It's been nearly 30 years that Denis Charolles, founding member of the company Les Musiques à Ouïr, has been contaminating the most established musical idioms with his acute sense of playful deconstruction. Formed around his drums (but also his bugle, his metallophone and his 'modified' trombone!) with two of his most faithful friends – Christophe Girard on accordion and Julien Eil on clarinet and saxophones – the Orange Sockets trio, inflated to the size of a small polymorphic orchestra by the multiplication of instrumental combinations, invents a music that is both highly sophisticated in its chamber-inspired writing and definitely whimsical in its approach carried by the irreverence and spontaneity of the most radically cheerful improvisation.

At the dawn of his 70th birthday, drummer and percussionist Kahil El'Zabar is now a living legend on the Chicago jazz scene. Faithful to the syncretic theses of Great Black Music, he has developed a baroque universe, re-visiting all the forms taken by black music since the beginning of the 20th century – from the original blues and gospel to house music, via jazz, rhythm'n'blues, funk and hip hop... Leading his new quartet in which the sparkling phrasing of the trumpet of Corey Wilkes shines, he alternates in pieces between the modal improvisations inherited from John Coltrane, an homage to soul saxophonist Eddie Harris and long esoteric sequences bringing out the soul of a ghostly Africa from upsetting melodies.