Helen Gillet

Helen Gillet is a musician, composer, cellist, singer (Belgian French & English), improviser and live looping artist. Her prolific career has won her awards of Offbeat Best of the Beat, Gambit Big Easy Awards, featured artist at the New Orleans Jazz Museum and has been nominated three times as a rising star in Downbeat Magazine's Critics Poll. She has played, recorded with many musicians over the past 20 years, including members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, AACM (Chicago), ICP (Holland), Members of Morphine, Kidd Jordan, Marianne Faithful, Cassandra Wilson, Delfeayo and Jason Marsalis, Steve Earle, Iron & Wine (North America Tour 2018), Zachary Richard, opened up as a solo artist for Les Claypool at the Orpheum Theatre in New Orleans in 2003 and Jeff Tweedy at Lincoln Center in 2019. She has performed at a variety of festivals and venues worldwide including the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Dark MOFO Festival in Tasmania, Darwin World Music Festival, New Orleans Jazz Festival, New Direction Cello Society Festival at Berkeley College of Music, Kennedy Center and at The Big Ears Music Festival in 2024.

Helen Gillet is a singer-songwriter and surrealist-archeologist exploring synthesized sounds, texture, and rhythm using an acoustic cello. For someone with her varied background, New Orleans, with its mix of cultures and music, was a natural place to call home.

Born in Belgium and raised in Singapore from the ages of 2 to 11, Helen Gillet was routinely shuttled between the homelands of her Belgian father and American mother. Since her arrival in New Orleans in 2002, she has worked with musicians of all stripes, from avant-garde jazz and classical to pop, Mardi gras Indians and funk. The core of her work features live looping: layering cello parts and vocal lines. Rhythmic figures emerge with bowed or plucked ostinatos or a variety of rubbing and slapping on the body of the cello, then enhanced with melodies played or sung in her haunting alto. Her mixed musical vocabulary is commensurate with her disparate travels — French chanson of the 1940s, Belgian folk tunes sung in Walloon, a mix of rock and punk from the likes of PJ Harvey and X-Ray Spex, and her own affecting originals, like audience favorite “Julien,” sung in a mix of French and English. Gillet’s solo performance is known for its enigmatic quality as she fabricates each song with innovative use of the cello and true mastery of live looping technology.