Jean-Pierre Batt

Jean-Pierre Batt is a French violist, player of historical woodwind instruments, and harpsichord maker from Paris. He co-founded Les Ménestriers, a pioneering French medieval folk band that performed on period instruments. Batt appeared on the first seven LP albums, released between 1969 and 1976 by Disques Du Cavalier label, playing on bass de viol, dessus de viole (the highest-pitched viol), as well as swahm and crumhorn (double-reed woodwinds), and occasionally on "jew's harp." Little is known about Jean-Pierre Batt's earlier life and activities beyond the mid-1970s; he's been very private and didn't enroll in the Register of Early Music or contemporary guilds of instrument-makers. In 1969, he constructed an Italian harpsichord after the 1677 model by Pietro Faby of Bologna (fl. 1677—1691), made by antique methods from the recycled old ship's mast. The first mention of Batt's harpsichord, likely referring to the same instrument, is in the 1976 article "Paris: A Survey" by Fiona McAlpine, published in Oxford's Early Music journal, Vol 4/No.1: "[…] I have also heard a resonant Italian harpsichord made by Jean-Pierre Batt, late of Les Menestriers." This harpsichord currently belongs to British keyboardist and collector Paul Simmonds, heard on several recordings — two Colin Tilney's LP albums, 1973 English Virginal Music on Argo and 1979 Dowland Transcriptions on L'Oiseau-Lyre, plus 1996 Concerning Babell & Son CD on Ars Musici by Trio Basiliensis (where Simmonds plays). In her 2012 memoirs, Catharina Meints Caldwell, a renowned American cellist and Oberlin's associate professor of Viola da Gamba and Cello, briefly mentioned Jean-Pierre Batt as "a Parisian friend," who helped Catharina and her husband, oboist Jim Caldwell, snuck out copies of newly-discovered unpublished music of Le Sieur de Sainte-Colombe. Jean-Pierre photocopied a few duets at Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, allowing Meints and Caldwell to give the early US premiere of Sainte-Colombe's works that subsequently became the staple of the viol repertoire.