Steve Lehman x ONJ: a large jazz ensemble merges with AI-driven, IRCAM-built electronics for the first time, on Frédéric Maurin's Ex Machina.

At a moment when artificial intelligence was becoming an increasingly inventive and consequential presence in music creation, American saxophonist Steve Lehman and ONJ artistic director Frédéric Maurin set out, with the technical support of IRCAM, to bring it directly into large-ensemble jazz. The result, Ex Machina, is a genuinely shape-shifting work, distinguished by the live interaction it stages between the ensemble's musicians and the machine itself, and by what the ONJ describes as the first integration of generative and interactive electronic processes within a large jazz orchestra. At the heart of the record is Dicy2, an AI software system developed by researcher Jérôme Nika, which the album weaves together with real-time composition and the improvisations of sixteen exceptional soloists, treating artificial intelligence not as a novelty effect but as a genuine compositional partner alongside the ensemble's own inventive writing. Critics responded to the project's ambition: Jazz Magazine's Franck Bergerot called it one of the highlights of the ONJ's entire career, regardless of era, citing its unprecedented ambition and the intensity brought to it by the ensemble's improvisers, while Xavier Prévost, also in Jazz Magazine, described the record as intense and fascinating from start to finish. Conceived jointly by Lehman and Maurin in collaboration with IRCAM-STMS in Paris, Ex Machina extends Maurin's broader tenure-long project of commissioning composers with sharply distinct aesthetics for the ONJ's variable-geometry ensemble, but pushes that project further than any prior chapter by making the technology itself, rather than a single guest composer, the collaborator that reshapes the orchestra's sound.

Track Listing

• 39
• Los Angeles Imaginary
• Chimera
• Alchimie
• Ode to akLaff
• Jeux d'anches
• Les treize soleils
• Speed-Freeze (part 1)
• Speed-Freeze (part 2)
• Le seuil (part 1)
• Le seuil (part 2)

Additional Details

Label: ONJ Records

Genre: Jazz

Language: English

Run Time: 51 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 11/06/26

UPC: 3521383477083