Thomas de Pourquery has taught himself to play the alto and tenor saxophone when he was 14 years old. A turnign point in his career was his significant meeting with Stefano di Battista, who convinced him to choose music instead of a sports career. In 1998, he enrolled in the Paris Conservatory, in François Jeanneau’s class. He had the opportunity to deepen his musical knowledge by playing with Collectif des Falaises (made up of Maxime Delpierre, Jean-Philippe Morel, Médéric Collignon, David Neerman, Arnaud Roulin, David Aknin, Matthieu Jérôme, Laurent Bardainne, Philippe Gleizes), first at Studio des Islett, and then at Falaises. During this time, the group held many jam sessions with legends of the genre, such as George Brown, Sunny Murray, Rasul Siddik, Jim Black and Marc Ducret. These illustrious musical collaborations have led to the creation of the legendary record label Chief Inspector. Furthermore, Thomas de Pourquery was the leader and lead singer of the Rigolus Rock Band, that played in all of Europe between 2005 and 2011.
“Although I rarely dream about music, one night I dreamed about this album. […] I was flying with musicians who were singing. I could touch the saxophone, sit on a cymbal, jump on the piano’s keyboards or the bass’ chords. What was most beautiful, though, was the energy of the sound that I heard. And I asked myself who those people could be… My band, Supersonic.
[…] Each composer has the supreme challenge of writing a masterpiece, but when I woke up I had that “Eureka” moment and I realised that I only had to write pretexts that could guide the composition.” – Thomas de Pourquery, about the most recent album created with Supersonic.
The poliinstrumentalist created his band in 2012, with the purpose of revisiting the music of the legendary jazzman “who came from Saturn”, who called himself Sun Ra. His repertory has proven to be a fertile source of inspiration for French school creativity, with its chaming aestheticism. In other words: technical virtuosity, racy improvisations, not only musical interaction, but theatrical as well, burlesque scenes seemingly descended from Alfred Jarry, a lot of humor, but also a unique sensibility for the universality of the human nature. All these materialize in an exuberant show, in which de Pourquery’s and Bardainne’s saxophone solos alternate with lightning tunes in unison or vocal interventions (reminding not only of the masterly vocalist landed from Space, but also of Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention). Besides, the evolution of the remarkable drummer Edward Perraud (with his juggleries and quasi-dadaist stage play) constitutes a show in itself, magnifying the classic role of the percussionist as the driving force of the jazz ensemble.