biographie

Atypique, le parcours de Laurent Zerat l’est sans conteste. Après quelques années de guitare classique en 1966 il se trouve une guitare électrique en 1973 et monte un groupe avec un certain Louis Bertignac. Mais Laurent Zerat a une autre vocation : la médecine qu’il va pratiquer en passant comme interne à New York en 1981 où il travaillera aussi sa culture musicale à grand renfort de Miles Davis, James Brown, Mink DeVille.

Il finira par rentrer à Paris où il sera un médecin pathologiste passionné. En 2000 il part en Patagonie chez son ami Florent Pagny où il renoue avec ses premiers amours : la guitare et la musique. Le même Florent Pagny le convie à jouer un titre avec lui à l’Olympia pendant 17 soirs en 2003. En 2012, à 55 ans, il sort son premier album Route 55 et revient en 2015 avec Women un album fidèle au Rock qu’il célèbre en français et en anglais. Avec Women il s’affirme en temps qu’auteur compositeur interprète. Florent Pagny est en featuring dans une belle reprise de The Partisan.

De nombreuses chroniques saluent Women comme le magazine Rolling Stone « du rock cool, genre californien, chanté en anglais et en français par un Frenchy, docteur de son état, qui connaît son rock seventies sur le bout du Stéthoscope. Le savoir faire du songdoctor émerge clairement ». Mélange de douceurs et d’âcreté , d’un bout à l’autre Women est à la fois grave et léger, profond et subtil.

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There is no escaping one’s destiny ! Whichever turn life takes, what is due to happen will happen. Laurent Zerat’s way has always been going through music. He set of on this trip with classical guitar lessons back in 1966, then the 70’s being the years of electrical guitar, so was the guitar that Laurent Zerat bought in 1971. The 70’s were also rock music years. In 1973, Laurent Zerat started a band with some friends among whom was a certain Louis Bertignac, future ‘Telephone’. In his career he embarks on two trainings: playing drums at the Dante Agostini school, and medicine – notably as an intern at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Since his vocation as a doctor is a serious one, Laurent Zerat takes the pulse of the city. This pulse is nothing but the rhythm of the music of Miles Davis, James Brown, Jazz Messengers and Mink Deville.

This accomplished doctor returns and practices his art with passion. Always having in mind these notes, these melodies that live inside him and haunt him, but that he stocks until year 2000 deep inside his head. And deep inside his heart. The year 2000 was a pivotal year, with a dire need to recharge himsels after an upheaval in his personal life. Like anybody else in a similar case, Laurent Zerat turned to a friend whose name is Florent Pagny. A friend who hosts him in his home in Patagonia, in an isolated place propitious for searching one’s inner self; a friend who in 2003 invited him to play a song with him at the Olympia in 17 night shows. So this is where his life brought him! Ever since that experience Laurent Zerat has been tirelessly working on his instrument. It is also at the age when we know how to overcome obstacles, for instance when he starts singing.

Gradually, in the year of his 55th birthday (2012 as he was born in 1957), he released his first album “Route 55”. A beautiful record that presents a rich range of music styles (blues to disco to rock-and-roll), without these influences being too pervasive. It is so because he has had time to ingest, digest them, distilling them into his own compositions and enriching them even better. Today, with his faithful musicians, Laurent Zerat asserts himself more as a songwriter, composer and a singer, with the second album WOMEN
Eric Tessier