Walls and Bridges

COMPOSER/ PIANIST

France

Biography

Born in 1976, Chassol discovered music at the age of four. Son of an amateur saxophonist father, this “black kid” joined the Conservatory as others join the army. He would spend sixteen years there, starting out by learning harmony, scales, and melody as essential illumination for what would follow. Traumatized at a very tender age by the soundtrack for the film The Towering Inferno, the young Chassol quickly understood that he would not release his first album at 20. No, indeed. His initial ambition was to compose for the cinema, covertly uniting sound and image in order to produce movie music of great elegance in the tradition of Jerry Goldsmith, Michel Magne, and Quincy Jones, among others. In the mid-1990s, Chassol practically disappeared. He headed for darkly-lit movie houses with immediate boarding for fifteen years of composition for the big screen, television, and advertising. Chassol was the shadowy composer for films he indefatigably illustrated by stamping his own story on them. For Igor Stravinsky (to get back to him), music was “wallpaper” for film. One could not have said it any better. Between advertising jingles, Chassol found the time to become an orchestra conductor from 1994 to 2002 and then discovered the world of pop music while accompanying Phoenix and Sébastien Tellier on Politics (2004), for which the young double of Jean-Michel Basquiat did most of the arrangements. That same year, Chassol met up with that bearded musician again on the original film soundtrack for Narco, which he sprinkled with an erotic languidness and violins caught in an embrace.