Leïla Olivesi's African Rhapsody: a luminous, prize-winning journey through jazz, poetry and plural identities, with an all-star French octet.

Pianist, composer and conductor Leïla Olivesi stands as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary French jazz. Double winner of the Best of Jazz 2025 awards -- Best Musician and Best Conductor of the Year by JazzMagazine and JazzNews -- and laureate of the prestigious Django Reinhardt Prize from the Académie du Jazz, she arrives with her seventh album African Rhapsody, a work of rare ambition and singular beauty.
Rooted in the plural identity of its creator -- Mauritanian and Corsican by heritage, Parisian by practice, cosmopolitan by instinct -- African Rhapsody is a musical journey that moves from the ancient library of Chinguetti to the streets of New York, from the maquis of the Mediterranean to the depths of the African continent. It is not nostalgia, nor exoticism. It is something altogether more honest: a composer reckoning with her own geography, and transforming it into sound.
Her hand-picked Octet brings together the finest musicians of their generation: Quentin Ghomari on trumpet, the incandescent Baptiste Herbin on alto saxophone and Manu Codjia on guitar. Together they navigate Olivesi's richly layered writing with the fluency of long-time collaborators, balancing collective momentum with luminous solo voices. The music breathes, surges, and dances -- latin grooves coiling around jazz harmonies, orchestral colour opening into joyful, full-throated swing.
The extraordinary Camille Bertault and the choir Poetic Birds lend their voices to a suite drawing on some of the greatest poetry from the African literary tradition: Léopold Sédar Senghor, David Diop, and Djamila Olivesi. Words and music intertwine here with natural grace, neither illustrating nor competing, but genuinely co-existing.
Awarded the CHOC by JazzMagazine and INDISPENSABLE by JazzNews, and nominated for Best Album of the Year by the Académie du Jazz, African Rhapsody is a record that earns every one of its accolades. This is jazz at its most generous, most rigorous, and most alive.

Track Listing

• African Rhapsody
• Corsica
• Wayne Left Town
• Blue Chinguetti
• Little African Flower
• Joy
• Aurore
• Afro Queen Poetic Birds Suite
• Les Nuits
• Un jour, le Silence
• New york

Additional Details

Label: Attention Fragile

Genre: Jazz

Language: English

Run Time: 30 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 06/05/26

UPC: 3521383499399