Daniel Yvinec is the first Artistic Director appointed to head the Orchestre National de Jazz for a renewable three-year mandate, and follows the other musical directors who, through nine different projects undertaken since the birth of the Orchestra in 1986, have chronicled the history of this unique “institution” created on the initiative of the French Ministry of Culture. The nomination of an artist with such a freewheeling and remarkable career to create and defend a project as audacious as it is demanding is a sign of the ONJ’s ambition to evolve, secure in its orchestral heritage, to reaffirm its status as a creative laboratory by enriching its missions and taking them to a wider audience. Daniel Yvinec is ready to take up the challenge of discovering new ways of working characterised by their openness to other players, musical and artistic forms, putting into effect original playing strategies and hitherto unknown orchestral configurations. It is as an inventor of fertile crossovers and as a unifying force that he will work to bring his creations to life, calling upon the assistance and inventiveness of numerous partners and writers, not to mention prestigious invited guests. Daniel Yvinec’s intention is to give the ONJ a transversal dimension and take it along a new path, and to do so he will accord equal importance to workshops and pedagogy, so that the orchestra, strong in its ambition, will reach out to new audiences.

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