Born in Belgium and raised in Singapore — from ages two to eleven — Chicago, and Wisconsin, Helen Gillet began cello lessons at nine and carried her classical training all the way to a bachelor’s degree in music and anthropology from Beloit College (class of 2000). Her training as an improviser began in 1998 with North Indian Hindustani vocal ragas, which launched her into free improvisation, jazz, funk, rock, and French chanson. In 2002 she landed in New Orleans to earn a master’s degree in music from Loyola University, and never left.
Since then she has forged a path for the cello in the New Orleans scene, developing what she calls “a singular polyglot style.” The core of her work is solo performance with live looping: rhythmic figures emerge from bowed or plucked ostinatos — or from rubbing and slapping the body of the cello — then bloom into melodies played or sung in her haunting alto. Her vocabulary spans 1940s French chanson, Belgian folk tunes sung in Walloon, the punk of PJ Harvey and X-Ray Spex, and originals like the audience favorite “Julien.”
“Her music, rich in depth and color, expresses her experiences as a world citizen, yet is steeped in the humid rhythms of New Orleans.”
— WWOZ
The awards followed: Best Contemporary Jazz (2011), Best Mixed Bag (2012), and Best Female Performer (2014) at the Gambit Big Easy Awards. As a recording artist she has put cello on records by Arcade Fire, Dr. John (Tribal), Cassandra Wilson (Silver Pony), Marianne Faithfull, Soul Asylum, and Kid Koala, and toured the U.S. and Canada with Iron & Wine in 2018. She has played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Voodoo Festival, Festival International, the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, the Kennedy Center, and Lincoln Center.
She is also a composer of place: her original score plays above Fats Domino’s wrecked piano in the Louisiana State Museum’s Katrina & Beyond exhibit at the Presbytère, and she is featured in the “Women of Note” jazz exhibit at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. Her latest duo album, Let It Shine (2021) with Jeff Coffin on Ear Up Records, is the newest chapter in a catalog she has self-produced since 2009 on her own Tephra Sound Records.
