The Bridge’s driving principle is to work in collaboration with the production and performance structures that work year-round in a given territory, in France and the United States. This chain of association of some forty venues on both sides of the ocean allows each tour to be organized in a logic of reciprocity and mutuality.

 

Along the same lines, The Bridge defends a model in which long-distance travel is only justified for transatlantic trips and for tours of two to three weeks devoid of plane-hopping, thus developing responsible practices based on sustainable territorial ties.

 

By fostering the interpenetration of these two “ecosystems”, bringing musicians (but also programmers and promoters from both continents) together, The Bridge has directly or indirectly sparked many new projects outside its immediate perimeter: in 2015, “Chicago in Paris,” in collaboration with the Théâtre de la Ville, the Théâtre du Châtelet, and the Festival d’Automne; in 2018, Olivier Benoit’s Orchestre National de Jazz playing Mike Reed’s “The City Was Yellow”; in 2019, its own exceptional festival at the Espace Cardin-Théâtre de la Ville and La Dynamo, and the international colloquium “W. E.B. Du Bois, Scholar, Activist and Passeur between America, Europe and Africa”, with the University of Chicago in Paris, the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux and several institutions.

 

The Bridge also shares its network and practical experience in North America with jazz and improvised music club and festival curators in France, and vice-versa, as well as with musicians and their promoters who want to understand and reach markets with different legal, administrative and fiscal quirks.

 

More than a network of musicians, The Bridge is also, therefore, a network of actors and structures supporting the same differentialist aesthetics–producing events, information and knowledge, around these musical and sociomusical practices.