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| Photos by Gonçalo Falcão |
I’m heading to meet Julien Desprez for this interview in the atrium of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, during the 41st edition of the Jazz em Agosto festival. It’s a privilege to get to know better a musician I admire so deeply.
Desprez traces his path from an initiation in jazz to a redefinition of his identity as a musician. He explains a technique that integrates the body—notably through Brazilian sapateado (step dancing)—and the unconventional use of electricity as a musical instrument. Along the way he reflects on culture in Europe, the institutionalization of jazz, cultural policy, and his view of art’s role.
Much more than a musician, Julien Desprez reveals himself as an artist.
Interview
Gonçalo Falcão : This interview is particularly hard for me: I admire your work. I love the electric guitar, and your playing is truly original. But I don’t want to start with the guitar or the pedals. Since we’re at a jazz festival, inside a beautiful art institution - with this garden - could we begin with the state of the art?
How do you see jazz and improvised music becoming — this is my opinion, feel free to disagree — part of the art-world, elitist, instead of remaining a popular music, rooted in the people and widely heard?
Julien Desprez: For me it’s a bit of both. In fact, there are more dimensions than just that popular/art opposition; partly because some jazz has become classical music today. I’d include European improvised music here too. Look: we often see a younger generation repeating the gestures of the older one — which is normal; we’re influenced by what we hear. But there comes a point where a lot of the improvisation I hear—good as it may be—feels like classical. It become institutional. The word “improvisation” is always complicated for me, because we see people improvising, yet the form is often the same.
GF: The old “calm–intensity–calm” arc.
JD: Exactly. I call it the “kebab form”. [laughs]
GF: [laughs]
JD: And for the record, I love kebab!
GF: Me too — the taste and the shape.
JD: This isn’t a new issue; it’s there from the start of free improvisation in Europe, with the British — Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, etc. The best example is Bailey himself, who called that practice “non-idiomatic.”
GF: Which ended up becoming an idiom…
JD: Exactly! The non-idiomatic became an idiom; it’s a natural contradiction of total improvisation. I played a lot of total improv myself, but five or ten years ago I thought: This is almost always the same; the same things keep happening.
When you say you’ll improvise, you don’t rehearse — which is fine — but what happens is a meeting of languages: each musician’s language and the collective language. That’s already a form of composition. Often it even feels more like composition than improvisation. So I’ve tried to find other paths so I wouldn’t get bored.
If you don’t work, even when you improvise, you end up repeating the same gestures. I don’t agree with statements like Joëlle Léandre’s — for example, when she says, “Every time I play it’s new for me.” I don’t think that’s true: each time we hear her we immediately recognise Joëlle Léandre — the gestures, the sound, the form. That doesn’t mean it’s bad music, but it’s not what I want for myself.
GF: For you as an artist—or also for you as someone who wants to communicate with am audience?
JD: Both. It’s conceptual, but it’s also about communication. For instance, it’s hard to bring younger generations to concerts if they hear claims like “every time is new” and then recognize repeated forms across shows. There’s a gap between the narrative and the action, what is perceived. I try not to fall into that space. Today I don’t define myself as an improvising musician. I use improvisation, but as a process, not an aim.
GF: I hear you. Many musicians who entered free improvisation felt — after a while — unsatisfied with the conceptual and political problem of that practice.
JD: Yes. And that’s the big difference from jazz, which now has over a hundred years of history.
In the 1980s, in Europe — mainly France (not the U.S., where the social context is different) — began a cultural policy to fund art. That’s good, and I fully approve. But that system also bourgeoisified the music; it placed it in a conformist space.
GF: We’re back to my opening question about the state of the art. Did this allow musicians to live without thinking much about the audience?
JD: In some ways, yes. Art changed because of that economic context. I’m not saying funding should end—on the contrary, it’s fundamental for artists and society. Without it, educational levels would fall dramatically. But this system also changed how music works — for better in some respects, not so much in others. So I sought to step outside that context, to return to a space of greater freedom. Today I don’t define myself as a jazz musician nor as an improviser, but as an experimental musician.
