The 12th and 13th days of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026 continued the festival’s remarkable journey through contemporary European jazz with two artists whose musical languages could hardly be more different, yet whose artistic instincts are united by the same desire: to make jazz a living, breathing territory of encounter.
First came Vincent Ségal, a musician whose cello seems capable of speaking simultaneously in the languages of jazz, chamber music, world music and improvisation; the following evening belonged to French trumpeter and composer Nicolas Gardel, whose Mano Figa project transformed personal memory, Hispanic heritage and the rhythmic cultures of Latin America into a vivid contemporary jazz narrative.
Vincent Ségal’s appearance was, above all, a celebration of listening. The French cellist has spent much of his career moving effortlessly between musical worlds, refusing to accept the artificial borders separating jazz from classical music, African and Brazilian traditions, chanson, experimental music and popular culture. His extraordinary range of collaborations — from Cesária Évora and Carlinhos Brown to Sting and his long-standing work with Bumcello — has made him one of the most versatile and distinctive musicians of the French scene.
What makes Ségal so compelling on stage is that the cello ceases to be merely a classical instrument. In his hands it becomes a voice, a bass, a percussion instrument, a source of texture and sometimes almost a human breath. The bow can create an astonishingly warm melodic line; pizzicato can suddenly become rhythmic and percussive; a sustained note can hang in the air like a fragment of memory. There is an almost physical quality to his playing, but it is never merely demonstrative. Even at moments of virtuosity, the music remains directed toward communication.
That sensibility has been especially evident in Ségal’s recent work with Stéphane Kerecki in Ponticello, where cello and double bass explore a repertoire drawing together jazz standards, Bach, Messiaen, Fauré, South American influences and American folk traditions. The project demonstrates how naturally Ségal inhabits the space between written music and improvisation, and how an apparently intimate instrumental language can acquire the breadth and density of an ensemble.
At the EU Jazz & Blues Festival, this artistic philosophy gave the concert a distinctive atmosphere. Rather than treating jazz as a fixed vocabulary, Ségal approached it as an open conversation. Melodic fragments appeared, were transformed, interrupted, rediscovered and allowed to breathe again. The music could move from delicacy to intensity without requiring a dramatic gesture. Its strength lay in nuance: in the pressure of the bow, the weight of silence, the colour of a chord, the subtle displacement of a rhythmic accent.
There was also something deeply cinematic in the sound world. Ségal understands that music does not always have to announce its emotions; sometimes it is more powerful when it allows them to emerge gradually. A single cello phrase can suggest an entire landscape. A low resonance can create darkness beneath an otherwise luminous melody. A sudden rhythmic figure can open the door to another musical culture. The concert therefore felt less like a sequence of conventional numbers and more like a continuous journey through changing shades of sound.
The most impressive aspect of Ségal’s artistry is perhaps his ability to make complexity feel natural. He is a musician who possesses enormous technical knowledge but rarely allows that knowledge to stand between the music and the listener. His playing is sophisticated without becoming academic, adventurous without becoming deliberately obscure, and lyrical without slipping into sentimentality. That balance is rare, and it helped make the 12th evening one of the festival’s most intimate and artistically revealing encounters.
The following day brought an entirely different energy. Nicolas Gardel arrived with a trumpet whose sound carries both the authority of the jazz tradition and the heat of Mediterranean and Latin musical cultures. His Mano Figa project is deeply personal: its starting point is Gardel’s childhood journey to Caracas, where his aunt Manolita — who had left Spain after fleeing Francoist dictatorship — gave him the small wooden and gold pendant that became the project’s name and enduring symbol. Decades later, Gardel returned to South America, including through journeys to Peru, and those experiences profoundly reshaped his musical imagination.
Consequently, Mano Figa is not simply another Latin-inflected jazz project. It is a musical autobiography. Gardel takes memory and turns it into rhythm. He takes family history and transforms it into melody. He takes geographical distance and converts it into musical proximity. The result is a repertoire in which Afro-Caribbean rhythms, flamenco colours, Latin American traditions and modern jazz coexist without any sense of forced fusion.
Gardel’s trumpet is perfectly suited to this music. His sound can be warm and rounded one moment, bright and incisive the next, capable of lyrical tenderness as well as rhythmic authority. He does not treat Latin American music as an exotic decoration placed upon a jazz framework. Instead, rhythm becomes part of the architecture of the music itself. The pulse moves through the ensemble with a physical energy that encourages the listener to feel the music as much as hear it.
