This is composer/singer Aurelie Claire Prost’s first musical project, and it was born at the musical crossroads where jazz meets slam and opera. She gave it the name AOURA, and the project brings together crossbreed forms of music in a daring encounter with her own compositions, mingling song, Gothic trance and opera with memorable titles like Lucifer, Dedale and Penthesilee. She offers her texts in pulsating, committed slams, creating aerial, mysterious rhythms and wild chases between harmony and mythology. Her album also includes some highly personal (re) arrangements of jazz standards, notably Wayne Shorter’s Mahjong: a surprising, incantatory version layered with verse from Charles Baudelaire’s Vampire, from Black Nile, and even John Coltrane’s Naïma in echo of Lord Byron’s recited poem. Didier LOCKWOOD
