Renaud Crols
Born on July 13, 1983 in Libramont
Started playing piano at 6 and violin arround 9. Entered the Conservatoire Royal de Liège at 17, and obtained first prize in violin, chamber music and music theory. Parallel to his studies, he turned to improvisation and jazz.
At the age of 21, after settling in Brussels, he undertook trips, notably to Romania, and became interested in several "world musics". Did a series of concerts with the famous Romanian gypsy group "Taraf des Haïdouks".
At 24, he toured Canada (Quebec) with a dance group, and two other musicians: Bert Cornelis, a Belgian zither player, and Partha Mukherjee, an internationally renowned Indian tabla master...
From December 2008 to July 2009, he took part in the world tour of the show "Pitié" by the famous Belgian choreographer Alain Platel, with a group of ten exceptional dancers, a countertenor and two highly talented sopranos, and 7 other musicians, including Fabrizio Cassol (saxophone), Stéphane Galland (drums) and Michel Hatzigiorgeou (bass), the musicians who make up Aka Moon, and Magic Malik, the famous French flutist. This tour gave him the opportunity to visit several European countries, as well as Japan and Congo, which was his final destination. The show was the subject of a film produced by Arte, first broadcasted around April 2010.
With Renaud Dardenne on guitar, Tcha Limberger on violin, Alexandre Tripodi on viola, and Sam Gerstmans on double bass, he created the group “Les Violons de Bruxelles”. They recorded their first album in March 2012, and it was released in September 2012. www.lesviolonsdebruxelles.be He travelled to India in December 2012 and began his exploration of Indian music with an Indian violin master in Varanasi.
In January 2016, he gave 3 concerts with Roby Lakatos (world-renowned Hungarian gypsy violinist), and Bireli Lagrène (excellent French jazz guitarist known throughout the world), on piano and violin, and it was a great success. In June 2016, with "Les Violons de Bruxelles", he traveled to Northampton, Massachusetts, US, to play and give lessons during the famous "Django in June". They are much appreciated and acclaimed there. He also met Giacomo Smith, a highly talented London clarinetist, and took part in a memorable concert with him.
He has taken part in a number of Cd recordings for various artists, as well as recordings for dance shows (such as the last 3 shows by Peeping Tom, the world-renowned Belgian dance company), and plays live with jazz swing groups (Reverent Juke, a group specially designed for Lindy Hop), gypsy jazz, afro-jazz (Achille Ouattara), Balkan music, rock, blues, folk, bluegrass (Bash), Cuban music (Tumbao Cubano), Brazilian, Greek, Indian (Nada Trio) and more. He has recorded and plays regularly with zitherist Joachim Lacrosse's band Sitardust (indo-jazz), whose self-titled album was released in November 2016.
In 2018, he took part on keyboards and violin in the album and project of Achille Ouattara, an excellent Burkinabe bassist, accompanied by Moise Ouattara, a magnificent Burkinabe drummer, and Désiré Somé, a guitarist also from Burkina and based in Belgium. In 2018, he played piano on the album by Reverent Juke, a swing band specially designed for the Lindy Hop dancer scene... This group is very popular with dancers, and he regularly accompanies them all over Europe at various events and festivals...
In 2019, he toured 11 countries in Africa with Achille Ouattara's project and played concerts all over Europe with Reverent Juke... When autumn came, with his group "Les Violons de Bruxelles », he did a series of concerts to celebrate the release of their 2nd album “Barcelona”, which was recorded in 2016. This album was ranked in the 10 jazz albums of the year 2019 ranking by “The Times”.
He left for Montreal at the end of October 2019 for 10 days to record videos for the “DC School”, an online Gypsy Swing school created by Denis Chang, and recorded an album with “Duved Dunayevski and the Transatlantic Five” , entitled “More than you know”. This guitarist is very faithful to the music and sound of Django Reinhardt in the 30s. The wonderful singer Tatiana Eve-Marie also participated in this album. This one was officially released at the beginning of December 2019.
Langues : Dutch, English, French
