"Very serious - he plays the violin like Coltrane played saxophone,” is how American jazz violinist Stuff Smith described Jean-Luc Ponty after hearing him play for the first time in the '60s. Ponty was 23 in 1966 when, together with three legends - Smith, his countryman Stéphane Grappelli and Svend Admussen - he recorded the Violin Summit, which started him down the path of success. Even then, Grappelli considered Ponty to be a mature artist who had developed an entire new way of playing his instrument, which followed the suggestive sound of the bebop saxophonists. After this, he was invited to appear together with the Modern Jazz Quartet and to record with George Duke, among others. Later on, at Frank Zappa's urging, he and his family moved to the United States. Everyone wanted to play with him, and play with him they did: including, apart from Zappa, both Elton John and John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Of the dozen records he released with his own band in the '70s and '80s, all of them landed in the top five on Billboard's jazz charts. In the '90s, he took a sojourn in the world of African rhythms and worked working with Al Di Meola and Stanley Clarke, and with Miroslav Vitouš and Lalo Schifrin. Of the musicians in his current band, he has been working together with keyboardist William Lecomte since the turn of the century, and with bass guitarist Guy Nsangué Akwa since the '90s. Both are well-versed in West African music, which is no surprise in the case of the bassist, since he was born in Ivory Coast. In 2007, he introduced Damien Schmitt to Ponty, and the drumming phenomenon immediately became a member of the team.


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