# Two Nights of Musical Discovery: Remarkable journey through contemporary European jazz at the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026: Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2026/08/14/457678777/
- Published: 2026-08-14T09:47:05+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**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.

![Vincent Ségal - Wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/
JSLP2021VincentSegal.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content
=original)

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.

![Haute-Garonne : « On a tous une affinité avec Jazz sur son 31 » affirme le  trompettiste
toulousain Nicolas Gardel - ladepeche.fr](https://i0.wp.com/images.ladepeche.fr/
api/v1/images/view/61683e6dd286c24d70373d59/large/image.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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.

![No photo description available.](https://scontent.fevn2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-
6/497505668_122156542484428851_1117042967210175399_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_tt6&cstp=mx640x753&
ctp=s640x753&_nc_cat=100&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=6ee11a&_nc_ohc=sNubXt2Ff88Q7kNvwGcFnSU&
_nc_oc=Adp2F-wC3XZ2YVlltHtPUslr_rP9F6PhSqjeKkq0D_LnZS2joP6kSIybn_n0KSumztc&_nc_zt
=23&_nc_ht=scontent.fevn2-1.fna&_nc_gid=YrM7kLIozX6twjrGezgEyA&_nc_ss=7b2a8&oh=00_AQE6W_Zqeu3FcEkUW5vBlsHIkK3Z2pwnfS3Z6nm-
u-e9cQ&oe=6A848C44)

**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**

![No photo description available.](https://scontent.fevn12-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-
6/467901120_122128913744428851_5752248200219079085_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_tt6&cstp=mx1380x776&
ctp=s1380x776&_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=cc71e4&_nc_ohc=7xijmYczGf8Q7kNvwEB8qIb&
_nc_oc=Adoa3GN24bVEy2xCii0FAnzn2kkJFiMmiztao05ddGjG7FEcxvuDySLu0kq2KZbtNIY&_nc_zt
=23&_nc_ht=scontent.fevn12-1.fna&_nc_gid=abFfjn9m1TNqDH9QNRBu0Q&_nc_ss=7b2a8&oh=
00_AQENioTTa114w5VCuoS8nZARAoAUSQsW41kl7H7sdZAIgw&oe=6A84B940)

### _Related_