French drummer and composer Olivier Le Goas returns with The Chaining Loops, a new septet recording with Ensemble Pulse that brings together complex rhythmic design, long-form composition, and a strong melodic focus. Recorded in Paris, the album draws on years of shared musical history within the ensemble, balancing shifting meters and interlocking patterns with a clear sense of line, movement, and narrative.
In this conversation, Le Goas discusses the role of form in his compositional process, the relationship between melody and rhythmic complexity, and the lasting influence of his time in New York working with musicians including John Abercrombie, Drew Gress, and Ralph Alessi. He also reflects on the importance of long-standing collaborators, the current state of the French jazz scene, and the wide range of references—from Keith Jarrett and Frank Zappa to Renaissance music—that help locate his work within a broader musical landscape.
The Chaining Loops is built around pieces that evolve over time. When you start composing, what usually comes first: a groove, a melody, or something else?
It depends on the moment, but it is always a question of form.
It can quite often be a melody—I write it, then I try different possible harmonisations or different bass lines. The next day, on the drums, I can play a pattern for a long time in order to reach another level of rhythmic awareness. At a certain point, I realise that the number of accents corresponding to the beginning and end of the melodic sub-motifs is the same as the main accents of this or that pattern.
From there, I create a bass line following the logic of the placement of these accents from the drum pattern. For example, in Oblique Song, one of my compositions on On Ramp of Heaven Dreams, the bass movements underline the sequence and order of accents between bass drum and snare. Then I take the melody again and treat it in terms of rhythmic subdivisions, rethinking its placement according to the subdivisions of the pattern.
What matters is that everything can be decided during the time of practice.
Some of the music has quite complex rhythms, but it never feels difficult to listen to. Were there particular artists or recordings that influenced this balance between complexity and clarity?
It is a question of levels of reading.
In The Chaining Loops, the “large structure” or large pattern (on the scale of a wide melodic phrase) is quite simple. For example, the primitive version of the theme that comes before the coda, played on soprano saxophone, is a theme where the melodic phrases unfold over a basic cycle of eight bars in 4/4.
Its derived version, according to the rhythmic pattern of the section, combines different levels of metric reading. In fact, it combines three within a global cycle of nine bars: the level of the overall rhythmic pattern (here a 15/16 cycle moving across a 4/4 framework, and stretched at a certain point), the level of the internal melodic points of support (like the pillars of a suspension bridge), and finally the level of the subdivisions that exist between those points of support played by bass and drums.
The melody evolves according to the overall subdivided pattern; it can sometimes align with intermediate points of support. If it ventures into the subdivided rhythmic groups, it is only to reinforce its rhythmic grip. In a way, the melody floats above a rhythmic mass without ever losing its clarity.
At the beginning of your career, you spent time in New York working with musicians such as John Abercrombie and Kenny Wheeler. How did that period influence your approach to practice and composition?
First of all, it was the powerful encounter with the energy of that city.
Musically, it was also the meeting with the American guitarist John Abercrombie, whom I had already met during a workshop in 1990. Being elsewhere, in the unknown, often offers unexpected possibilities, and here that unknown was New York.
I came to New York with a collection of melodies and polyphony by Erasmus Widmann, a 17th-century German composer. What was decisive was recording these melodies, harmonised on piano, at the New School with a portable recorder. This process allowed me to take distance and opened up a field without equal, and allowed me to imagine what it could become with drums, guitar, trumpet, and double bass.
This gave me the confidence to bring together these great musicians—John Abercrombie, Drew Gress, and Ralph Alessi. That is how Gravitations was born.
Since then, when I build a new repertoire, I often study existing music, mainly Baroque and Renaissance, for the beauty of their melodies, and practise them on the piano to draw out new material and ideas.
As for original melodies, they come either when I wake up, or during drum practice, by playing the same groove for a very long time.
This album brings together musicians you have played with for many years. Does that shared history change the way the group plays compared to a newer collaboration?
Absolutely.
I more or less already know how it is going to happen, or if I need to modify certain elements so that things go well. It also determines the choice of improvisers according to the formal, harmonic, or rhythmic character.
That is to say, the sound is in a way already there.
As a French artist who has worked a lot internationally, how do you see the current jazz scene in France?
It seems fragmented to me.
There are, broadly speaking, two circuits: the large festivals programming well-known mainstream artists, and another, much less visible, offering more demanding music, outside the usual paths, with a more specialised but also more limited audience. I find it difficult to see a middle ground.
I also think there is a kind of uniformity in the jazz landscape, which paradoxically creates more classification and locks creation into certain patterns. This uniformity also comes from lobbying that focuses its efforts on a very limited number of artists and aesthetics.
If I were being harsh—but I’m not—I would say, for example, that TSF is a mainstream radio with a jazz programme that is correct but that harms diversity, where subversion has no place. I think it has little interest.
For someone discovering your music for the first time, are there albums or artists that could help situate this one stylistically?
First, the European quartet recordings of Keith Jarrett for the melodic and harmonic universe.
Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe for the earthy sound of the group and the use of metric play.
Vijay Iyer’s Accelerando for the multi-layered rhythmic reading.
Steve Coleman’s albums, especially Rhythm People, for the rhythmic forms.
Pat Metheny Group, especially We Live Here, for the ability to produce large-scale melodies.
And then Renaissance music, especially German. For me, a decisive recording was the Neumeyer Collegium Terpsichore playing Hermann Schein’s Banchetto Musicale. It is music that moves forward inexorably, with a deep sense of melodic line, and a mixture of popular and learned elements that makes it unique and universal.
