A double studio album for chorus and 13 instrumentalists, co-written with Ellinoa, Sylvaine Hélary, Leïla Martial and Grégoire Letouvet.

Rituels is a collective studio work for chorus and thirteen instrumentalists, built around seven pieces that together form a world of illusion evoking time as an eternal return. True to his stated wish to open the ONJ to multiple, singular aesthetics during his tenure as artistic director, Frédéric Maurin co-wrote the original material with four of the most adventurous voices on France's contemporary jazz scene: Ellinoa, Sylvaine Hélary, Leïla Martial and Grégoire Letouvet. The compositions draw freely on ancient texts gathered in Jerome Rothenberg's landmark anthology The Technicians of the Sacred, and address life, death, joy and grief, love and sex, and the wider range of experience that Rothenberg's collection frames as universally human and indivisible. Musically, the album unfolds as a contrasted world of vivid, poetic flashes, setting powerful ensemble crescendos alongside a wide spectrum of orchestral colour, an omnipresent sense of fantasy, and intoxicating solo turns from the ensemble's featured voices, among them Ellinoa, Leïla Martial, Linda Oláh and Romain Dayez. Released in 2020 as a double CD on ONJ Records, Rituels earned a top, four-T rating from Télérama and was singled out among Citizen Jazz's selections of the year. Positioned within Frédéric Maurin's broader programme of commissioning composers of sharply different aesthetics for a variable-geometry, intergenerational ensemble, Rituels stands as the most explicitly ritualistic and vocally driven of his ONJ productions, using chorus and instrumental forces together to stage something closer to invocation than performance, and confirming the orchestra's continuing capacity to reinvent its own format from one project to the next.

Track Listing

Disc 1:

• LE MONDE FLEUR
• RITUEL (1ère PARTIE)
• RITUEL (2ème PARTIE)
• A MÉTAMORPHOSE

Disc 2:

• FEMME DÉLIT
• LOON
• NAISSANCE(S) DE LA NUIT
• AIÔN

Additional Details

Label: ONJ Records

Genre: Jazz

Language: English

Run Time: 72 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 11/06/26

UPC: 3521383461365