Helen Gillet
Advance tickets $18; day of show.. $20
Award winning cellist, live looping artist, singer, improviser, producer, composer and performer, Helen Gillet has been nominated as a rising star by downbeat magazine. She is currently on tour with her solo show and frequent jazz collaborators. Gillet was born in Belgium, raised in Singapore and Chicago, classically trained and had already begun to experiment with improvisational music prior to her arrival in New Orleans in 2002. She flourished into one of the most unique, talented, and beloved artists in the Crescent City. She’s known for her eclectic palette – which includes avant-garde jazz, French chansons, funk, alternative rock, and Bohemian flair of the Velvet Underground.
Helen Gillet is a singer-songwriter and surrealist-archeologist exploring synthesized sounds, texture, and rhythm using an acoustic cello. For someone with her varied background, New Orleans, with its mix of cultures and musics, seemed like a natural place to call home. She was born in Belgium, raised in Singapore from the ages of 2 to 11, and routinely shuttled between the homelands of her Belgian father and American mother. Over the years — working in New Orleans with musicians of all stripes, from avant-garde jazz and classical to pop and funk — Gillet has developed a singular polyglot style. The core of her work is solo performance with live looping, layering cello parts and vocal lines. Rhythmic figures emerge with bowed or plucked ostinatos or a variety of rubbing and slapping on the body of the cello, then enhanced with melodies played or sung in her haunting alto. Her mixed musical vocabulary is commensurate with her disparate travels — French chanson of the 1940s, Belgian folk tunes sung in Walloon, a mix of rock and punk from the likes of PJ Harvey and X-Ray Spex, and her own affecting originals, like audience favorite “Julien,” sung in a mix of French and English. Gillet’s solo performance is known for its enigmatic quality as she fabricates each song with innovative use of the cello and true mastery of live looping technology.
