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Born from the meeting between Paul Lay and Joël Suhubiette, Waves of Light extends their desire to bring together two worlds: that of the Les Éléments chamber choir, which since 1997 has been exploring five centuries of a cappella music, oratorio and opera, and that of Paul Lay, steeped in Western musical culture as well as African-American tradition, from jazz to blues, swing to gospel.
The chamber choir Les Éléments asked Paul Lay to compose a unique programme bringing together the two ensembles.
"Meeting Paul Lay and his jazz trio was exciting and took us into uncharted territory. The ensemble enjoys travelling to unknown lands. Actively immersing ourselves in the world of jazz, which most of us only knew as listeners, was a new experience. There was no question of transforming ourselves into a vocal jazz ensemble; that is not within our skills and was not the goal. Paul knew how to use the colour of the choir, his experience in contemporary music, and his flexibility in travelling between styles to create real bridges between our identity as a “classical choir” and his jazz trio. At times, we find a style of writing where the relationship to the text is not so far removed from our repertoires, but he also used the voices without text, in a totally instrumental inspiration that we could describe as a ‘vocal big band.’
Waves of Light is Paul Lay's first recording for a large ensemble. The album features ten original compositions for choir and jazz trio. It sets poems by Emily Dickinson, Victor Hugo, Henry David Thoreau and Pablo Neruda to music. It also includes two reinterpretations: Bach's Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen and Purcell's Hear my prayer, O Lord, illuminated with a new colour, with the collaboration of the other two members of the trio, Donald Kontomanou on drums and Clemens Van Der Feen on double bass.
Light is the common thread: divine and sacred light, but also intimate light, pierced by shadows – revelation, spiritual power and expression of the duality between light and darkness.
Paul Lay is a sound sculptor, playing with timbres, rhythms and silences like shadows and light. Waves of Light thus combines choral breathing and jazz in music that is open, sensitive and powerful.
The more experience I gain, the more I feel the need to return to the roots of what I play and what I love. (...) The music of the past is like an infinite source of spiritual nourishment that we must draw on to make our imagination fertile.
"The voice is fundamental. It is our instrument, and it is through its vibrations and all its colours and variations that I have been moved since my earliest childhood. My relationship with music thus began with the voice, with all the songs that played on the radio. My ear was constantly drawn to the melodic lines. After a few years of playing the piano, I realised that by hearing what I was playing internally (or being able to sing it out loud), I was memorising it accurately and for a long time. As an improviser, my relationship with singing is intimate: everything I play or improvise on the keyboard is sung internally or hummed at the same time. This is also what I teach my students: if you can sing the melody that comes to you accurately, it becomes easy to reproduce it on the instrument.
Created in 2024, the programme was recorded in 2025 at the ThéâtredelaCité in Toulouse.
This album will be the first release on the Libellule Records label.
To mark its release in early 2026, Les Éléments and the Paul Lay Trio will return to this venue to present ‘Waves of Light’ to the Toulouse public for the first time, before embarking on a tour of Occitanie, visiting Montpellier, Tarbes and Perpignan, then Paris and Metz.
