Jazz
ONJ Records · 22 May 2026
A double album, eighty-five minutes and twelve pieces as a way into the work of Carla Bley, who died in October 2023. “With Carla” is the first programme of Sylvaine Hélary’s tenure as artistic director of the Orchestre National de Jazz, the orchestra the French Ministry of Culture set up in 1986, and the arrangements are signed by her and the saxophonist Rémi Sciuto. They aren’t reproductions of Bley’s own versions: the word they use is extensions.
It starts with the strings. “Musique Mécanique”, eleven minutes six, mixes chamber music, a melody with a Spanish tilt and a flute solo from Hélary; “Préludvi” is the door into “Útviklingssang”, with Juliette Serrad’s cello out front and Sciuto’s alto covering a lot of ground; and “Ups And Downs” opens on a musical saw that vanishes immediately, making room for solos from trumpeter Quentin Ghomari and tenor player Hugues Mayot. It’s the only track on the set that swings conventionally all the way through.
The second disc is the more varied of the two. “Wrong Key Donkey” moves fast and carries the least usual solos here, Fanny Meteier’s tuba and Jessica Simon’s trombone; “Hypothèses…”, one of Sciuto’s two pieces, is a slow orchestral block opened by Antonin Rayon’s Hammond organ that leads into “Religious Experience” and “Major”, both with church-music references; and “End Of Vienna” closes on cello, flute and piano with the classical root showing. The eighteen musicians on the recording change tempo constantly and abandon passages as soon as they’ve set them up, which is a very Bley way of going about it.
Of the twelve tracks, eight are her compositions. The other four are two pieces by Sciuto, Bley’s own arrangement of “Exaltation”, by Carl Ruggles, and one track with no composer credit: a third of a tribute’s programme isn’t by the person being honoured, and across an eighty-five-minute double that shows, mostly on the first of the two discs. It was recorded in November 2025, mostly live at the Théâtre de Cornouaille in Quimper, with two pieces from the first disc done at the Auditorium-Opéra in Dijon, and comes out on ONJ Records, distributed by L’Autre Distribution.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents