There is a particular quality to the light at Petite Pinède on a July evening — the Provençal sun already low, the stone pines casting long shadows across the boulevard, the sea air carrying just enough salt to remind you where you are. Antibes has hosted jazz under these conditions for decades, and the crowd that gathers here knows the ritual: find your place, let the warmth settle into your shoulders, and wait for the first note.
On 9 July 2026, that first note will come from Shems Bendali — trumpet raised, percussion within reach — as The Big Tusk take the stage at Petite Pinède for the Jammin Summer Session. Alongside Bendali: Théo Duboule on guitar, Andrew Audiger on keyboards, and Nathan Vandenbulcke on drums. Four musicians, one programme, and the particular electricity that only a live outdoor concert in this corner of the Côte d'Azur can generate.
The Ground Beneath the Music
Petite Pinède sits on boulevard Edouard Baudoin, a short walk from the old town walls of Antibes, close enough to the Baie des Anges that the geography feels like a deliberate choice. The venue is part of the broader Jazz à Juan constellation — one of the oldest jazz festivals on the French Riviera, with a lineage stretching back to 1960 when it first brought American jazz masters to the Côte d'Azur. The Pinède Gould, its larger sibling, has hosted Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and Ella Fitzgerald. Petite Pinède offers something more intimate: a tighter frame, a closer audience, the sense that the musicians are playing not at you but with you.
That intimacy suits a group like The Big Tusk. The instrumentation — trumpet, guitar, keyboards, drums — is a configuration that resists easy categorisation. There is no bass guitar anchoring the low end in the conventional way, which means the harmonic and rhythmic responsibilities shift, overlap, and redistribute themselves across the four players. Audiger's keyboards carry the weight the bass might otherwise hold; Vandenbulcke's drumming holds the architecture together; Duboule's guitar moves between texture and melody with the freedom that only comes when there is no rhythm guitar beneath it. And over all of this, Bendali's trumpet: an instrument that, in the right hands, can sound by turns like a conversation and a declaration.
'The trumpet has this quality,' Miles Davis once observed, 'of going straight to the emotional centre.' The Big Tusk seem to understand this instinctively.
What to Expect on the Night
The Jammin Summer Session series is built around the idea of jazz as a living practice — not repertoire to be preserved but music to be made, in the moment, in the heat of a Mediterranean July. For a visitor arriving at Petite Pinède on the ninth, the experience will be shaped as much by the setting as by the setlist.
Antibes itself rewards the hours before and after a concert. The old town — Vieil Antibes — is compact enough to walk entirely, its narrow streets lined with the kind of food markets and small restaurants that have not yet been optimised for tourism. The Musée Picasso, housed in the Château Grimaldi where Picasso worked in the autumn of 1946, is a ten-minute walk from the venue and closes in the early evening, making it a natural prelude to a night of music. The port, where the superyachts moor in summer, offers a different register entirely — a reminder that the Côte d'Azur contains multitudes.
The concert on 9 July is listed as a récital — a word that implies a certain formal intention, a programme with shape and direction rather than a loose jam. Four musicians this precise, in a space this well-suited to close listening, should make for an evening that rewards attention.
Come with time to spare. Find a seat with a clear sightline to the stage. Order whatever the bar is offering. The pines will do the rest.