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Jacques Bailhé

Composer and multi-instrumentalist

About Me

What happens when you mix years touring on bass with Big Lost, stir in producing hundreds of tracks for film and commercials including with Dolly Parton for her theme park, a drum solo behind a fire-breathing stripper in a roller rink in Bangkok, sitar lessons in India and Nepal, and chanting prayers as a Buddhist monk in Thailand?

I guess my style is reckless abandon. I like to explore ideas through instrumental music, often for narrative, or other dance. My album and scenario Shiva in flagrante tells the tale of a Harley-Davidson riding Shiva falling in love with the goddess Parvati and the birth of their child in the final track titled “The Facts of Creation.” That story had to be told in Jazz.

I’m a multi-instrumentalist: sitar, guitar, drums, piano & keyboards and things that make interesting sounds. Why so many composers seem to abandon melody is hard for me to understand. Isn’t it probably the most powerful aspect of music? I don’t think much in chords. I seem to work from independent melodic lines in the tradition of counterpoint, although I hasten to add I’ve never studied formally except for a Harmonic Analysis class in a UCLA Extension course. Among my musical inspirations are early works by Weather Report and Miles Davis, Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, ethnic artists like Ravi Shankar and Zap Mama, and others like Hendrix, The Beatles, and producers and engineers like George Martin and Geoff Emerick. Their Beatles albums are, well, what can you say? The sound of the tracks is just plain amazing. Engineering is the yin of the yang. I can't sight read, but studying scores, especially by Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Berg, John Adams, Gil Evans, and Miles has been a revelation. They make it all look so simple.

My grandfather, George Bailhé was an award winning pianist and arranger, working for Cecil B. Demille in the 1930’s. Published a piano study book that’s used in India. Comes in a fancy leather bound volume too. My great uncle Gaston Bailhé was a fine violinist whose score collection is held at Indiana University. My father sang on the radio and appeared in the movie College Days, also in the 30’s. My grandmother, Lisa Nichols Bailhé, was an opera singer.

Traversing the world of filmmaking and composition, I graduated magna cum laude from Art Center College of Design with a BFA in Film Production and acquired deep experience in a wide array of music, composing and producing with some of Los Angeles’s finest composers, studio players, and engineers for film and advertising, including a number of years producing tracks for Dolly Parton for her theme park advertising. I’d say I’m self-taught except I learned so much working with those people and in my early days, talking music after gigs in bars, but also from engineers at Paramount, Capitol, Sony, RCA Hollywood, Jimmy Hite at Margarita Mix, and the legendary Buzz Knudsen at Todd-AO on a feature documentary Pacific High produced by Roy Disney.

My Jazz Story

I love jazz because it's open-ended exploration and defies a fixed definition. As Louis Armstrong said, "If you gotta ask, you'll never know."