Brad Spurgeon's Blog

ASNIERES-SUR-SEINE, France – For the last week I had been worried sick about how well I might match up with one of France’s coolest jazz pianists and his upright bass player for a gig I had been invited to do at the Gala of the European Corporate Chess Championship in my hometown last night. Fortunately, for two very good reasons I ended up not having a problem playing with Ahmet Gülbay at all: the first was because Ahmet and his bass player are such great musicians with so much experience playing in jam sessions that they had no problem at all adapting to my own idiosyncratic musical style, so far away from their own. The second reason was that I had also been invited at the last minute to play in the tournament itself on the team of the Ile de France Region, as I am a member of the club that organized the event: Le Grand Echiquier, of Asnières-sur-Seine. And if my music is idiosyncratic, my chess game is even more so. But having spent the two days prior to mounting the stage losing all but the last game of my six rounds in the tournament, I had just the “blues” and pent up emotion to get up on stage and try to take my revenge by channelling all that amassed energy into song. It seemed to work. Above all, the tournament and gala were of such emotional proportions for me and everyone who attended, that we were all winners in the end. Oh, yes, and what made that gala so special and perfect for this blog which has always had as its main central theme the open mic or open jam session, the gala stage itself ended up turning into something of an open mic, or open stage, as it turned out we had several fantastic musicians in the room who ended up taking the stage.

This extraordinary chess tournament is in only its second year, but anyone who visited over the last couple of days might have imagined it has been around for decades: There were more than 50 teams of four players each from around Europe, and the players ranged from the un-rated to among the top in the world, including the former world champion, Veselin Topalov, of Bulgaria. Another of the top rated players of the event is the extraordinary Ukrainian, Igor Kovalenko, who after three years fighting on the frontlines of his country’s war with Russia, has recently taken a break to return to chess. He with his Ukraine team won the European Team Championships last month. Yesterday, his team – Greco – won the tournament in Asnières.

The tournament is the fruit of a fantastic synergy between the founding director of the Grand Echiquier, Jean-Claude Moingt and the longtime mayor of Asnières-sur-Seine, Manuel Aeschlimann. The two of them met in the 1970s while playing tournaments as teenagers, and while the one pursued his political career – without ever losing his love for chess – the other concentrated his energies in building the sport in France to the highest levels. Moingt first founded the Clichy chess club, which went on to become the strongest in the country for many years, fostering some of the top talents, before he became the president of the French Chess Federation from 2005 to 2011. A decade ago, the mayor called him up and told him he wanted to develop his city as a chess center in France. Today, my hometown since 1996 – where my son had begun playing chess as a young child and reached a top level before quitting competitive chess at age 15 – is now the seat of the French federation, and the home of the Grand Echiquier, which has among its players some of the top in the world, including Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, the former world blitz champion, the rising young talents Javokhir Sindarov and Andrey Esipenko, and the Jules Moussard, a former French champion. Not to mention the somewhat retired former champion, Joel Lautier. The team has won the European Cup several years in a row. And as a final statement of its chess ambitions, there is a sector of the city that now features streets and a park bearing the names of several chess champions.

At this weekend’s European Corporate Chess Championship, under the aegis of the European Chess Union, other better known players included the reigning French national champion, Marc’Andria Maurizzi, and the former champions, Moussard and Laurent Fressinet. Another Frenchman was Jean-Marc Degraeve, who just won the European seniors title. There were many other extraordinary players from several other countries. But one of the most interesting of those who took part in what is above all a meeting between top companies and chess players to try to use the game as a team building and intellectually stimulating exercise was the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Sir Demis Hassabis, who also happens to be the founder of Google DeepMind. Hassabis was something of a child prodigy in chess, among many other things, and he remains attached to the game. There were several teams from Google present at the boards. I played the seventh round against Google’s #2 team, and I lost in the final seconds of the game on board 4 against what I can only describe as a brilliant young woman. I mean, could my ego accept she be anything else?

My only excuse for losing so many games was that I have absolutely no experience playing in this particular time control: It was 15 minutes for each player, PLUS 5 seconds added after each move at the end…. I got so excited and nervous several times as the game arrived close to its end that I threw away great positions for total failure! Including in the Google game!

Anyway, as I said, this whole thing just lifted my angst, anger, and motivation to try to get rid of all of that pent up whatever by playing the music during the gala last night. But there remained that other challenge that I mentioned: The top jazz musicians I was matched up to play with. It was Jean-Claude Moingt, the director of the club, who called me from the big Cap d’Agde tournament a week or so ago to invite me to play with his friend, Ahmet Gülbay, who is not just a great pianist, but a chess player himself and Gülbay’s regular bass player, Laurent Souques.

As anyone who follows this blog knows, any small amount of talent I may have in music – a little more than in chess nevertheless – is entirely unrelated to jazz. I am a huge fan of jazz, however, and have even seen some of the great pianists live – like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and McCoy Tyner. So I was trembling with respect and trepidation. Ahmet and I exchanged phone calls and I sent him four songs I thought we could try from my repertoire, so he had a bit of time to look at what he was up against! (“Mad World,” “Crazy Love,” “Wicked Game,” and “What’s Up!.”)

As it turned out, I need not have worried. Ahmet is such an experienced pro, with more experience than I can even dream of with his longtime leading of the Duc des Lombards open jam session, dates at the New Morning and other prestigious venues, while Laurent Souques is also so talented and wide-ranging a bass player, that not only did we play those scheduled songs, but we did many more from my repertoire as well. The night then finally progressed with us playing not only together, but also taking duties on the stage individually in order to give each other breaks, as the celebration went on for several hours. The people attending the gala therefore, had a night of hearing my rock, pop, folk, and Ahmet and Laurent’s classic jazz and show tunes. Ahmet has a massive repertoire, and a facility to glide across the keys like I have rarely heard.

Then, one of those musical things happened that I run into again and again: The night turned into a kind of open mic session! First, a young guy who had been sitting beside Ahmet for several tunes, asked me when I was up doing a solo if he could play the piano. I agreed. When he immediately launched into Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, and did it like a master, I quickly exited the stage! Seeing this, another participant in the tournament asked if he could take my guitar and the stage for a song. I agreed: Out camee the Oasis standard, “Wonderwall!” Then, by the end of the evening, we discovered we had another singer in the crowd, and all I can say is that when she took the mic, I counted my blessings that she ended up singing AFTER my gig had basically finished. I did not want to go up on stage after a fabulous, trained opera singer, who has also mastered the French pop and jazz standards doing a couple of Piafs and several other songs. She was fantastic, and unfortunately, I did not get her name. But the combination of Ahmet, Laurent and this singer was brilliant: Especially for the many French people still left at the end of the long gala evening. And the most surprising of all, I think, was when the President of the Asnières chess club, Yves Marek, a top politician, and also the president of the “Hall de la chanson, Centre national du patrimoine de la chanson, des variétés et des musiques actuelles,” got up on stage and sang a comical ditty from Belgium!

In the end, I mentioned synergy between the two lead architects of the emergence of Asnières-sur-Seine as a French chess mecca; but what astounds me personally is how I could find myself quite by chance not only being a great fan – and mediocre player – of chess and living in this town, but being able to merge that with my other great love of music. There was another thing that made me feel even more at home at the European Corporate Chess Championship, and that was after my decades of reporting on big companies in the context of both my technology writing and my Formula One writings at the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, I felt I had stepped into a zeitgeist in that area with people I felt close to as well – even all those horrible people who beat me at the chessboard!

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