Album title: Souffles

Release Date: 30 May 2025

‘Souffles’ (‘Breaths’) is the tenth album from award-winning French flautist and composer Naïssam Jalal. Written as an intimate and inspired dialogue between wind-instrument players it features Naïssam in a series of duets with eight prominent figures in jazz and improvised music, including Archie Shepp, Yom, Sylvain Rifflet, Thomas de Pourquery, Louis Sclavis, and Émile Parisien. Blending her own breath with these exceptional wind instrumentalists, Naïssam has created eight vibrant duos. New collaborations also enrich the project, with contributions from Robinson Khoury and Irving Acao, further expanding and energising the project. ‘Souffles’ will be released on 30^th May on Les Couleurs du Son.

The album includes the three singles Souffle #1 featuring Archie Shepp (14 March), Souffle #3 featuring Yom (11 April) and the recently released Souffle #7 featuring Louis Sclavis (6 May).

It was her 2023 album Healing Rituals that brought Naïssam recognition in the UK. With 5 reviews in both The Guardian and Songlines and airplay on Jazz FM and 6Music the album made a huge impact and as a result came the opportunity to perform at Gilles Peterson’s Impressions at the Fundation Maeght, Nice in 2024. Whereas Healing Rituals featured Naïssam with her band, Souffles is a series of duets and marks a new stage in her career, showcasing her talents as a composer, storyteller, and improviser.

“Several years ago,” says Naïssam, “I realised that I would probably never play with these fellow wind-instrument players who touch me in their musical expression but whom I have been rubbing shoulders with at jazz festivals for years. I realised that there would probably never be an opportunity to blend our sounds and our breaths unless I imagined it and provoked it.”

Described as a meeting place which questions the relationship of musicians to their instrument and to playing together, it also invites you to listen in a different way, to perceive music in its most intimate form.

“This album was born out of the desire to create a common sound with my peers, since as wind players, we share issues to which we each respond with our sensitivity and our uniqueness, in a more or less conscious way. How can we create a musical discourse by playing only one note at a time even if some of us try to escape this constraint by creating double sounds with our instruments or by using our voices? How can we approach melodic linearity in a horizontal way or by trying to recreate a certain verticality? How can we embody the role of the one who ‘fatally’ carries the melodic discourse? How do we deal with the fact of using something as intimate as our breath, the air in our guts, to create beauty? What does this baring of everything imply as regards our relationship to intimacy, spirituality and to other, the person who listens to us and hears the fruit of our exhalations?”

Composing for such luminaries was an interesting exercise, and Naïssam found herself asking how to compose specifically for each musician and express, with sound, the feelings that a particular musician’s personality inspired in her. Every piece needed to highlight each musician’s unique sound while also considering her own. In essence, she had to imagine a shared musical space in which they could mix without compromising their own distinctive voices. On all eight tracks, Naïssam has skilfully broken down musical boundaries and created a singular language that opens the door to a wide range of possibilities.

Naïssam concludes: “This album is the result of all these questions but provides no answers. It is more of a concrete experience, a joyful and enthusiastic attempt to share sound, breath and meaning, like children or friends, with generosity and kindness.”