French jazz violinist, Swedish nyckelharpa player, and composer Clément Janinet has a new European chamber jazz quartet, Garden of Silences, featuring Norwegian trumpeter and electronics player Arve Henriksen, fellow French contemporary music accordionist Ambre Vuillermoz, and German-Romanian double bass player Robert Lucaciu. The new quartet recorded its debut album at BMC Studio in Budapest in June 2025.
Janinet is known as a hyperactive musician who is influenced by American minimalism, Ornette Coleman’s free jazz (and he recorded for BMC the album, Ornette Under The Repetitive Skies III, 2022), and European folk traditions as well as musical traditions from north-east Brazil, Cameroon, and the Maghreb. Each of his past projects bears the mark of a taste for mélanges and collages, and Garden of Silences is no different.
The new quartet explores points of intersection between modern, chamber jazz, Baroque and Renaissance, minimalism, and world music, in a patient, introspective manner. The quartet plays Janinet’s genre-defying compositions, and interprets compositions by Baroque and Renaissance composers, French viol player Marin Marais, German-Danish organist Dieterich Buxtehude, Italian Emilio de’ Cavalieri, English singer and lutenist John Dowland, and French cellist Mario Boisseau.
Garden of Silences was inspired by American trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas’ chamber jazz album, Charms of the Night Sky (Winter & Winter, 1998), which had the same instrumentation, minus the nyckelharpa. The new album offers a poetic, elegant, and intimate dialogue of Janinet’s wide-ranging musical influences and interests, led by Janinet, Vuillermoz, Henriksen, and anchored by the commanding bowing work of Lucaciu.
These dialogues are spiced with subtle timbral explorations, microtonal improvisation, and expressive meditations. The simple themes liberate the quartet from the constraints of musical traditions and genres, and leave enough space for the individual voices to shine and weave an imaginary, melancholic, but deeply beautiful, ten-movement suite.
Eyal Hareuveni
Clément Janinet (violin, nyckelharpa), Arve Henriksen (trumpet, electronics), Ambre Vuillermoz (accordion), Robert Lucaciu (double bass)
