To start rhe music
Jean-Paul SABATHE began learning to play the piano at the age of eleven and was studying harmony with the professor of harmony of the Conservatoire National de Musique.
It was only later on in his life that he began to be interested in the blues piano, a music which intrigued him.
So, the author frequented musical bookstores, realising finally that this kind of blues piano had not been the subject of any serious study, and that the available scores were not really representative of the kind, from a qualitative, rather than quantitative point of view.
It was thus a certain feeling of frustration which led him to make his own transcriptions, starting from C.Ds bought in record shops specialising in old recordings for the serious collector; the recent appearance of specialised computer software enabled him thereafter to improve considerably the quality of his transcriptions.
His curiosity brought him to analyze the pieces that made up his collection into three volumes, GENIUS OF THE BLUES PIANO, and thus to accompany each piece with an explanatory presentation.
Having proceeded to this analytical step, starting from transcriptions as close as possible to the blues extracts, it was then possible for him to carry out a synthesis (a thesis might be a better description) entitled SYNTHESIS ON THE AUTHENTIC BLUES PIANO *.
He has also been seen in bars providing a repertory of blues and boogie-woogies, and readily blows (but especially sucks) his diatonic harmonica blues solos in the best tradition of Sony Terry or Doc. Watson.
* This work is now completed, only in French for the moment, although he has not yet obtained all the licences needed, legally impossible to circumvent, from the publishers of the pieces.