Collection: Barney Wilen

Barney Wilen was born in Nice in 1937 to a French mother and an American dentist father, spent the early years of the Second World War in the United States where an uncle gave him a saxophone, returned to France after the liberation, began playing professionally in Nice clubs after the modernist poet Blaise Cendrars, a friend of his mother, encouraged him to pursue music, and was performing at Le Tabou in Saint-Germain-des-Prés at sixteen alongside Bobby Jaspar and Henri Renaud. By the time Miles Davis arrived in Paris in 1957 to record the Louis Malle film soundtrack "Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud," Wilen had established himself sufficiently that Davis included him as the tenor voice alongside René Urtreger on piano, Pierre Michelot on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. He was twenty years old. The resulting sessions, recorded across one night in the studio as footage from the film was projected on a screen, produced some of Davis's most atmospheric improvisations and introduced Wilen to an international audience. Two years later he composed soundtracks for "Un Témoin dans la Ville" (1959) with Kenny Clarke and worked with Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers on Roger Vadim's "Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960." He played with John Lewis, Bud Powell, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then he drifted: a Timothy Leary-dedicated psychedelic album (1968), a free jazz period, a long withdrawal from the scene in the south of France through most of the 1970s and early 1980s. A 1987 graphic novel by Jacques de Loustal and Philippe Paringaux fictionalising his life story, "Barney et la note bleue," brought him back to public attention and he resumed recording in earnest for Venus and IDA in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He died in Paris on May 25, 1996, aged 59. He is described in French sources as "le seul ténor européen susceptible de concurrencer les maîtres américains": the only European tenor capable of competing with the American masters.