Sylvie Courvoisier has been awarded the Schweizer Grand Prix Musik 2025 from Schweizer Kulturpreise - Bundesamt für Kultur.

"Musician with boundless connecting power. The pianist, composer and improvising musician Sylvie Courvoisier has been a central voice in jazz for decades with her boundless playing."

Congratulations Sylvie, well deserved!

The Federal Office of Culture writes the following about Sylvie's receipt of the prize:

Musician with boundless connecting power

The pianist, composer and improviser Sylvie Courvoisier has been a central voice in jazz for decades with her boundary-breaking playing.

Born in Lausanne in 1968, Courvoisier has lived in New York City since 1998. Her work moves in a wide variety of musical traditions and performance contexts, from concert halls - where she interprets works from Zorn to Stravinsky - to jazz festivals and clubs, where she combines composed and improvised music in her unique style. Her compositions and ensembles fuse the elegance of European chamber music and the avant-garde styles and grooves of New York's downtown scene.

Courvoisier's artistic path is extraordinary. She has worked with avant-garde personalities such as John Zorn, Mark Feldman, Yusef Lateef, Ikue Mori, Joey Baron and Evan Parker. She also leads a renowned trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen, which she has also expanded into the sextet Chimaera (with Austrian ambient musician Christian Fennesz, among others).

As a duo with the celebrated guitarist Mary Halvorson, Courvoisier has released three albums and toured extensively. In her ten-year collaboration with the innovative flamenco dancer and choreographer Israel Galvan, she transcends genre boundaries. Courvoisier has received several awards, including the Swiss Music Prize 2018, the German Jazz Prize 2022 and most recently the Music Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2025.

2025 is an eventful year for Courvoisier. Following the releases of her second solo album To Be Other-Wise (Intakt Records, 2024), the atmospheric and multi-layered album Chimaera (Intakt Records, 2023) and Bone Bells with Mary Halvorson (Pyroclastic Records, 2025), the album Angel Falls with the legendary Wadada Leo Smith (Intakt Records, 2025) will be released in the fall.

She has already toured Europe this year with her trio and as a duo with Mary Halvorson, along with solo concerts in the spring. She returns to Europe in the fall with Wadada Leo Smith, alongside a duo tour with vibraphonist Patricia Brennan. At the end of the year, she will travel to South America for performances with the trio Short Cuts, consisting of percussionist Nasheet Waits and woodwind player Ned Rothenberg. A special concert on December 9, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY, will celebrate the albums Bone Bells and Angel Falls.