Sylvain Barou, from Brittany is considered as one of the best flute players. Having played mainly Irish and Breton traditional music, Sylvain has been part of some of the most exciting projects of the genre and played with the foremost bands and musicians such as Donal Lunny, Padraig Rynne, Guidewires, Altan, Guichen, Alain Genty, Denez Prigent, Jacques Pellen-Celtic Procession, Erik Marchand, Smadj, Gildas & JB Boclé, Keyvan Chemirani, Trilok Gurtu, Prabhu Edouard, Vincent Ségal (arranger with Sting) Sandip Chatterjee, Karim Ziad, Adnan Joubran, Dan Ar Braz, Yann-Fanch Kemener, Gilles Le Bigot, Soig Siberil, Yvan Cassar, Liz Carroll, John Doyle, Andy Irvine, Mairtin O'Connor, Paddy Glackin, Seamie O'Dowd, Paddy Keenan, Laoise Kelly, Fred Morrisson... he has been seen playing at some of the major festivals and venues such as Glasgow Celtic Connections, Festival Interceltique de Lorient, Festival de Cornouaille, Festival des Vieilles Charrues, Les Tombées de la Nuit, Transmusicales, Paléo Festival, Ennis Trad Festival, FMM Sines, Théatre de La Ville, Jazz à Vienne, Bercy, Stade de France, Musiques Nomades in Nouakchott, Tanger Festival, Dranouter Folk Fest, etc...
Today, Sylvain travels the world with his own lineup and a new trio with irish legendary musician Donal Lunny and Padraig Rynne, Sylvain is also participating to several projects with breton jazz guitarist Jacques Pellen, including a new exciting collaboration with jazz drummer extraordinaire Trilok Gurtu and a new quartet called Offshore. He also collaborates with musicians from other musical realms such as iranian percussion wizard Keyvan Chemirani, indian musicians Prabhu Edouard (tabla) Sandip Chatterjee (santoor) and Sukdhev Misra (violin) and Cretan genius Stelios Petrakis (lyra, saz, laouto) and multi-instrumentalist wizard Efrén Lopez.
He is still very active in the breton "fest-noz" scene (the famous dance nights of Brittany!) and also experiments regularly with other musical styles that he has been studying (indian classical music, sufi music from Turkey, persian music, greek folk...) and it is also not rare to hear him creating incredible soundscapes in jazz/ambient/experimental projects these days.
Sylvain also plays other instruments such as indian bansuri, armenian duduk, zurna, mey, kabazurna and tulum (turkey) and is also a very accomplished uilleann-pipes player and also biniou kozh (traditional bagpipe of Brittany)