The Rabbit Hole NOLA Presents: Helen Gillet Sundays
4/28 Featuring Helen Gillet + Nir Felder
About Helen Gillet
Helen Gillet is a singer-songwriter and surrealist-archeologist exploring synthesized sounds, texture, and rhythm using an acoustic cello. For someone with her varied background, New Orleans, with its mix of cultures and musics, seemed like a natural place to call home. She was born in Belgium, raised in Singapore from the ages of 2 to 11, and routinely shuttled between the homelands of her Belgian father and American mother.
Over the years working in New Orleans with musicians of all stripes, from avant-garde jazz and classical to pop and funk, Gillet has developed a singular polyglot style. The core of her work is solo performance with live looping, layering cello parts and vocal lines. Rhythmic figures emerge with bowed or plucked ostinatos or a variety of rubbing and slapping on the body of the cello, then enhanced with melodies played or sung in her haunting alto. Her mixed musical vocabulary is commensurate with her disparate travels French chanson of the 1940s, Belgian folk tunes sung in Walloon, a mix of rock and punk from the likes of PJ Harvey and X-Ray Spex, and her own affecting originals, like audience favorite “Julien,” sung in a mix of French and English.
Gillet’s solo performance is known for its enigmatic quality as she fabricates each song with innovative use of the cello and true mastery of live looping technology.
https://www.instagram.com/helengillet/
https://www.facebook.com/HelenGillet
https://www.youtube.com/@HelenGillet
About Nir Felder
Nir Felder (born Dec 30, 1982) is a Grammy-winning American jazz and session guitarist, composer, and music producer. In addition to leading his own band, Felder has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists across the jazz and popular music genre spectrum, including Diana Krall, Brad Mehldau, John Mayer, Rina Sawayama, Ben Platt, Chaka Khan, Keyon Harrold, Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, PJ Morton, Snarky Puppy, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Erykah Badu, Common, Anderson .Paak, Dave Chapelle, Dave Matthews Band, Benson Boone, Gov’t Mule, Ben Stiller, Vulfpeck,