PARIS — Nobody would confuse “Madame Toulouse” for a readymade vocal feature. The tune, composed by saxophonist Michael Brecker, has no lyrics. It’s a contraption full of harmonic and rhythmic twists folded into an aerodynamic frame, like a Formula 1 race car. And on Sunday evening, in the auditorium of the Fondation Louis Vuitton here, the young French singer Malou Oheix took it out on the speedway — tracing Brecker’s corkscrew melodic line with wordless scat syllabics, which she also applied to a improvisation of daredevil risk and reward.
She ended the song with a sharp and satisfying jolt, and the applause that erupted was a rousing validation, along with a revealing indicator. At the end of the night, Oheix, 27, was crowned the winner of the 2026 Herbie Hancock Institute International Jazz Vocals Competition, earning a prestigious title and a $50,000 scholarship. Georgia Heers, a magnetically poised and discerning singer originally from South Carolina, won second prize; Lucy-Anne Daniels, a charismatic, uninhibited talent from Leeds, UK, took third.
Oheix’s triumph, in the jazz-friendly city she calls home, was far from preordained; before the closing moments of her performance in the finals on Sunday, it would even have seemed unlikely. But it brought the competition to a stirring emotional close, and affirmed a few bedrock values behind the ever-changing art of jazz singing.
The Hancock Competition, which originated in 1987 as the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition, and gradually started rotating its instrumental focus, has long been heralded as a major springboard for ascendant jazz talent. Most of its winners have gone on to exceptional careers, as have many runners-up. The singers who have won in this century form a case in point: Jazzmeia Horn, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Gretchen Parlato are three of the leading jazz-vocal artists of our time, each with her own inimitable style.
Parlato was on the finals jury, alongside three other jazz singers of exalted stature: Dee Dee Bridgewater, Roberta Gambarini and Gregory Porter. (In the semis, they were joined by Angélique Kidjo, standing in for Patti Austin.) Throughout both days of the event, competing singers performed with an impeccable, flexible rhythm section composed of Carmen Staaf on piano, Ben Williams on bass, and Kendrick Scott on drums.
The house band had its hands full at the semifinals on Saturday, which featured a parade of young hopefuls: 11 in total, hailing from six countries, and each given a 15-minute set. The diversity of style and strategy on display was fascinating, a testament to how capacious the jazz vocal tradition has become (or maybe always was). Across the board, the level of talent was thoroughly impressive, which made those distinctions of style all the more critical.
This was especially true of the pop songs that some semifinalists reinterpreted, and the original songs that others offered. (They had to do one or the other, per the competition guidelines.) Courteney Hooper, from Adelaide, Australia, gave Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” a sturdy upwelling of pathos, but hardly a trace of camp; a small shame, given how much winsome, breezy humor suffused the rest of her set. Zhenxuan “Jimmy” Lin — the only male vocalist in the bunch, originally from Guangzhou, China — sang “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” the Bonnie Raitt tearjerker, at a honey-drip tempo; his baritone suggested all the properties of a warm bath, and his connection with Staaf, in a spare voice-and-piano rendering, was admirably deep.
His temperamental opposite might have been Daniels, whose dynamically fresh take on “Ode to Billie Joe” was one of the competition’s high-water marks, rich with blues connotation and narrative tension. Or it might have been Heers, whose definition of a pop song extended to George Duke’s “Someday,” along with Bessie Smith’s “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon.” Those moments, among others in their sets, made Heers and Daniels feel destined for the finals.
As for who else would make the cut, there was no shortage of options. Ashley Pezzotti, styled as if she’d stepped through a portal from Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club, reeled off bravura scat choruses on a couple of songbook standards — setting one of them, “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise,” at a jackrabbit tempo that had the judges murmuring in disbelief. (She also sang a fine original bolero, “En Las Noches Como Esta,” with ardent yearning and near-operatic power.)
Kate Kortum, the most recent winner of the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, demonstrated both dramatic instinct (on her own original, “Notice the Love”) and the heart of a scavenger (unearthing a Henry Kramer song). Then there was Lin, and the self-described “rowdy lady” Joie Bianco, who knowingly evoked Nancy Wilson in her version of “Never Will I Marry,” enlivening the affair with a syncopated stop-time refrain.
The Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, which organizes the competition, is also the driving force behind International Jazz Day. Following the lead of its namesake chairman, a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador who at 86 is one of our true living jazz legends, the Institute operates in a register of tasteful luxury and global diplomacy — both of which factored into the decision to hold the competition at Foundation Luis Vuitton, in a space designed by Frank Gehry. The Hancock Competition is the kind of event that involves an illustrious host like Jeremy Irons, wry and welcoming in equal measure.
As part of the Gala Concert on Sunday, pianist Danilo Pérez presented the premiere of a suite in tribute to Gehry: “The Ever-Changing World,” a heraldic piece for a hybrid chamber-jazz ensemble that expertly handled its clever convolutions of form. (The piece was introduced by maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who until recently worked in another building that Gehry designed.)
The Gala Concert also honored Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval with of the Maria Fisher Founder’s Award, and observed Miles Davis’ centennial with a slalom through his tune “So What” — featuring Hancock on piano, his fellow NEA Jazz Master Terri-Lyne Carrington on drums, and past Monk Competition winner (and current Hancock Institute Director of Education) Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet, among others.
A jazz tribute to Paris included commanding vocal performances by two of the judges, Bridgewater and Porter. It also involved a romp through Bud Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare,” with a spirited piano solo by Monty Alexander, and an all-star horn section (Akinmusire, trombonist Nils Lofgren, and saxophonists Tineke Postma and Walter Smith III) that dispatched the melody’s rat-a-tat triplet runs with all the clanging confidence of a machinist bolting rivets into the base of the Eiffel Tower.
Oheix — who in the semifinals redrew D’Angelo’s “Spanish Joint” as a polyrhythmic waltz, and also tackled the intricate Chick Corea composition “Humpty Dumpty” — turned out to be the ultimate jazz tribute to Paris. Unlike some of her competitors, she has a voice that doesn’t overwhelm in either its luster or its timbre. She inhabited the stage with only the most modest hint of glamor, seeming almost discomfited by the spotlight.
This diffident air dissolved as soon as she was cavorting through the contour of a chord progression, digging in with the band. The body language in those moments was telling: her back straightened, her face brightened, her hands fluttered as if along the keypad of a saxophone. During “Madame Toulouse,” her no-holds-barred improvising brought smiles to the faces of the other musicians, especially Scott.
But it wasn’t just pyrotechnics and proficiency that shot Oheix into the lead. To open her performance in the finals, she sang a ballad, “I’m Glad There is You,” beginning with a vulnerable a cappella pre-verse and gradually easing into the song. There was a charming trace of her accent when she sang the lyric “filled with ordinary people / extraordinary people.” She captured the song’s tender sentiment with such guileless simplicity that it was momentarily possible to forget all about competition. Which is, paradoxically, when this competition is at its best. “I’m glad there is you,” Oheix sang in the chorus, and from this point on, a worldwide audience will be in a good position to echo the thought.
