The product of migrations spanning North Africa, the Middle East, Western Europe and the American Midwest, saxophonist Michaël Attiassettled in New York City in 1994, where he currently enjoys rich activity as bandleader, sideman, composer, and improviser. Exposing himself to a wide range of situations and collaborations, he has created a supple, passionate and uncompromising language in which to render the diversity of his imagination and concerns. Since 2005, he has released four albums as a leader, including Credo, Renku, Renku in Coimbra, and Twines of Colesion and, in 2012, Spun Tree.

Attias has played in groups led by such luminaries as Anthony Braxton, Paul Motian, Oliver Lake, and Anthony Coleman; performed in New York City at the Village Vanguard, the Stone, and countless other venues; appeared at international festivals such as the North Sea, Banlieues Bleues and the Istanbul Jazz Festival. As a sideman, he has recorded with some of today´s most compelling and original musicians: Paul Motian, Masabumi Kikuchi, Tony Malaby, Ralph Alessi, Marty Ehrlich,John Hébert, Nasheet Waits, Sean Conly, Ken Filiano, Kris Davis, Taylor Ho Bynum, and many others.

His projects as a leader include his long-standing trio Renku, with John Hébert and Satoshi Takeishi; Twines of Colesion, with Hébert, Takeishi, Tony Malaby, Russ Lossing; Spun Tree, with Ralph Alessi, Matt Mitchell, Sean Conly, Tom Rainey; Face/Swap, a collaborative duo with percussionist Satoshi Takeishi. 2011 saw the debut of the eleven piece Clinamen Orchestra, including all of the players above + vibraphonist Matt Moran, hornist Mark Taylor and trombonist Ben Gerstein, and the collaborative quintet Fugu, with Alessi, Waits, Thomas Morgan and Jacob Sacks.

Attias has also established himself as creator of live musical scores and sound designs for theatre including, since 2008, four collaborations with legendary director Robert Woodruff: Chair, Notes From Underground, Battle of Black and Dogs, and Autumn Sonata. These were produced at such prominent New York and regional theatres as the Yale Repertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and The Duke on 42nd Street.

Michaël Attias was named a 2000 Artists' Fellowship Recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts and was awarded a MacDowell Arts Colony fellowship in Fall 2008. From 2003 to 2008, he curated the critically acclaimed and highly successful new music series, Night of the Ravished Limbs, at Barbès in Brooklyn, welcoming a wide array of established names such as Barre Philips, Tim Berne, Mark Helias, Jason Moran, as well as an impressive list of rising New York talent such as Mary Halvorson, Eivind Opsvik, Gerald Cleaver, and many more.



Earlier
Born in Haïfa, Israel in 1968, Attias spent the first part of his childhood in Paris, where he attended the music conservatory and studied violin for a brief period. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1977. An early passion for the music of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman led him to start playing the alto saxophone at the age of 15 while attending the Children’s Theatre School, under the guidance of great Minneapolis saxophonist and composer Pat Moriarty. Avid for adventure and experience, he graduated from high school as a junior and traveled for a year in Europe before enrolling at New York University as a Film and Music student. Judging that school was interfering with his education, he dropped out after the spring semester, went back to Paris for a year where he wrote a novel called Twines of Colesion (1000 pages thankfully destroyed), came back to the US for an eight-month cross-country trip that took him from New York City to San Francisco via Mexico, and returned to Paris in 1989 where he became bartender at the IACP, a music school founded by legendary bassist Alan Silva. There he met such heroes of the ex-pat scene as Steve Lacy, Sunny Murray, Frank Wright, Bobby Few and others. He recorded with a pianoless quartet dedicated to the music of Thelonious Monk, Four in One (In Situ 1992), recorded his first album as leader and composer with a quintet of French musicians, released as part of Igal Foni’s For Elevators (Jazzis, 1993). In January 1993, at the prompting of Anthony Braxton, he moved back to the US, sat in on his classes at Wesleyan University for one semester and finally moved to New York the following winter.