Isabelle Oliver - Impressions

The Jazz Podcast

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30d ago 35:12

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The French Impressionists revolutionized the art world by privileging the emotional and spiritual perception of the natural world over its literal reproduction. Hailing from France, harpist Isabelle Olivier has always felt an innate affinity for Impressionism and discovered its echoes within her other artistic passions, primarily the parallel worlds of jazz and classical music.

On her vibrant new album, Impressions, Olivier conjures a bold musical landscape from the lush and stirring hues of her diverse influences. Inspired by tenor sax icon John Coltrane’s revered composition “Impressions,” she explores the confluences of jazz and Impressionism with a painter’s instinct for complementary colors, forms and textures.

“I think about Impressionism as a combination between elegance, minimalism, spectral notions, feelings and vibes – things that you can feel but you cannot explain,” Olivier describes. “Looking at Impressionist art is like becoming part of nature, to the point where you forget that you’re human. I love this feeling.”

Out now in Europe and in the US/Canada on March 21, 2025 via Olivier’s Rewound Echoes imprint, Impressions features a versatile and genre-fluid ensemble that includes the harpist’s sons – pianist and accordionist Tom Olivier-Beuf and electronic musician Raphael Olivier – along with a string quartet (violinists Mathias Naon and Anne Le Pape, violist Cyprien Busolini and cellist Jean-Philippe Feiss) and drummer Baptiste Thiebault. In addition to Olivier’s Impressionism-inspired compositions, the album is interspersed with a number of group improvisations that suggest or were suggested by impressionistic ideas – from the misty, crepuscular “Fog on the Lake” to the stark, pointillist “A Pizzicato Life.”

With its many references to Chicago art and artists, Impressions brings together the two metropolises that Olivier calls home – the Windy City and the City of Lights, Chicago and Paris. The album bridges various landmarks for the harpist, including her roots in jazz and classical music, as well as her love for aural and visual art. These seemingly divergent poles have never been separate in her mind – she was introduced to her instrument in the first place by Duchess, the harp-playing cat in Walt Disney’s jazz-inflected 1970 animated film The Aristocats. Not long after finishing her classical studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Lyon, she co-founded the jazz quartet Océan with the Moutin Brothers, well known figures on the French and American jazz scenes.

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