Erwan Keravec

Erwan Keravec is a highland bagpipe player, composer and improvisation artist. On the search for unusual sounds as well as ways of playing and listening to his instrument that lie outside of its original cultural setting, Keravec explores improvised music, free and noise jazz and has established a repertory of contemporary music for solo pipes, trios with solo voices and choirs. With an interest in movement and settings that are associated with new creation, he also write, plays and improvises for the field of dance.

Trained by the violin maker and bagpipe player Jorj Botuha and educated in the playing technique and the repertory of the Scottish bagpipe, Erwan Keravec made his debut in Lokoal Mendon’s Bagad Roñsed and as a duo with his brother Guénolé Keravec at Bombarde. He began to explore free jazz and improvised music in 1996 with La Marmite Infernale and ARFI-Bigband – Association a la Recherche d'un Folklore Imaginaire – (“Coeff 116”, 1997). He met the Basque singer Beñat Achiary in 2009, with whom he recorded “Ametsa” (2011). Since 2007, he has been on the lookout for a style of bagpiping that removes itself from its original environment using the projects “Urban Pipes I” (2007) and “Urban Pipes II” (2011) for which he wrote alone and improvised with his brother Guénolé and with Beñat Achiary.

Keravec has worked with, amongst others, Philippe Leroux, José-Manuel López López and Oscar Strasnoy and collaborated with choreographers and dancers such as Gaëlle Bourges (amongst others, “Ce que tu vois”, 2018), Cécile Borne (“Robes fanées”, 2008), Boris Charmatz (“Enfant”, 2011) und Jordi Galí (“Anima”, 2022).

In 2019, he expanded the solo bagpipes repertory with Goebbels/Radigue/Glass with Heiner Goebbels’ “no28/502” (world premiere in 2018 at Festival Schlossmediale Werdenberg, Switzerland), Éliane Radigues “OCCAM OCEAN XXVII” (world premiere in 2019 with Le Vivier in Montreal, Canada) and “Two Pages”, an adaptation of the work of Philip Glass for bagpipes in C. in 2022, he once again took up Terry Riley’s famous piece “In C” in an immersive version. “In C // 20 PIPERS” placed the audience at the centre of a circle of sound with a diameter of 20 metres, which was formed by 20 bagpipers. This piece is also an opportunity for the development of new instruments by the violin makes Tudual Hervieux and Jorj Bothua. In 2024, Erwan Keravec continues his research into repetitive music with the programme “8 PIPERS FOR PHILIP GLASS”, which consists of four pieces written in 1969 and which is performed by an ensemble of eight bagpipers.