Jeanne’s tour is also an interesting departure for Gilles Olivesi because it is the first time he has been Front of House engineer on a pop tour.
“I have been working as a sound engineer since 1997, both in studios and live and generally with the same French jazz artists,” he explains. “With Jeanne, we are playing venues with a capacity of 600 to 2,500. The biggest audience we’ve had to date was at Les Vieilles Charrues Festival where we played in front of 40,000 people.”
On stage, Jeanne plays bass and keyboards and is supported by a drummer and two more keyboard players/backing vocalists. They, too, are using
d:facto™ Vocal Microphones.
“Alongside d:facto™, I am using
d:dicate™ 4011C Cardioid Microphones as overheads, because they are really natural and allow us to maintain a nice, acoustic sound for our drums,” Olivesi says. “I’m also using
d:dicate™ 2011C mics on the snare and kick because I like the low end. For the snare in particular, they allow me to work very precisely with placement so that I can have more or less of some frequencies that I either want to hear or hide.”
Singing in English to provide distance from her French origins, Jeanne says that Be Sensational should be taken as her guiding principle – a way of refusing to surrender and to find courage in herself. The album is released on the Naïve label and her current tour is scheduled to run until the end of this year.
Photo ©Gilles Olivesi