Yves Charuest

Canadian saxophonist Yves Charuest has been active since the 1980s on the Canadian jazz and improvised music scene, playing with many Canadian musicians such as Michel Ratté, Jean Beaudet, Lisle Ellis, Jean Derome and Pierre Cartier in different groups and projects: I Like Jazz, Evidence, Duo Charuest-Ratté, Trio Michel Ratté and Wreck’s Progress and more recently with Nicolas Caloia, Lori Freedman, Sam Shalabi, and Peter Valsamis among others.

He was a member of the Peter Kowald Trio (1985-1990) with German bassist Peter Kowald and South-African drummer Louis Moholo, with whom he played extensively in Europe and the USA. He also played with several musicians from the US and abroad such as William Parker, Agustí Fernández, Nate Wooley, Georg Graewe, Roscoe Mitchell, Lê Quan Nin, Dominic Lash, Mark Sanders, Steve Noble, Richard Scott and Audrey Chen. Charuest has collaborated with electroacoustic composers Jean-François Denis, jef chippewa and Jean Piché.

He is currently involved in many projects with the following ensembles: duo Charuest-Caloia, Now and Then, Charuest/Shalabi/Caloia, the Ratchet Orchestra, Charuest/Ellis/Valsamis, a duo with British violist Benedict Taylor, a duo with dancer Alanna Kraaijeveld, and collaborates on specific projects with electroacoustic composer Gilles Gobeil and the Bozzini Quartet.

Charuest’s solo work has recently gained renewed momentum. He has always devoted most of his creative energy to improvisation in varying forms and contexts: free improvisation, encounters between improvisation and notated material (conventional and graphic notation, verbal instructions), ensembles with more apparent stylistic links to free jazz. In collective situations as well as in solo, his approach is characterized by his sense of form and his attention to the sonic properties as well as the formal potentialities of the material he works with.

This page was last updated in July 2023.