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Joëlle Léandre

French double bass player, improviser and composer, Joëlle Léandre is one of the dominant figures of the new European music. Trained in orchestral as well as contemporary music, she has played with l’Itinéraire, 2e2m and Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain. Joëlle Léandre has also worked with Merce Cunningham and with John Cage, who has composed especially for her – as have Scelsi, Fénelon, Hersant, Lacy, Campana, Jolas, Clementi and about 40 composers.

Quartet Noir
Urs Leimgruber, Marilyn Crispell, Joëlle Léandre and Fritz Hauser in their first concert as a quartet, Victoriaville, 15 May 1998: eight improvisations growing from small details into heated four-way exchanges.
Taxi
The debut album of the French master improviser from the early 80s finally available again! her impressive release-list over the years - solo, duos, trios, big projects – shows a range of works with most of the current improvisers, to new music (Cage…
For Baritone Sax, Double Bass & Drumset
This 2013 meeting of baritone saxophonist Daunik Lazro, bassist Joëlle Léandre, and drummer Paul Lovens is a deep dive into spontaneous creation at the highest level of free improvisation, uniting three of Europe’s most adventurous and seasoned impro…
Jeux de mains
Jeux de mains, a striking new album from acclaimed double bassist Joëlle Léandre and inventive composer-performer Rémy Bélanger de Beauport, arrives as a vivid exploration of spontaneous musical conversation. Recorded with immediacy and an acute sens…
L'Histoire De Mme. Tasco
1993 release ** "This trio, comprised of bassist/vocalist Jöelle Léandre, violinist Carlos Zingaro, and accordion and clarinet player Rüdiger Carl have, under the auspices of Léandre's inspiration, come together to create a musical mosaic under the g…
Lifetime Rebel
This amazing boxset is the complete recording of Joëlle Léandre's Lifetime Achievement evening that opened the 2023 issue of Vision Festival at Roulette, Brooklyn, NY, USA. It is most likely to best summary of the first 50 years of Joëlle Leéandre in…
Live In St. Johann
"The legend of the world of improvisation and the field of double bass virtuosity, Joelle Leandre, needs no introduction. She is one of the most expressive and original artists in the world! The singer and composer Elisabeth Harnik is probably alread…
Great Star Theater, San Francisco
Joëlle Léandre and Lauren Newton have been performing together for nearly 30 years, having met in the mid-1990s in Paris. Throughout that time, they have always favored exploring the textures of music that are not arranged conventionally but rather a…
Miniatures
Since emerging in the early 1980s the French bassist, composer, and vocalist Joëlle Leandre has ignored the gaps between improvised and composed music, jazz and new music, inventively braiding post-Cagean concepts with the free jazz ferment she witne…
Hasparren
*2023 stock* "Recorded in Hasparren, in the French basque county, we find two of the country's most eloquent free improvisers in a fantastic duo album. Daunik Lazro is on baritone sax and Joëlle Léandre on bass. Their music is a sheer delight. It is …
Kozmik Zigzag
Edition of 200 copies. Jean-Jacques Lebel lives and works mainly in Paris. The artist and political activist was chief editor as early as 1955 for the Florence-based art, politics, and poetry magazine Front Unique. In 1960, he staged the first Happen…
Off Course !
"There is a landscape of sonic ideas, of banging, of entity, of new forms of stimulating the body and of prehension moved by our human, urban, maybe even cubist surroundings, or by the big wild country where, we say, music does what it wants. Unless,…
Bla Bla Bla Duo
Double bass legend Joelle Leandre and young Catalonian drummer virtuoso Nuria Andorra together. Two generations of the improvised music world, two different approaches to improvisation, and one incredible world of music!
After You Gone
Four double bassists, Barre Phillips, Joëlle Léandre, William Parker and Tetsu Saitoh, live at Victoriaville on 23 May 2003 in memory of Peter Kowald: bowed and plucked basses and voices in a shared farewell.
Play As You Go
A grand meeting of three luminaries in the fields of improvisation, avantgarde and experimental music -- live recorded by the national Czech radio station, as part of the festival VS. Interpretation 2014 in Prague. Personal notes from Joëlle Léandre …
The Space Between with Joëlle Léandre
Recorded live at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, Berkeley, CA, November 2 & 3, 2002. The Space Between brings together the freedom of spontaneous improvisation with a number of diverse traditions and ideas, not the least of which is …
Beauty / Resistance
Not Two Records presents Beauty / Resistance by Joelle Leandre. Recorded live at the Krakow Jazz Autumn Festival 2019, in Club Alchemia, in Krakow, Poland, Fall, 2019, by Rafal Drewniany. Joelle Leandre, bass. Zlatko Kaucic, drums, percussion. Mateus…
Désordre
**250 copies** Two instruments linked, calling to each other, leaping around, recalling and fooling around with the music of Joëlle Léandre, improviser, composer and double bass player, and Alexandra Grimal, composer, singer and saxophone player. Wit…
Solar Wind
Solar Wind was recorded by Robert Dick (glissando flute, bass flute, contrabass flute, piccolo, voice), Joëlle Léandre (contrabass, voice) and Miya Masaoka (koto, percussion). Three independent jazz masters base their music on different characters, s…