Whether appearing solo as a guitarist or leading orchestras whose personnel and size couldn't vary more — they range from the quartet to the big-band —, Olivier Benoit's sole obsession has always been to further his explorations of territories still barely represented on the official map of contemporary music. Rock, (for its sound and energy), jazz (for its collective interaction, and the beauty of music as an act), contemporary (for its concerns with form and the precision and sophistication of its language), and non-idiomatic free improvisation (for its horizontal organizational modes, and its fundamentally immanent condition), are musical territories whose attributes have real exchanges in generating forms of expression typified by authentic syncretism and innovation. Appointed for a term of four and half years (January 2014 – June 2018) at the head of the Orchestre National de Jazz (ONJ), the composer and guitarist Olivier Benoit inaugurates with his musicians the eleventh orchestra in the history of the institution. Motivated by the desire to have an intergenerational orchestra open to multiple stylistic registers, Olivier Benoit picked ten musicians with rich, original backgrounds — all of them have given a strong personal touch to their implication in musical research — and created an ONJ suited to all kinds of aesthetic orientations, an orchestra capable of fulfilling the ambition lying at the heart of his project: to free genres from the compartments which separate them.