Jazzdor Strasbourg-Budapest | Claudia Solal – Benjamin Moussay (FR) | Louis Sclavis India Quartet (FR)

More than 20 years after their debut, and with three hit albums behind them - including the 2018 Victoire du Jazz Award nominee Butter in my Brain - the duo of Claudia Solal and Benjamin Moussay have set the world of arty pop-jazz songs alight with a new repertoire. Punk Moon is based on the singer's own English-language poems, inspired in part by American exponents of confessional poetry in the post-war era, including Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. The duo's sound of piano, modular synthesizer, vocals and effects is as self-explanatory and malleable as it is detailed and moving. Punk Moon 2025 will be released on disc in the spring of 2025 on Jazzdor.

In a career spanning several decades, saxophonist-clarinetist Louis Sclavis has not only become a well-known figure in European jazz, but has also maintained his passion for theatre, dance and film music. After his project Characters on a Wall (ECM Records), Sclavis and his fellow musicians began to develop a new repertoire. The name India refers to his first album as a bandleader, Chine, released in the early 1980s. The material is dominated by suggestive melodies and moods, underpinned by a stubborn throb and rhythms. "I have distant, vague memories of a theatre in Calcutta's harbour, a long train journey through the countryside, a night spent in a Kali shrine, brass bands parading at Ganesh festivals and the like. These impressions occasionally surface in my compositions, but my aim is to convey the sounds of a far-off landscape, more imaginary than real," Sclavis said.