The Orchestre National de Jazz and IRCAM present Ex Machina, a programme conceived by the American saxophonist Steve Lehman and Frédéric Maurin, artistic director of the ONJ. In fact, both musicians share a number of aesthetic questions and ambitions that make it possible to compare their respective careers. Both have proposed material that has been widely praised as music that has inventive forms, with sophistication in its palettes of timbres, and elaborate patterns in which the music can be played, notably the manner in which the soloist integrates into the construction of the different pieces they have written.

Their shared ambition to go beyond traditional orchestral limits has particularly fostered their strong interest in the theories of spectral music, a contemporary practice notably represented by such French composers as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail (under whom Steve Lehman studied at New York’s Columbia University). Based on the decomposition of the music’s acoustic properties, spectral music has allowed the emergence of new composing principles and orchestration techniques, notably in microtonal compositions that favour merged perceptions of the timbres, revolutionising the impressions that can emanate from orchestral works.

This project is the result of a collaboration with the Musical Representations team at IRCAM, headed by Gérard Assayag, and explores for the first time the possibilities of interaction between the instrumentalists and the machine within a large jazz orchestra.
By integrating devices created using Jérôme Nika’s DYCI2 environment in the composition process and in the soloists’ improvisations in real-time, the computer becomes, in turn, a generator of electronic orchestrations for the composers and an improvisation partner for the musicians.