GF: Across Europe, and also here, in Portugal, with the rise of the far right, artistic creation has been inserted into a subversive action package…
JD: Exactly. Doing what I do is no longer just a musical process; it’s now also a radical one. Twenty years ago, when left ideas dominated the culture wars, it was normal. Today, with the far right everywhere, just for doing what I do I get seen as an extremist—not only artistically, but politically. But in essence, I haven’t changed. The context has. Strange ideas have surfaced; fake news too. That’s why I think art will become more political.
GF: That sounds like good news — an encouraging prospect. I often feel the opposite: jazz is becoming less questioning, more tamed and comfortable. American musicians who come to Europe rarely talk about politics. They don’t speak about war—or they say vague things like “we’re for love” or “we’re against war.” It’s hard to hear that silence from people from a country that sponsors wars, supports a genocide. As a European, it’s difficult to accept that muteness. And France? For us, in the ’60s and ’70s it was culturally central. Then it lost relevance. We almost forgot there was interventionist, innovative jazz in France. Suddenly you and many others surface and we realise there’s plenty interesting things happening.
JD: For me it’s not so different. In the ’60s and ’70s, French music and art were important. But with cultural policy tied to socialism, a very protecting system was created. I love playing in France and abroad, but many musicians prefer to stay only in France. The system provides monthly funding, which is great — but it can be too comfortable. So I think the European system should be criticised. I support it, but we also need to share what we do with that support — show the rest of Europe that this system can produce great things. You’re required to play 43 concerts a year to receive the subsidy; then you can stop for a couple of months and work on new ideas. That gave me the time and opportunity to go deeper into the guitar and create my approach.
GF: Americans don’t have that.
JD: Exactly — it’s very hard for them. There’s no support; they have to play constantly, do weddings and baptisms, or hold a day job. In France it’s not like that; it gives us freedom. Everything I developed I owe to that possibility of stopping to reflect and practice.
GF: Since you’ve opened that door—and even though I said I wouldn’t dive into guitar technique — let’s talk about your playing, because it’s unique. I don’t hear direct links between standard electric-guitar technique and your approach. Of course there’s Fred Frith with Massacre and other downtown NY players (Elliott Sharp, Eugene Chadbourne, Henry Kaiser, Sonny Sharrock) from the ’90s… but you brought something genuinely new with your rapid stutter and a very physical, percussive, bodily approach to the instrument. It often reads as performatic thing — or even a choreography — where instrument and instrumentalist, together, produce sound. Am I off?
JD: No, I completely agree. I love using the body because that’s how I feel this thing. It’s also a good limitation because, for instance, everything I do I could do on a computer. But with a computer you have to define your limits before you start. I listen to a lot of electronic music, and for me the best electronic musician is the one who makes good choices — because with machines you can do everything. So the first technology an artist must master is choice. In my case, the body works as that decision device: it allows many things, but it also imposes limits. There are things I simply cannot do — and I really like that.
GF: How did this way of playing develop?
JD: I come from a working-class family and started guitar at 16. No one in my family had any link to the art world. It was pure luck; I could have never played. One day, in my neighborhood, a friend brought an acoustic guitar. When it reached my hands I thought, ‘Wow, this is incredible, I love this.’ It was the first time I made music. Then I taught myself — rock, singing with the guitar. Later I met jazz musicians — I didn’t even know what jazz was. My father was a plumber; my mother worked in social security. I was completely outside that world. I later realized that distance can be an advantage, because it gives you more freedom in the art world.
GF: And then?
JD: Those musicians told me I should go to music school; so I did — In Yerres, a district outside Paris. I didn’t know what jazz was; I couldn’t read music; I showed up with a guitar and what I’d learned alone. I stayed in that school four years. I learned a lot, but I also saw a problem: others had played their instrument since they were five years old and were at a very high level. I could work like crazy to reach their level — but once I arrived at their level, they’d be even further ahead. So I decided the best solution was to take a different path.
I kept studying jazz because it’s a great school for the instrument and for music, but I began to feel bored with the guitar — the same licks, the same sounds. I moved to a Stratocaster, because I was listening to Hendrix, who is still a big influence.
GF: And Bo Diddley and James Brown; am I right?
JD: James Brown, for sure—I love him! Bo Diddley, not so much.
