Olivier Glissant

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Olivier Glissant is a composer, conductor, producer and founder of Blacksalt Records. He created the Brooklyn Orchestra in 2016, a symphony orchestra working to fuse kinds of music that rarely meet (classical, jazz, world music, contemporary, etc.). Glissant spent his childhood in his native Martinique, then went on to study piano in Paris before attending Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1988, where he studied music production & engineering, composition and conducting. His influences are many, including South American, Caribbean and African music, as well as European classical music. This brought him to collaborate through the years with Philip Glass, Norah Jones, Bill Frisell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vinicius Cantuaria, Pete Seeger, John Zorn, Tico da Costa, Thiago Thiago de Mello, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Yasmin Levy, Michael Harrison.

He has more recently conducted his own creations with the Brooklyn Orchestra – Symphony No. 1, the symphonic poems “Charmeuse de Serpents”, “Echaurren”, and “Les Nuits d’Egypte” – at Carnegie Hall and the United Nations in New York, as well as in Paris in the Panthéon-Sorbonne’s Cour d’Honneur. He is currently working on new pieces to be released in fall 2018, as well as an opera, “Concert Baroque”, based on the novel by Alejo Carpentier.