“There are composers who simply offer you a piece of music,
and others who draw you into a whole world.
Lara Humbert falls into the latter category.”-Jazzenzo
Lara Humbert is a french pianist, composer, arranger based in Brussels. She is leader of the octet « I’m Not Done Cooking » and « Lara Humbert Quartet ».
Hailing from Haute-Savoie, French pianist and composer Lara Humbert creates music in which writing and improvisation interact like two moving landscapes.
Having received early training in classical piano, she developed a particular sensitivity to silences, tensions and breaths, before finding in jazz a constantly evolving field of exploration.
After studying music in Lyon, she moved to Brussels, a vibrant city whose collective energy and diverse music scenes have influenced her musical style.
Her music moves between contemporary jazz, improvisation and pop, rock or classical influences, playing on contrasts, textures and open forms. The compositions become spaces to inhabit, transforming as the musicians interact.
In 2021, she founded the Lara Humbert Quartet, a sonic melting pot in which she develops a compositional style that is
both precise and fluid.
In March 2024, « Pinède » was released, the group’s first self-produced album, conceived as a journey through different moods and textures, leaving plenty of room for listening, fragility and the unexpected.
The Quartet will release their second album, *Village*, in autumn 2027.
At the same time, Lara Humbert initiates and takes part in projects of varying scales, pursuing an exploration in which music is constructed as a collective gesture. Both on stage and in her composition, she cultivates an organic and sensitive approach, making each concert a unique experience, straddling the line between improvisation and meticulous storytelling.
With the piece « I’m Not Done Cooking », she opens up a broader creative space, where composition becomes a shifting playground, traversed by a multitude of sensibilities.
Conceived as a large-scale laboratory, the project brings together eight musicians around a deliberately open form of composition, conducive to friction, detours and the unexpected. The pieces unfold like mutating materials: sketched motifs, layered textures, breaks and collective surges.
The title ‘I’m Not Done Cooking’ embodies this idea of an ever-evolving process, of music that rejects a fixed form and reinvents itself with every rehearsal and every performance. The ensemble functions as a living organism, where individualities coexist without hierarchy, sustained by attentive listening and a shared energy.
Through this octet, Lara Humbert deepens her exploration of collective dynamics, sonic density and form in motion, affirming an approach to composition as a shared and
evolving practice.