Oxymoremusic

Guillaume Orti (1969) started playing music with others at the age of 5. He waited until he was 12 before he could start the saxophone. His first teachers, Francis Montesinos and Francis Grand led him to the realms of jazz, classical and improvisation. He then studied for four years at the Avignon C.N.R. (Conservatoire National de Région). Robert Malbec and Jacques Pierson were his classical saxophone teachers and André Jaume his jazz teacher. He graduated with mentions at the age of 19. He also studied with Yoshk’o Seffer during his teens.

In 1989 he moved to Paris and has been since very active and demanded in the field of improvised music of many forms. Not long after he met Benoît Delbecq in 1989, they founded the band Kartet (B. Delbecq on piano, Hubert Dupont on bass, Chander Sardjoe on drums) which was to become a creative reference for many younger musicians.

At the Summer time 1990 he attended to the Jazz Seminar of the Banff Center of Fine Arts (Canada) under the direction of Steve Coleman. Together with B. Delbecq and Geoffroy de Masure, he met in Banff many musicians he developed a long term musical relationship with, such as Jorrit Dijkstra, Steve Argüelles.

From the Kartet and the Banff experience he founded the Hask Collective (1993-2005) and developed connections with musicians in Belgium (the Aka Moon sphere), Holland (the TryTone sphere), in Finland (the Pepa Païninen sphere) .

Over the last fourteen years, he participated to a dozen of contemporary dance projects, as a performer as well as a composer. His field of experimentation also extends to combining music with literature.

He’s involved in many regular creative music projects such as KARTET, OCTURN (medium band based in Brussels and led by Bo Van Der Werf), REVERSE (with Olivier Sens on computer and Gilles Olivesi on sound), OXYMORE, THÔT TWIN (led by Stéphane Payen), BENZINE (Franck Vaillant quartet)…

He can be heard on more than 30 released CDs.