Violinist
born February 11, 1956
died February 18, 2018.
Didier Lockwood, who has died suddenly at the age of 62, was a violin virtuoso whose musical interests spanned the worlds of jazz, classical music, opera, progressive rock and indigenous folk music from around the globe.
He was a musician whom France took to its heart and who had admirers all over the world. On learning of Lockwood’s death from a heart attack on the morning following a concert in Paris, the French president, Emanuel Macron said, “We will miss his radiance, his openness and his immense musical talent.”
Almost 40 years earlier, another notable Frenchman, the great jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli had told young British guitarist, Martin Taylor, “You must meet Didier, he’s a genius.”
Lockwood was born in Calais into a musical family. His father taught violin at the local conservatoire. His uncle Willy played bass and Didier’s older brother, Francis, who would become an influence and playing partner, played piano. The musical gene had been handed on by Didier’s grandfather, who gave the family their Scottish name and had settled in France after the First World War.
Didier, knowing Scotland’s fiddle music tradition, once told the Herald that he was disappointed that his Scottish grandfather had played the clarinet rather than the fiddle, thus robbing him of a connection to a Scottish musical legacy.
He was six when his father began teaching him to play violin and within seven years he was playing regularly with a theatre orchestra in Calais. His parents’ plan – his mother was an artist – was for Didier to become a concert violinist. However, in his mid-teens, Didier he heard fellow Frenchman Jean-Luc Ponty playing electric violin with Frank Zappa and instead of following the path expected of a prize-winning student from Calais Conservatoire, he caused some consternation at home by joining the French prog rock band Magma at the age of 17.
By this time his brother Francis had become a fluent jazz pianist and after Didier had spent three years touring and recording with the unique Magma, whose music suggested a fusion of Frank Zappa, Richard Wagner and Karl Orff, the brothers put a band together, Surya, which followed in the style created by guitarist John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. Didier also worked with the Magma spin-off, Zao, and went on to record with another legendary French band, Gong, and somewhere along the way he came to the attention of French composer and bandleader Michel Colombier.
It was while Lockwood was playing with Colombier that Stephane Grappelli heard him and pronounced him his “spiritual son”. Grappelli invited Lockwood to tour Europe and the manouche style of swinging jazz that Grappelli had finessed with guitarist Django Reinhardt stayed close to Lockwood’s heart for the rest of his life.
Lockwood released his first album, New World, in 1979 and moved easily between the swing style and jazz-rock as Surya finally released its first album in the early 1980s. Opportunities then came to play and display his incredible vitality with not just most of the leading European jazz musicians – pianists Martial Solal, Gordon Beck and Michel Pettruciani, bassists Niels-Henning Orsted-Pedersen and Henri Texier, drummers Daniel Humair and Aldo Romano among them – but also top Americans including Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.
As well as continuing to work with Martin Taylor after their meeting on the Grappelli tour (they later discovered that their Scottish grandfathers had served in the same regiment), Lockwood played manouche style jazz with guitarists Christian Escoudé and Biréli Lagrène and co-led an equally energetic jazz-rock band with former Miles Davis guitarist Mike Stern for some years. Their extraordinarily vital gig at the Blue Lamp in Aberdeen in 2010 won’t easily be forgotten. Nor will Martin Taylor’s duo concert with Lockwood in Perth Theatre in 2004, when the violinist roamed the auditorium while playing with superb agility and real depth of expression.
In 1996 Lockwood had shown another side of his creativity by composing and performing a concerto for electro-acoustic violin with the Orchestre National de Lille. He also composed other orchestral works, including a piano concerto and a piece for symphony orchestra and jazz big band as well as a jazz opera and the classical-jazz fusion project, Jazz and the Diva with his then wife, soprano Caroline Casadeus. He had recently recorded an album with his second wife, Patricia Petibon, also a soprano, featuring music from around the world, and he released what will now be his final album, Open Doors, in January.
Lockwood’s energies weren’t restricted to playing music. He taught, too, and in 2000 he founded the Didier Lockwood Music Centre in Dammarie-les-Lys, southeast of Paris. The school gained national accreditation and hosted the Russian virtuoso Maxim Vengerov, who described Lockwood as “a legend of our time”, as a student in 2005.
Lockwood’s many awards included the Victoire de la Musique, the Golden Django, the Grand Prix of Sacem, and the Django Reinhardt Prize. He was also awarded the Légion d’honneur and appointed Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is survived by his second wife, Patricia Petibon, and three daughters
Rob Adams
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here