CharlElie Couture at the 2020 French Cultures Festival in Houston

2020 French Cultures Festival is taking place throughout the month of March in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. The festival aims at celebrating French language and cultures through cultural and educational events. (Check out the French Cultures Festival webpage)

The Festival will be officially launched during the 8th annual kick-off concert, a free and family-friendly event open to the public to be held at Discovery Green park in downtown Houston, TX. The concert will showcase a bouncing mix of French / Indie & Blues rock, folk, pop and soul sounds with three francophone and American bands: CharlElie Couture (France), Ariane Roy (Québec) and Vodi (Houston, TX).

More info: http://frenchculture.org/events/10832-2020-french-cultures-festival-kickoff-concert

CharlElie Couture

With works spanning music, photography and painting, CharlElie Couture has more than 25 albums, 17 film soundtracks, 20 books of his work, and performed 1,500 concerts worldwide.

The French-American artist, born in 1956, in Nancy, France, studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts). In 1978, for his PhD, CharlElie Couture chose the theme of “polymorphism of the mind” which he still explores today. On this occasion, he self-produced 12 chansons dans la sciure – a first disk that was released in a thousand copies, which attracted the attention of professionals, and thanks to which he received an invitation to perform during the Printemps de Bourges, a major annual music festival in France – as well as presented photos, texts and paintings. He, in 1981, was the first French artist to sign with Island Records label, famous for other artists such as U2, Grace Jones, and Robert Palmer. The resulting album Poèmes Rock, recorded at the Electric Lady Studio in New York, was produced by Houston-based publisher Michael Zilkha and was a major commercial success. He moved to New York in 2004, where he later created « The RE Gallery », both a workshop and a gallery. His work has been on exhibition in Paris, Nancy, Strasbourg, Rodez, Sète, and Montpellier, France, and in Montreal and New-York.

Included in his multidisciplinary works, CharlElie Couture has composed close to 20 film soundtracks; in 2019, 24 years after the original release of Toy Story, he re-recorded the French version of the leading song You’ve got a friend in me, which he also sang in the original.

His last studio album, Même pas sommeil, was released in 2019.