The rhythmic dimension was particularly important. Gardel’s compositions draw upon Afro-Caribbean and flamenco influences, giving the music a supple, constantly shifting foundation. Percussion becomes more than accompaniment: it creates movement, tension and atmosphere. The piano can answer the trumpet with harmonic colour, while the bass establishes a flexible centre around which the music can turn. The quartet formation — Gardel with pianist Arthur Guyard, bassist Thomas Boudé and percussionist Julien Garin — has been central to the project in 2026, while other performances of Mano Figa have also expanded the percussion forces.
There is a particularly attractive quality in Gardel’s relationship with the jazz tradition. He does not abandon history in pursuit of novelty. Instead, he carries that history into another geographical and emotional landscape. The repertoire can embrace the language of Monk, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie while allowing Caribbean, Cuban and Hispanic colours to alter the rhythmic and melodic perspective. That dialogue between tradition and personal identity is one of the project’s greatest strengths.
Gardel’s musical personality also reveals a strong sense of narrative. The concert is not simply about virtuoso trumpet playing. Every rhythmic change, every melodic phrase and every shift of atmosphere contributes to a larger story about travel, ancestry, displacement, discovery and belonging. The title Mano Figa therefore becomes more than the name of an album or concert. It becomes a metaphor for the way music carries memory across generations and across oceans.
The contrast between the two evenings was precisely what made this pair of concerts so powerful within the festival. Vincent Ségal explored the intimate, textural and almost chamber-like possibilities of improvisation, while Nicolas Gardel opened the music outward toward rhythm, movement, ancestry and the colours of Latin America. One evening seemed to listen inward; the other seemed to travel outward. Yet both musicians demonstrated the same fundamental belief in music as dialogue.
This is one of the great virtues of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026: it does not present jazz as a museum piece or as a single aesthetic formula. Instead, it reveals the genre as a vast living organism, capable of absorbing new cultures while retaining its historical memory. From Ségal’s cello, where classical sonority and improvisational freedom meet, to Gardel’s trumpet, where French jazz encounters Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic traditions, the festival continues to demonstrate that the most interesting contemporary jazz often happens precisely where musical borders begin to disappear.
The 12th and 13th days therefore belonged to two very different forms of musical poetry. Vincent Ségal offered poetry through timbre, silence, resonance and intimate improvisation; Nicolas Gardel offered it through rhythm, colour, memory and movement. Together, the concerts formed another important chapter in a festival whose greatest achievement is perhaps its refusal to allow one definition of jazz to become definitive.
Olivia Peevas — The indispensable artistic force behind the festival
Behind this extraordinary succession of musical encounters stands Olivia Peevas, Director and Artistic Director of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival, whose role is indispensable to the festival’s identity and artistic coherence. The breadth of the programme — moving from internationally celebrated figures to highly individual European voices, from contemporary jazz to blues, world music, Latin traditions and experimental forms — reflects an artistic vision that understands jazz not as a closed category but as a meeting place for cultures, generations and ideas.
Peevas’s importance is therefore not simply organisational. Artistic direction at this level requires a particular kind of musical curiosity: the ability to recognise established masters while also identifying artists whose work deserves a larger audience; the courage to place contrasting musical languages beside one another; and, above all, the conviction that audiences should be invited into discovery rather than merely given familiarity. The succession of Vincent Ségal and Nicolas Gardel is an excellent illustration of that philosophy.
The festival’s artistic richness depends upon precisely these contrasts. Ségal’s fragile, chamber-like exploration and Gardel’s vibrant, transatlantic rhythmic world may appear to occupy distant musical territories, yet Olivia Peevas creates the space in which those territories can coexist and illuminate one another. That is the deeper achievement of her direction: she gives the festival not merely a programme, but an artistic personality.
Under her leadership, the EU Jazz & Blues Festival becomes a cultural journey rather than a simple series of concerts. Each evening adds another colour to an expanding musical portrait, and each artist contributes another perspective on what jazz can mean in the twenty-first century. The 12th and 13th days, with Vincent Ségal and Nicolas Gardel, demonstrated that vision with particular clarity — two nights, two musical worlds, and one continuous belief in the power of music to connect people, histories and cultures.
By Lauren Wulff
