Rêve d'Eléphant Orchestra

Telluric jazz - This atypical orchestra of seven musicians has been offering joyful, unusual, generous, sensual, poetic and pleasantly crazy music for over twenty years. Before becoming Orchestra, Rêve d'éléphant was a dance show. From these origins, it keeps in its genes the love of rhythm and movement. 

Since its creation in 2000, the group has released five albums and has generated two versions: one theatrical and literary, Odyssée 14, and the other percussive and electronic, RéPercussion. 

The special sound of the Rêve d'éléphant Orchestra makes the group recognisable from its first notes. Didier Levallet - composer, French double bass player and director of the Jazz en Clunisois festival - talks about it better than we do: "(...) it's an orchestra that comes from Belgium... A title that I find quite appropriate because it's a bit surreal and we know that Belgium is a country that not only for reasons of internal politics, but also for artistic reasons has many links with surrealism. And this relatively large orchestra of seven musicians produces music that is at the same time very exuberant, very generous, very free, but also very rigorous in its writing, very colourful, very joyful. It's music that surprises us in the right sense of the word, very open to many things, many influences, that goes from one thing to another in a completely natural way; I don't find it artificial at all. Today, musicians have the possibility to pick from everywhere, and sometimes it's just pointless editing. It's not world music, it's still jazz, because it's the way of making music that counts, whatever the sources; besides, I don't think there are any literal borrowings from outside music, from world music, but it's an open state of mind."

Around the core group formed by Pierre Bernard, Michel Debrulle, Michel Massot and Stephan Pougin, who were present from the very beginning, we can find

on Racines du Ciel and Lobster Caravan 

LAURENT BLONDIAU trumpet, flugelhorn | JEAN-YVES EVRARD guitars | ETIENNE PLUMER tablas, drums, percussion

on Pourquoi pas un scampi ?

BENOIST EIL guitars | ETIENNE PLUMER tablas, drums, percussion | ALAIN VANKENHOVE trumpets, electronics

on Odyssée 14

NICOLAS DECHÊNE guitars | THIERRY DEVILLERS lyrics, vocals | JEAN-PAUL ESTIÉVENART trumpet, buggle | DAVID HERNANDEZ vocals, dance | ETIENNE PLUMER tablas, drums, percussion

on Dance Dance

NICOLAS DECHÊNE guitars | CHRISTIAN ALTEHÜLSHORST trumpets | LOUIS FRERES bass, electronics