of playing and listening to his instrument, far from its original cultural setting, he is exploring improvised music, free and ‘noise’ jazz, and establishing a repertoire of contemporary music for solo pipes, trio with solo voice and with choir. With an interest in movement and in settings associated with reinvention, he also writes, plays and improvises for dance.
Trained by luthier and piper Jorj Botuha, and tutored in the playing style and repertoire of Scottish bagpipes, Erwan Keravec made his debut in Lokoal Mendon’s Bagad Roñsed, and as a twosome with his brother Guénolé Keravec on the bombard. Starting in 1996, he explored free jazz and improvised music with La Marmite Infernale, the ARFI big band – Association a la Recherche d’un Folklore Imaginaire – (Coeff 116 – 1997). During his time with ARFI, he took part in the Guanabara programme (2005) and played in the Baron Samedi set-up. Alongside his exploits with the Niou Bardophones – a quartet comprising the bagpipe-bombard pairing, baritone sax and drum kit – and the release of albums Air de rien (2005), Champ d’âne (2008) and Sages comme des fous (2013), he jammed with trumpeter Jean-Luc Cappozzo (Air brut – 2010), and put his name to the album Outside the budaga (2010) with Romain Baudoin, Jerome Renault and Joan Francès Tisner.
In 2009, he met Basque singer Beñat Achiary, with whom he made Ametsa (2011). Since 2007, he has pursued his quest for a style of piping that’s removed from its original setting, with the projects Urban Pipes I (2007) and Urban Pipes II (2011), on which he wrote and improvised solo, with his brother Guénolé, and with Beñat Achiary. To make his intentions clear, he commissioned composers with absolutely no knowledge of bagpipes to write solo pieces for the instrument as part of the Nu Piping series (since 2011). So far, he has been behind 13 works for solo pipes, by Sébastien Bérenger, Bernard Cavanna, Benjamin de la Fuente, Xavier Garcia, Lars Kynde, Heiner Goebbels, Philippe Leroux, Zad Moultaka, François Rossé, François Sarhan, and Susumu Yoshida. For the Sonneurs quartet, comprising wind instruments from the Breton tradition (bagpipes, bombard, biniou-koz, and trélombarde), since 2015 he has been developing the repertoire with Pierre-Yves Macé, Wolfgang Mitterer, Samuel Sighicelli, Susumu Yoshida and Frédéric Aurier (for a 2019 piece with the quartet Béla).
At the same time, he has been working on the repertoire for VOX (since 2013), for bagpipes and voice (soprano and baritone) with Oscar Bianchi, Philippe Leroux, José-Manuel López López, and Oscar Strasnoy, which he’ll further expand in Extended VOX (2019) with Les Cris de Paris – a 24-piece choir led by Geoffroy Jourdain – featuring commissions by Bernhard Lang and Wolfgang Mitterer. He is also currently staging Blind (2015), a piece for four instrumentalists and a blindfolded audience, and leads the Revolutionary Birds project (2015) with Tunisian singer Mounir Troudi and percussionist Wassim Halal. In the more familiar territory of experimental music, he is collaborating with Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (Luft – 2015), imagining a meeting of their respective groups, Sonneurs and Fire!. He has also formed the trio White Sands with guitarist Julien Desprez and percussionist Will Guthrie (2019).
He’s collaborating increasingly in the field of choreography by writing, performing and improvising with Gaelle Bourges (Le Marin acéphale – 199, Homothétie 949 with the Raoul Batz group – 2002, À mon seul désir – 2014, Conjurer la peur – 2017, Ce que tu vois – 2018), Cécile Borne (Robes fanées – 2008), Boris Charmatz (Enfant – 2011), Emmanuelle Huynh (Huynh/Keravec – 2015), Mickaël Phelippeau (membre fantôme – 2016), Alban Richard (Breathisdancing – 2017). And he improvises with Boris Charmatz, Boris, Charmatz, Daniel Linehan.
In 2019, he is adding to the solo bagpipe repertoire with Goebbels/Radigue/Glass with Heiner Goebbels’s no28/50 (premiered in 2018 – Festival Schlossmediale Werdenberg – Switzerland), Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM OCEAM XXVII (world premiere 2019 – Le Vivier – Montreal – Canada), and Two Pages, an adaptation for bagpipes in C of the Philip Glass work. In 2020, he’ll add to the quartet repertoire with pieces by Otomo Yoshihide (world premiere January 2020 – Philharmonie de Paris) and Dror Feiler (world premiere April 2020 – Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan.
Photo credit – Jean de Pena