tangram

La compagnie Tangram

The Compagnie Tangram works to bring together audiences and disciplines through the rich and varied creations of the OZMA ensemble and its artistic director Stéphane Scharlé.

Since 2010, La Compagnie Tangram has produced and presented over twenty creations, as well as cultural events for all audiences, in the Grand Est region of France and elsewhere in the world. The compagnie promotes an adventurous and abundant creative approach that pushes back the boundaries between artistic expressions, and features innovative jazz in dialogue with cinema, photography, visual arts and dance.

Under the artistic direction of drummer and composer Stéphane Scharlé, the company supports the multiple projects of the OZMA ensemble, which has just celebrated twenty years of exciting projects and over 500 concerts in 50 countries on four continents.

Founded in Strasbourg in 2002, OZMA the jazz quintet is the flagship ensemble, the backbone of the company’s projects, with eight albums to its credit, including Ray Anderson invited by Rage Against The Machine, John Coltrane jamming with Radiohead, and Billy Cobham playing with the best brass bands in New Orleans.

But OZMA, from duo to decatet, is also a multitude of collaborative, multidisciplinary creations with artists from the four corners of the globe.

Large ensembles such as OZMA Orkestra or OZMA & DARPANA with Indian musicians and dancers from Gujarat, and a genuine sensitivity for music to image with photo-concerts: 20! a tribute to two decades of democracy in South Africa, 1914-1918, d’Autres Regards reviving archives from the First World War, or more recently Crossroads, a tribute to international social photography, as well as numerous cine-concerts on masterpieces of the seventh art including C.T. Dreyer’s Vampyr, Buster Keaton’s The Three Ages, and Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World.

Since 2020, the company has included in its catalog Stéphane Scharlé‘s personal projects, based around a new instrument, the Augmented Drum. This is a unique electronic control system, with software tools and a revolutionary interface that enables loops to be created and a multitude of electronic sounds and effects to be superimposed in real time on acoustic drumming. New projects incorporating this device include the solo cine-concert Paris qui Dort, the duo Neddermann-Scharlé and the afro-futurist quartet SARKABA.

Team