For pianist, composer, and producer Mathis Picard, the big band has never been about standing still.
His new project, The Sound Orchestra, takes the scale and tradition of large-ensemble jazz and pushes it outward, drawing equally from Madagascar, Afro-Cuban music, 1970s funk, UK garage, and the improvisational language of jazz. The result is a genre-fluid orchestra built not simply to be heard, but to move people.
Picard has announced The Sound Orchestra, the debut album from his large ensemble of the same name, arriving November 6 via La Reserve Records. The announcement comes with “Portrait of Lizzy,” a deeply personal reimagining of the American standard “Portrait of Jennie” and a celebration of Picard’s wife, Lizzy.
The timing is intentional. “Portrait of Lizzy” arrives on the couple’s third wedding anniversary. The two were married at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club, a venue with a significant connection to Picard’s career and his years at The Juilliard School. It is also a place where Picard has performed with The Sound Orchestra at the club’s legendary dance parties, including a celebration of the music of Earth, Wind & Fire, whose infectious energy has become a central influence on the project.
The new recording turns that personal history into music, transforming a classic melody associated with romance into something intimate and contemporary.
For Picard, however, The Sound Orchestra is about more than expanding the traditional jazz ensemble. It is about creating a physical relationship between musicians and listeners.
“This is not your traditional Big Band record,” Picard explains. “The goal of the band was always for it to make people dance. Whether it be swing music, house, dubstep, waltz, or even a ballad, I wanted to connect with the audience through dance. Dance for me is this wonderful way to express our bodies, and for us to be together in community.”
That idea of community is central to the album. Rather than treating musical traditions as separate territories, Picard allows them to collide and communicate. Rhythms from Madagascar, the homeland of his mother, meet Afro-Cuban grooves and the muscular funk of Earth, Wind & Fire. The harmonic and orchestral possibilities of jazz giants such as Duke Ellington and Fats Waller provide another foundation, while contemporary rhythmic ideas broaden the palette.
The result is music that can move between swing, funk, dance music, waltz, balladry, and improvisation without treating genre boundaries as fixed.
Picard's relationship with the large ensemble stretches back to adolescence. At 13, while studying at Chetham’s School of Music in England, he led a similar group. The American incarnation of The Sound Orchestra began years later as a three-horn ensemble performing Picard’s original compositions, with Giveton Gelin and Ruben Fox among its early members.
Over time, the project grew into a full-scale ensemble with a saxophone section, electric bass, and an expansive percussion section. That evolution mirrors Picard’s own musical development: the more worlds he encountered, the more space he needed to accommodate them.
Born in France to a French father and Malagasy mother, Picard began playing piano at four. His education took him across France, the United States, and the United Kingdom before bringing him to New York, where he graduated from Juilliard. He has since established himself as a distinctive young presence in contemporary jazz, receiving recognition from ASCAP’s Next Generation of Songwriters program and becoming a member of the Montreux Jazz Foundation.
His performance history already spans generations and musical perspectives. Picard has worked with artists including Ron Carter, Lillias White, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Wynton Marsalis, and Christian McBride, while performing internationally at venues and festivals including the Umbria Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, and The Jazz Cruise.
That breadth of experience is reflected in The Sound Orchestra. The album doesn't position jazz tradition and contemporary music as opposing forces. Instead, it treats them as parts of the same conversation.
The nine-track album opens with “FearLess” before moving through the two-part “A Bigger Picture,” with “Truth” and “Hope” as its respective movements. “JitterBug Waltz” leads into “Portrait of Lizzy,” followed by “InnerChild,” “SunRise,” “Ho Azy,” and “RoundPoint.”
Even the titles suggest a project concerned with movement, perspective, memory, and possibility.
There is also a sense of deliberate physicality throughout Picard’s concept. Large ensembles can easily become exercises in orchestration — impressive in scale but distant from the audience. Picard's approach reverses that expectation. The arrangements are expansive, but their purpose is ultimately communal: to create a shared rhythmic experience in which musicians and listeners occupy the same physical world.
That philosophy helps explain the influence of Earth, Wind & Fire on the project. Their music demonstrated that sophisticated arrangements, virtuosic musicianship, theatrical scale, and an irresistible dance groove could coexist. Picard takes that lesson into the contemporary jazz landscape, adding his own multicultural vocabulary and an improviser's instinct for surprise.
The Sound Orchestra also continues Picard’s growing relationship with Jazz at Lincoln Center. On October 9, he will perform a solo set at Lincoln Center’s Kenneth C. Griffin Sidewalk Studio honoring the musical legacy of San Juan Hill. Other upcoming performances include appearances in Pennsylvania, Vermont, San Francisco, and Palo Alto.
With The Sound Orchestra, Picard is building something larger than a conventional big band. The project reflects the many places, traditions, teachers, collaborators, and communities that have shaped him, while leaving room for those influences to transform each other.
At its core, the album asks a deceptively simple question: What happens when the expansive language of jazz is built around the body's instinct to move?
For Picard, the answer is The Sound Orchestra — a meeting place where Madagascar can speak to Afro-Cuban rhythm, Duke Ellington can coexist with funk, orchestral writing can meet improvisation, and a jazz audience can become a dance floor.
The Sound Orchestra arrives November 6 via La Reserve Records.
The album tracklist is “FearLess,” “A Bigger Picture Pt. I (Truth),” “A Bigger Picture Pt. II (Hope),” “JitterBug Waltz,” “Portrait of Lizzy,” “InnerChild,” “SunRise,” “Ho Azy,” and “RoundPoint.”
Upcoming performances include October 9 at Kenneth C. Griffin Sidewalk Studio at Lincoln Center in New York; October 10 at Middlebury Town Hall Theatre in Middlebury, Vermont; October 15 at the SFJAZZ Joe Henderson Lounge in San Francisco; and October 16 at Meyhouse Jazz in Palo Alto.
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