Tenor and Soprano Saxophone | 1937-1996

Barney Wilen was born Bernard Jean Wilen in Nice on March 4, 1937 to a French mother and an American father, spent the early war years in the United States, returned to France after liberation, and began playing professionally in Nice clubs after the modernist poet Blaise Cendrars, a friend of his mother, encouraged him. He moved to Paris at sixteen and was performing at Le Tabou in Saint-Germain-des-Prés alongside Bobby Jaspar and Henri Renaud by 1953. When Miles Davis arrived in Paris in 1957 to record Louis Malle's "Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud," he chose Wilen, then twenty, as his tenor saxophonist alongside René Urtreger, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke, recording across a single night with the film's footage projected in the studio. Two years later Wilen composed the soundtrack for "Un Témoin dans la Ville" (1959) with Clarke and worked on Roger Vadim's "Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960" alongside Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He recorded with John Lewis, Bud Powell, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s before drifting into a psychedelic period, free jazz experiments and a long withdrawal from the scene through most of the 1970s. A 1987 graphic novel fictionalising his life brought him back to attention, and he resumed recording for IDA and Venus through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Wilen died of cancer in Paris on May 25, 1996, aged 59.