Claude Whipple is a Uruguayan-American guitarist, singer, composer and soundpainter based in France. His work spans jazz, rock, reggae and tango. He currently performs with A Drop of Poison, an acoustic trio with Leïla Soldevila on double bass and Jean-Pascal Molina on drums, playing his own songs and music by Tom Waits. He also performs in Little Rock Story, the family show he created about the history of rock, and with the funk collective Le Grind.
He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and jazz guitar at the CIM with Pierre Cullaz and Malo Vallois. His previous projects include the jazz quintet Quinte & Sens, the quartet The Lips and the tango group Serpientes. He also spent ten years (2006–2016) as guitarist and backing vocalist for singer Flox, whose music combines reggae, dub and electronic music.
Alongside performing and composing, he teaches Soundpainting, the multidisciplinary sign language for real-time composing. Trained and certified by Walter Thompson and François Jeanneau, he is active in the international Soundpainting community and teaches at Université Gustave Eiffel. He founded the Soundpainting training programme at Real Time Music, where he teaches alongside Walter Thompson, François Jeanneau and Éric Chapelle, and leads the La Palette workshops. A conservatoire teacher, he also founded and coordinated the modern music departments in Bondy and Pantin.
