by Deanna Byck
JC Maillard’s blood
Courses with the beat of Africa and the Caribbean.
He is an artist, musician, and composer from Pointe-à-Pître, Guadeloupe who has a love for the traditions of his island and percussion. Maillard fronts the band Grand Baton; a creation stemmed from his original roots of drumming on his island turned into a vehicle to connect and transport his audience to the unexpected.
Currently the band is touring with Lisa Fischer, originally a backup singer for the Rolling Stones, Luther Vandross and Tina Turner among others, who struck out on her own to critical acclaim. Together, they create and perform music that transforms their audience into a temporal space entrenched with tendrils of African/Caribbean ancestry. The result is magical. JC Maillard is the musical director and wizard behind the collaboration. Prior to their alliance, Grand Baton has been, and continues to be, an electrifying musical experience; hypnotizing its audience in a way that enriches simply by being in their presence – it is like a portal to a different dimension.
The music is rich – infused with spices and rhythms of a different world.
JC Maillard
I had a chance to sit down with JC Maillard and ask him about the origins of his artistry, his connection to the audience and his transformative evolution of music. Like Maillard, the music is rich – infused with spices and rhythms of a different world. He is able to use the beat to obtain these relationships, because he himself is from a different place. What came forth was an unexpected conversation – raw and primordial – about a man whose desire is deep connection not only with his audience but to a larger collective experience of shared energy, freedom and alignment with the Universe.
And yes, he is beautiful.
Deanna: Tell me about the origins of your music. I am fascinated with the drum beats, electronica, middle eastern chant and rock you create during your concerts to take the audience on such a magical journey.
JC: There are different steps to that whole story, and being from the Caribbean, I’m very much into percussion and trance music. Before I started Grand Baton, I released and worked on my first solo acoustic album – Ka Suite. The story of this album is really about my love for the tradition of my island and percussion. It was not only because of the love of my culture but it was also because I already had more than 10 years as a professional musician. I was already mature, asking myself the question what do I really like to play? What are the feelings of the past 10 years on stage that really captured me? And there were two things. I realized that I was into percussion and rhythm and my best moments on stage always had something to do with trance.
My favorite times were when I had a rhythm going on, my head started to spin, and as we were playing, I was having an out of the body experience. I put all of these ideas together into an album. I also wanted to be innovative in writing some interesting music for classical guitar together with the beats of the drums —infused in the traditional drum.
My work is intended to weave together two worlds. On one hand it is the “mind” or the “mad scientist” approach with an intentional organization of sounds. On the other hand, is the “womb” where music is a primal pulse – instinctive and connected to a universal clock. To me it was obvious that the latter, symbolized in the drum with its pulse and overtones — would break away from a conventional approach of melody and harmony. That “pulse” is not the result of a human invention, it comes from nature. Each tradition is bringing its own flavor to a universal phenomenon.
Deanna: I would like to know more about how your roots, growing up in the French Caribbean, influenced your music.
JC: My whole family has been there for generations on my mother’s side. It is interesting that several times in my musical life I faced prejudice of race because I’m from the Caribbean, AND white and I played a lot of African music. It didn’t prevent people from making music with me, but I just heard things. It really didn’t make sense to me because the music was rooted in the Caribbean and it was not a matter of black and white. I started to reflect deeply on this. I was sad about it, but I wanted to show people that the music was a matter of energy; the rock sounds would blend, and they would understand each other into one music.
It was bringing all the sounds of electric guitars into the traditional drums. It was also about writing new rhythms because the drum traditions that came from Africa spread throughout the Caribbean, giving birth to many different styles and flavors. Each island has its own tradition. Much has been lost from the original diversity of the rhythms from this part of Africa, and so I began to create new rhythms. The whole project was about this – about opening new doors both sonically and compositionally.
Into New Dimensions
The reason art is so moving is because it’s a moment where we lose that sense of identity and we realize how much connection there is between beings and between things.
JC Maillard
Deanna: What is your perception or what is your notion of how, when you connect with an audience, how it becomes this spiritual experience?
