Meeting Clotilde Rullaud — the French artist, singer, flutist, composer and creator — at Visa For Music was truly delightful. Her talent spans jazz, world music, improvisation, and performance arts; she brings a rare blend of sensitivity, energy, and artistic vision.
Clotilde’s background is rich and multifaceted: from early flute and vocal training, she moved into jazz and improvisational music, while also embracing diverse vocal techniques and global influences.
What is striking about her is the capacity to transcend strict categorization: voice, flute, perhaps dance or visual arts — all united to produce living pieces, full of emotion, atmosphere, and poetic depth.
In our conversation, Clotilde’s artistry revealed a profound respect for music and life, a quest for meaning and freedom. She doesn’t just play notes — she weaves stories, evokes feelings, draws listeners into sonic landscapes through arrangements, improvisations, unexpected colours.
At a festival that already aims at bridging cultures and geographies, the presence of an engaged European artist, open to experiment and to mix influences, enriches the artistic dialogue even more. Clotilde stands as an open door: between jazz, world heritage, experimentation, memory and modernity.
Through her albums (from duo to solo to collective projects), collaborations across cultures, and multidisciplinary ventures, Clotilde proves she belongs to a generation of artists for whom music is travel, exchange, and cultural melting-pot.
Thus, this moment of exchange — modest in appearance — becomes emblematic: a symbol of possibility, where European jazz, global sensibilities and diverse audiences meet. Clotilde Rullaud, with her voice, her flute and her vision, seems capable of reinventing jazz — not as a frozen genre — but as a living, shifting, shared space.
