Molly Lewis

With: Molly Lewis (whistler), Frank Maston (keyboards), Lucas Chantre (guitar), Oscar Robertson (drums), Dave Bardon (bass).
Production: Vedettes Production.

“The professional whistler on everyone’s lips in Hollywood”
The Guardian

Molly Lewis is a professional whistler whose name is on everyone’s lips. After The Forgotten Edge, a first promising EP presented at the Trans Musicales Festival in Rennes in 2021, the artist releases her new whistled EP in October 2022, entitled Mirage, taking its inspiration from the film noirs of Hollywood of yesteryear and spaghetti-western soundtracks. Molly Lewis launches her European tour with a performance at the Fondation Cartier as part of the Nomadic Nights!

The melodies of this young Australian artist living in Los Angeles are breathtakingly beautiful. After honing the craft of whistling at numerous competitions and having won first prize at the Masters of Musical Whistling tournament in Los Angeles in 2015, she decided to knock on the door of the music industry. Half film-noir femme fatale, half romantic nightingale, her subtle and expressive technique evokes that of the remarkable soloist Alessandro Alessandroni, a faithful collaborator on the spaghetti-western soundtracks of composer Ennio Morricone. With her new EP, Mirage, the whistler Molly Lewis breathes fresh life into an art that had its heyday in the 1930s with the arrival of the “talkies”.

For her first tour date in Europe, Molly Lewis will whistle her way through a Nomadic Night at the Fondation Cartier, accompanied by four French musicians. A captivating and memorable evening guaranteed.

Biographie

Molly Lewis’s compositions seem to float into our ears from distant shores. They’re otherworldly, drawn more from landscapes of dream than from anywhere you could find on a map.
Lewis is a unique presence in music today. Her trademark whistle, which brings to mind the great Peruvian soprano Yma Sumac, has graced recordings of everything from Schumann lieder and Brazilian jazz to Spaghetti Western ballads and noir lounge.
Lewis’s collaborations are diverse: La Femme, Sébastien Tellier and Dr. Dre. She’s performed around the globe, at Shanghai’s Yuz Museum, the Cannes Film Festival, Mexico City’s Salón Los Angeles, and across the whole of New Zealand.
Lewis’s 2021 debut EP, The Forgotten Edge, was produced by Tom Brenneck (Charles Bradley, Amy Winehouse). It was a critical success, drawing praise from The New York Times and NPR, and landing Lewis a spot on CBS Sunday Morning.
Now, Lewis and Brenneck have teamed up again for her second EP, Mirage, bringing aboard Brazilian guitarist Rogê, as well as percussionist Gibi Dos Santos and keyboardist Roger Manning. Capacious and atmospheric, Mirage is Lewis’s most hypnotic effort yet. Like Eden’s Island (1970) by eden ahbez—whose “Nature Boy” is covered in one of Mirage’s standout moments—the album is based on Lewis’s visions of an imaginary island. The lush, oceanic textures of Mirage transport us to the sands of an unknown beach—all alone or in the company we’ve always dreamt of keeping.