French flutist-vocalist-composer Sylvaine Hélary is a rare bird. She has played in Eve Risser’s White Desert Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Jazz under the artistic director Frédéric Maurin. She will become the director of the ONJ in 2025, as well as with guitarist Marc Ducret, and hip-hop poet Mike Ladd, and she co-leads with bassist Sarah Murcia the quintet La tête de Lark.
Rare Birds, with the newly-founded, nine-musician Orchestre Incandescent, is Hélary’s most ambitious project to date. This project offers a unique musical setting to the poems of 19th-century, American poetess Emily Dickinson,