GF: I’ve asked because his way of playing the guitar feels like a drum.
JD: True. If I had to choose another instrument today, it would be percussion or drums. The guitar was accidental, as I said—almost as if it chose me. But I was bored — not with the instrument itself, but with how it was played.
That’s when I started reading Tristan Garcia, a philosopher of my generation. In Forme et objet. Un traité des choses, he proposes a new ontology: instead of “I think, therefore I am,” his logic is “I exist because I am a thing.” He puts humans on the same level as a sofa, a car, or a tree. I loved that way of thinking; it helped me create relations between objects.
I applied it to the guitar: I divided it into strings, neck, pickups, body. I worked in pairs — strings and pickups, neck and body — and then I thought of pedals not as effects but as instruments themselves. I even started using them without the guitar, as sound generators. That’s when I began using my feet much more, seeking independence between feet and hands, like a drummer or organist.
My first solo album, Acapulco, came from that process. I recorded it without big plans and suddenly started playing live a lot. That led me into the world of dance. A dancer once said, “How can you make those complex movements and make them look easy?” I’d never thought about it; I was only thinking about sound. So I created Acapulco Redux, with lights controlled from the stage. I presented it here at Jazz em Agosto, in 2017.
That project came precisely from the encounter with dance. I realised that, when we learn an instrument, nobody talks about the whole body — but it’s the beginning of everything. Even in electronic music, when you move a fader, it’s the body acting. So I knew I had to work that dimension more, particularly playing with my feet. I started doing it seated, then I adapted to play standing.
At the time, I was travelling to Brazil a lot. I met Arto Lindsay and others and returned many times between 2010 and 2019. There I discovered Coco Raízes de Arcoverde, in Pernambuco. They play a simplified samba, only percussion and voices, wearing wooden shoes. They do “sapateado” (step-dance). When I saw it I thought: ‘This is what I need to learn.’ I spent three weeks with them, lived in the community, and every morning we trained step dancing. It was forty degrees… very intense — but I perfected it; and then I brought that physicality into my work.
That experience definitively linked body and sound. Today I can’t separate them. And, oddly enough, even my use of pedals relates to that samba rhythm. Of course the material is different and sounds different, but that’s the origin. I’m still in touch with them, we exchange ideas on recording processes and more.
GF: What a story —the creative process finds its form in very intricate ways.
JD: Then I decided to create the piece Coco, with three dancers and three musicians. The idea was to erase the boundary: at the start we all step-danced in a line, and you couldn’t tell who was a dancer or who was a musician. I taught my way of playing to a dancer, guiding her through body movements, not through scores — and she managed to play by thinking only of the body. That was incredible.
That led me to deepen the “tap” element, which became part of my language. That’s when I started to move away from the idea of being a “guitarist.” Today I don’t consider myself a guitarist but a user of the guitar. It’s just a tool. In new projects I started singing again — because that’s how I began in music. Two years ago I decided to return to that origin: singing, step dancing, noise, all at once. I want to create a musical form where everything fits, while maintaining the relation to the idea of “things”.
There’s a French expression I love: when you enter the world, you get lost forever and never leave it — you have to deal with everything. That’s what I want: a thermodynamic organization of things where everything can enter.
GF: Perhaps that’s why I like Abacaxi so much: it feels like a world that processes many musics.
JD: Exactly. That’s what I do in Abacaxi: I put everything there, from funk to noise. I bring different musical spaces together and let them live. Often I don’t control the encounter of those musical objects—I let them react and just surf them.
GF: That’s the most fascinating part of speaking with musicians: hearing how they explain their music and then it becomes clearer. I know I like it, I’m deeply interested, I’ve got a fair idea of what’s going on musically — but while hearing you, it all becomes richer. I first saw Abacaxi in Portalegre and was struck by your technique and by the music of the group. So when you say you’re not a guitarist, I think I get it—but for someone who plays guitar, it’s astonishing, because you developed a new approach, a new pedal technique. Back to the point: do you feel part of the electric-guitar legacy?
JD: In some way, yes—maybe not so much in jazz, but in the history of the electric guitar. I’m a fan of Bill Frisell, and I think there are aspects of him in my music, particularly how he uses sound, especially on the ’80s records.
