Album Title: Landscapes of Eternity

Release Date: 27 March 2026

Landscapes of Eternity is the new album from multi-award-winning French flautist, composer and vocalist Naïssam Jalal. Out on 27th March 2026 (Les Couleurs du son), the album explores the connection between music, nature, and spirituality at the heart of the Hindustani tradition. Although Landscapes of Eternity is shaped through a contemporary and deeply personal lens, it is rooted in the language of Indian classical music. Traveling alone in North India for several months, Jalal wandered through landscapes and sacred sites, met masters and musicians, absorbed the sounds, smells and sensations of this unique journey and in doing so invites a new way of listening to the world. From this experience emerged an intimate, contemplative, and profound repertoire, where the flute becomes the vehicle for an inner journey rooted in the breath of life.

Landscapes of Eternity also draws on Jalal’s many years of exploring the intricacies of Hindustani music and the sensory and imaginative worlds it evokes. The instrumentation blends modern and classical elements, and she brings together Indian classical musicians Samrat Pandit on vocals, Sougata Roy Chowdhury on sarod and Nabankur Bhattacharyaon tablas with Franco-Brazilian pianist Leonardo Montana, Brazilian drummer Zaza Desiderio and Flo Comment on tanpura, to create a sound that is both current yet grounded in tradition.

The album weaves together a series of landscapes experienced at different times of day, capturing the distinct impressions they left on Jalal during her months of travel. Over the course of her travels, she would often wake up before sunrise, taking advantage of the quietness of dawn to offer prayers with her flute in the countryside, in temples or on the banks of rivers. In the rice fields at dawn is an expression of one such excursion, composed mainly in the scale of a dawn Raga, the solemn Raga Bhairav. Inspired by the monsoon season in Goa, Soft rain on a silent river was composedduring a time of great pain and self-reflection in Jalal’s life. After it was written, she chanced upon a poem by Indian mystic and poet, Kabir, from which she borrowed the line, “Dive into that Ocean of sweetness: let all errors of life and of death flee away,” to frame her personal story. Tears in Delhi’s fog – the first piece she wrote for the album – is a tour de force of contemporary jazz infused with Hindustani traditions, in the spirit of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. Bath of forgiveness in the moonlight – a reference to pilgrims bathing in the waters of the Ganges to ask for forgiveness – was inspired by two Ragas, Raga Yaman, the king of the Ragas, played between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. in the evening, and Raga Behag, usually played between 9 p.m. and midnight. It also incorporates another verse by Kabir. Inner Landscape in raag Kafi is a bright and playful Raga much favoured by 20th century French composers, as well as John Coltrane. The 6/8 rhythm is a trance groove, which Jalal encountered not only in West Bengal but also in North and West Africa.

The process of healing through music is consistent in much of Jalal’s work – something she explored in her 2023 album Healing Rituals – and plays an intrinsic role in her life. Through music she has overcome intense pain and suffering and as listeners we are privileged that she has let us in to this profoundly private process. In her own words, “My music is healing, and it rescued me first. With every small step, I felt a great sense of gratitude slowly smooth over my pain. Gratitude from knowing that I could gently extract myself from this eternity, from this dissolving of myself into the present moment. From knowing that I could slowly return to myself, feel centred inside my body, even while keeping the memory of the peace I had experienced in my travels.”