Dominique Gaumont (8 January 1953 – 10 November 1983) was a French

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...

guitarist who played alongside notable musicians such as

Miles Davis Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musi ...

, the

Art Ensemble of Chicago The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz group that grew out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians ( AACM) in the late 1960s. The ensemble integrates many jazz styles and plays many instruments, including "little ...

, and

Michel Portal Michel Portal (born 27 November 1935) is a French composer, saxophonist, and clarinetist. He plays both jazz and classical music and is considered to be "one of the architects of modern European jazz". Early life Portal was born in Bayonne on ...

Biography

Dominique Gaumont was born on 8 January 1953 in

Saint-Mandé Saint-Mandé () is a high-end commune of the Val-de-Marne department in Île-de-France in the eastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris. It is one of the smallest communes of the Île-de-France by land area, but i ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

, son of Édouard Gaumont, a former Guyanese politician. After his musical studies, he became attracted to the electric guitar, in particular Jimi Hendrix, and began playing in public in 1970. In 1974, he was invited by the trumpeter

to join his band and tour the United States. Davis was quoted as saying, "Dominique gave me that African rhythmic thing". Gaumont appeared on '' Dark Magus'', recorded in March 1974 at New York's