GF: In Line, Rambler, Theoretically…?
JD: All of them! When he plays, I love it—so full of dynamics, and I love dynamics. So yes, I’m still connected to the guitar’s history, even if, in my case, the connection was to find a way to exit it. But by leaving, you also open space, and enlarge the field.
GF: Exactly—new doors open. But I confess:… “Bill Frisell” really surprises me. If you’d said Fred Frith or Derek Bailey, it would fit. Frisell is unexpected because he’s so melodic, the master of attack...
JD: I get it. I like Frith and Bailey too. But what I like in Frisell is that he has many technical capacities that he uses in a musical way — always in service of the music. I listen to everything: from reggaeton to noise, contemporary, reggae, pop. I like to explore. But the artists I love the most are those who keep evolving, transforming. Frisell is like that: the ’80s albums have nothing to do with the later ones, and then he changes again. He keeps pushing.
GF: I love him too, but I don’t know if I can understand your point. I saw him last year in Hamburg, in a retrospective, and he seemed stuck in the ’50s, in The Beach Boys/Space Age mood — almost denying contemporary America, wanting to return to a happy childhood. But now that you say this, I’ll listen again with new ears. Let me ask a nerdy question: do you use the Hexe Revolver pedal for your stutter? Your stutter is so fast I thought it couldn’t be purely human.
JD: No. As I said, I like using the body because it imposes limits—it forces me to choose. I have different ways to stutter: for example, a multi-tap delay set to repeat once, then I change the speed. But I still need to play the guitar, hit the pedal, switch on/off. I’ve tried many pedals—some respond to attack—but basically I prefer to use my feet.
GF: I get it. When processors appeared, every guitarist I knew started using them, but I don’t like too many knobs and hundreds of options you never use. I prefer a single on/off switch and two knobs.
JD: Exactly! I also like direct things. With very complex devices you lose time in options. In Acapulco Redux — that light piece I presented at Jazz em Agosto — I used Max/MSP with patches controlling everything. I’d turn on the computer, press a button and — shhboom — light everywhere. It’s fun; but because it’s so complex, it doesn’t leave many space for other things. My relation to technology is this: I use it because we live in the modern world, but minimally, to leave space for other things to happen. That matters to me in music, politics, and human relations.
GF: So it’s not just a traditional artistic stance. It’s a global attitude — leaving room for the unforeseen.
JD: Exactly. Never discard, never ignore. If I see something, I grab it. For me the world is thermodynamic: organization creates chaos; chaos creates organization. That’s what I work with.
GF: How do you see changes in how people use music? Before, we went somewhere to listen; we played an album start to finish; we waited for a radio programme. Now music is everywhere — backgrounding for a meal in a restaurant, to a conversation in a café, to run in the gym. But music is rarely truly heard.
JD: Yes — music like tap water. You open it and it’s there. No questions asked. That makes me think about what I do in that context: what’s the difference between art and entertainment? I like entertainment — I like Hollywood action films, pop music. But art isn’t made to like or not like; it’s made to create sensitivity, imagination, to move people, help them to understand themselves. That’s why I enjoy shaking the audience a bit. When someone says “I loved it”, I’m happy — but that’s not what I’m after. I want them to leave thinking, ‘Wow, something happened.’ My goal is to increase human sensitivity. If that happened on a big scale, maybe fewer people would say so much nonsense. Because sensitivity and connection to the world are fundamental to be free.
GF: Not to change?
JD: Art is made to change. That’s why it’s good when people love it, and also when they hate it. The worst is the “whatever…” If I get that feedback, I think: “It was a bad concert.” Music and art are always political.
GF: Change — hopefully for the better, which is not guaranteed…
JD: Yes. Let’s hope. This year, for example, it’s not going great...
GF: Indeed — art doesn’t seem to be working, this year…
JD: Not right now. I don’t know how we got here.
GF: Even in Portugal… the far right is now a important political force. In France you’ve become used to Le Pen, but in Portugal this transformation was a shock. And the recipe is the same across Europe. I wonder if it’s also related to this erasure of music — by turning artworks into odorant, which anaesthetizes society. You say you like many kinds of music — Beethoven, Schoenberg, jazz, rock, James Brown. Me too. But I dislike random music in restaurants or on the beach.
