“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”Gustav Mahler
Hunting Badgers is a young Bluegrass/Newgrass quartet bringing together four musicians already well known on the French bluegrass scene.
Their music draws on the roots of traditional bluegrass while venturing into rock, jazz and improvised music. Free-spirited and high-energy, the band is most at home on stage.
The quartet
Select a musician to view their profile.
Guitar · Vocals
Elliott is a guitarist, composer and arranger. He studied with Emmanuel Malépart before training at the American School of Modern Music, and writes and arranges for jazz, soul, folk, rock, music for visual media and the performing arts. For five years, he led the power-soul band Iceberg, also serving as its composer and lyricist. The project produced two albums, one EP and around one hundred concerts in France and Europe.
His passion for folk traditions led him to join Celtic neo-folk band Lockins in 2018 as a banjo player and composer. The band has played more than two hundred concerts and numerous festivals, and released two albums. He also composes for theatre, notably Travol’time, Exodes and Toujours Toujours.
His interest in traditional music and theatre led him to join the musical Chicago at Casino de Paris in 2025-2026, playing banjo and mandolin in a New Orleans jazz style. He is also preparing 9 Folk Songs, a collection of nine folk songs announced for early 2027, where intimate writing meets folk instrumentation tinged with noise and electronic music. Elliott is deeply committed to music education through the Académie des Musiques Actuelles, the association-run school he founded in 2019.
Fiddle
Hugo Van Rechem is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. Moving between new music, electronic pop and jazz, he explores contrasting, singular forms shaped by experimentation. In 2013, while continuing his classical training at the Conservatoire de Lille, he received the Prix spécial du jury and Prix du public at the Concours international de violon jazz Stéphane Grappelli, under the patronage of Didier Lockwood. The following year, he joined the jazz department of the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, graduating with a Master’s degree in 2019.
His work as a performer spans jazz, pop, theatre, minimalist and ambient music. He has collaborated with the Yessaï Karapetian Quintet, Orchestre national de jazz des jeunes, Yumi Ito, Rising Cloud Orchestra and Ensemble Social Silence. A co-founder of the noise-rock quartet SCP-055 and the large ensemble un garage par jour, he also initiated poisons·phantome(s), a folk trio created with Climène Zarkan and Maëlle Desbrosses.
As a composer, he has received commissions from festivals and ensembles including Lucerne Festival, Ensemble Modern, Into the Open, 2e2m and TM+. He also won second prize at the 6th Zbigniew Seifert International Jazz Violin Competition in Kraków. His influences range from Clara Ianotta and Philip Venables to ML Buch and YHWH Nailgun, as well as the worlds of Colette Thomas, René Daumal and Bertrand Mandico.
Mandolin
Henri Colombat is a multi-instrumentalist and composer whose work contributes to the contemporary continuation of old-time, bluegrass and American folk repertoires. As a mandolinist, he performs in varied settings, from free improvisation with la SEE in The Hague to the trio Sweet Joe Pye, with whom he has appeared at Rotterdam Bluegrass Festival and L’Herbe Bleue.
He has also contributed to several recording projects, playing mandolin for singer-songwriter Yousra, Sweet Joe Pye and Steph Doe, and working as a sound artist and arranger for Linen of Words and Tilmann Volz. As a guitarist for square dances in the United States and Europe, he maintains a direct connection with the collective practices that keep these repertoires alive.
Henri has organised old-time and bluegrass sessions in The Hague and Paris, and has been invited by Sawmill Sessions to lead mandolin workshops. Without a regular mentor in the tradition, he learned through the communal exchange of jam sessions in his hometown of Baltimore and later in Montreal. From 2015 to 2021, he also pursued undergraduate and graduate studies in composition at McGill University in Montreal.
Upright bass
Michael Harlen is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and music teacher based in Paris. He grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, in the United States, where he was active on the Washington D.C. and Baltimore jazz scenes while performing with local rock bands and teaching guitar and bass.
In 2008, he moved to New York to study at New York University. There, he had the opportunity to perform alongside musicians including Chris Potter, Lenny Pickett, Wayne Krantz and Kenny Werner. After his studies, he pursued a performing career across four continents and more than twenty countries. His appearances include Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Blue Note jazz clubs in New York, Milan and Beijing.
He settled in Paris in 2022 and continues to work as a performer, teacher and composer. His influences reflect the breadth of his background, ranging from jazz figures such as Duke Ellington, Paul Chambers and Ornette Coleman to traditional American and Irish folk music. Drawing from these worlds, he has developed a sound that adapts to very different musical settings while retaining an identity of its own.