Yohan Giaume
is a composer, trumpeter, producer, and ethnomusicologist whose music is inseparable from his research. History shapes his compositions, and music becomes a way of exploring the traces of the past and inventing new artistic forms.
Trained in trumpet, composition, orchestration, and jazz at the Conservatories of Lyon, Chambéry, Grenoble, St Maur-des-Fossés, and in ethnomusicology at the Sorbonne, he has collaborated with artists across borders and idioms, including La Banda de Santiago de Cuba, Kocani Orkestar (North Macedonia), Juan Carlos Caceres (Argentina), Manu Dibango (Cameroon), Evan Christopher (United States), the Minnesota Orchestra (United States), Marrakech Jazz Beat (Morocco), Christian Vieussens (France), Mirtha Guerrero and Felix Casaverde (Peru).
His album Whisper of a Shadow, Opus 1 (2021), a musical dialogue with the nineteenth-century New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, has been critical acclaimed. The Wall Street Journal wrote that his music “reveals an essential soulfulness that transcends categories,” Le Monde called it a “musical novel,” Rolling Stone praised its ability to “imagine a brass dialogue” with Gottschalk, and Jazz News highlighted how it merges “Afro-American culture with European romantic music.” Opus 2, now in development, explores the connections between opera and the early days of jazz in New Orleans.
Alongside his artistic work, Giaume is a historian and PhD candidate at the EHESS in Paris. He is the author of the first book-length history of the French Opera House in New Orleans, a major cultural institution of the nineteenth century destroyed by fire in 1919, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press. Drawing on the same research, he is also developing an ambitious digital and acoustic reconstruction of the theater.