JD: I understand.
GF: It bothers me. On the beach we should hear the waves, not boorish beats. This omnipresence of sound anaesthetizes. Everything is an “experience” now, nothing is trash or wrong.
JD: I agree. The problem is people lose the capacity to think for themselves and to disagree. For me, that’s the start of politics: disagreement. I don’t expect a society where everyone agrees with me; I expect relations and art that make us think. When we stop thinking — even if we believe we are thinking because we’re fed easy answers—nothing good can come. That’s manipulation. Art can help to explain this. My partner works with neuroscientists. A friend in Geneva told me after a concert: ‘You know, Julien, you do exactly what’s needed to redefine neural connections. First you present clear rules, then you distort them and force the brain to reorganize.’ I was happy — that’s exactly it. I show an image, then I warp it. That’s also why I don’t consider myself a guitarist. I use the guitar as an initial image: people think, “OK, an electric guitar — I’m safe.” Then I start playing and they ask, “What the hell is this?” That distortion is essential. I want the audience to listen actively, not as background. I want to put them in an active position, to return to them the possibility of action.
GF: Absolutely. An active stance towards creation — and towards the social and political situation — seems to be where you provoke something, whether in design, music, theater, or any other form. Like sand in the brain causing an itch — some productive confusion. Julien, I don’t know if there’s anything left to say, but I’ll add that, for me, this conversation was very positive and stimulating. I’ve always thought of you as a guitarist; I like this idea that you’re a musician who uses the guitar.
JD: Perhaps just this, by way of conclusion: although I use the electric guitar, what I really play is electricity. When I touch a pedal, I’m managing the tension of an electrical circuit. The guitar is an electrical controller. Pedals react to impedance and to the impulse they receive. When I change the guitar’s tone or volume, I change the circuit’s impedance. So when I use my feet or turn knobs, I’m managing electricity.
To go further: two years ago I created a performance called Arc, where I play guitar, sing, step-dance and use a new musical device I developed with Nicolas Canot, made of 12 small electrical arcs. An electrical arc is basically electricity managed in the air: two electrified pieces of metal; current always seeks the quickest path from A to B. We amplified those arcs with jacks and cables, into a DI and then the PA. You hear the magnetic fields vibrating. The most beautiful part was realizing, at the same time, that this is a comparable process: my partner — also an artist, connected to science — showed me images of neurons firing when we feel emotions. It’s the same process: neurons generating electricity. I realized that, at bottom, everything I do is electric — the human body generates it; the guitar depends on it; so do the pedals.
GF: So it’s not sound — it’s electricity?
JD: Exactly.
GF: We’ve known electricity for a long time. Since Antiquity we knew it existed, but didn’t know what to do with it. Only in the 20th century did we fully controlled and used it. Today we’re totally dependent on it.
JD: One of Tristan Garcia’s best books, La Vie Intense, is precisely about this—not technological electricity, but what it brought to the human brain and emotions. He shows how the lexical field we use to describe feelings comes from electrical intensity. It wasn’t only light that changed us; it also changed the language with which we speak of love, passion, pain. We say “it was intense” “a shock” “a storm in the sky.” All electrical metaphors. That’s the link. That’s how I see the world: electricity in flow, intensity.
The interview ends as it began: between body and philosophy, musical practice and politics, physicality and electricity. Julien Desprez confirms himself not merely as a guitarist but as an artist who conceives music as an expanded field—where sound, gesture, body, and energy meet and reorganize.
This interview was initially published in Portuguese on the Jazz.pt website on August 24, 2025: https://jazz.pt/entrevistas/o-corpo--a-eletricidade-e-a-politica
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Gonçalo Falcão is the co-editor of Portugal's Jazz.pt magazine.
Studied music with Vítor Rua. Composition workshops with Louis
Andriessen and Salvatore Sciarrino. Played with Telectu, Evan Parker,
Eddie Prévost, among others. Recorded Load “ “ and Volkswagner guitar
solos. Teacher at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon.
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