JC: I think what we want actually is that connection. I think what we all want in life is connection. If it could be in every possible minute of our lives, this is what we would always go for –to reconnect. When we lose ourselves in a sense of identity and separation it’s never a good thing. To me, the reason why art is so moving is because it’s a moment where we lose that sense of identity and we realize how much connection there is between beings and between things.
Deep Audience Connection
I was saying earlier, it’s like having an out of the body experience. When music really takes me out of my mind, this is the best feeling in the world. This is where everything seems to be at its right place, everything seems to flow, and seems to make sense in a deep way. This is what you want to feel in life. Playing music on stage is a moment where we know we can get to that connection. When two or more people are experiencing one same thing at the same time, each individual perception is also shared by the others. When you play to an audience you perceive your own work differently, as if you were also listening through their ears and seeing through their eyes. When an audience is experiencing a piece of music or visual art, you seem to be receiving more signals from them than what you would be receiving if you were alone. You are sharing perceptions; and this multiplies, intensifies, your own resonance to the surrounding phenomena.
Ideally, I would like to feel it every minute of my life. I don’t really know what makes or what doesn’t make the connection. I don’t have the recipe. Nobody does. I just can play music being as honest as I can, and hopefully this is where it’s going to work.
Deanna: Not only do you have a primal connection between music and the audience, but you also seem to have a deep-rooted connection between visual artwork and your music. Can you please elaborate?
JC: This morning I was reconnecting with this thought, and I was in the moment when you’re actually half in your brain – because your brain is the invention. Your brain is what creates the concepts that are going to take you beyond what you already know. But the soul is the connected part. The ideal music is one that has made the good marriage of staying connected to something that is beyond understandable because it has to do with something that is instinctive and that’s deep inside us, what I will call the animal part. Which is not, in my mind, something dirty or whatever. It’s something real. And on the other hand, the inventiveness and the creation, this is what a brain should be used for.
The artists that really move me the most are the ones that are inventive but never lost that animal side of the music and instinctive side of their art. When I did the first Le Grand Baton album, I was looking for images to go with it, because I’m a very visual person. I love visual arts. The paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat really struck me. They seemed closest to what I envisioned this music being. It has real, ethnic, deep connection to it and creativity at the same time. That’s my vision of what a musical ideal piece of art is. It has a foot in the obscure origins of our souls and a foot in the craziness, inventiveness of the brain.
Deanna: What is next for you; what is on the horizon?
JC: I am lucky that I am able to wake up every day and choose what I want to do. And I do what inspires me. I want to keep writing, keep creating. I hope these things will find their way; they will manage to find their way out of my mind or my apartment into somebody else’s hands, into somebody else’s home. It’s like giving birth to something. It’s nice to let it out into the world. Let it have a life of its own, and let people make something with it. Be inspired by it; use it as an object in their everyday life. I think this is all that matters. Then there is the process, and the process is you have to continue to live — you have to survive to create. Survival is dependent upon how many people know you. I just want to keep writing.
I’m so thankful that I can perform, because this is very important to me — I’m an alive person. I need to feel people around me. I need to feel connections. I can be in my head, and I need to have these out of the body experiences. It’s not a selfish thing, this out of the body — when you’re out of the body, it’s when you connect with others and when you connect to the world. It’s forgetting about yourself.
Every day of my life, I want to keep feeling that feeling of bliss that is to feel connected. This is all I want. What I know for sure is that the deep thing that motivates me to do what I do, is that feeling of suddenly sharing a moment; when we managed to build all these energies together and we know we can only compare it to all these moments in life when we don’t feel that connection — the contrast. Then we feel that this is very important. It really matters.
Jean-Cristophe (JC) Maillard is an acclaimed composer, arranger, electro-rock music producer, musician and visual artist. He is the musical director of Grand Baton and Ms. Lisa Fischer and Grand Baton. He is also on Vocals, Classical and Electric Guitars, Keyboards and the SazBass; an instrument he created and had built.
For more info, visit JC’s website
jcmaillard.com