Hélène Labarrière is a French double bassist and composer who works in jazz and improvised music. She was born on October 23, 1963, in Neuilly-sur-Seine and grew up in Clichy, the youngest of five children. Her four older brothers, Dominique, Jean-Louis, Christian and Jacques, brought records and then instruments into the house in the 1970s. She started piano at seven, although dance was what interested her most, and chose music in her teens. With the family piano always in use, she took up the double bass at sixteen, a decision she describes on her own website as a snap one, driven by what the instrument does in a band rather than by any one player. Her brother Jacques became a pianist and composer, and Dominique, a poet who died young, wrote the texts she and Jacques later set to music.

She learned mostly by playing. A few years at the conservatoire were followed by café and restaurant gigs of standards with the guitarist Pierre Brunel, and in 1983 she formed Ladies First with Marie-Ange Martin, Micheline Pelzer and Dominique Borker. By her own account and French Wikipedia, she spent many nights at the Paris club Petit Opportun accompanying Alain Jean-Marie, André Villéger and Gérard Badini, who hired her for his orchestra Swing Machine, as well as American visitors including Slide Hampton, Art Farmer, Johnny Griffin and Lee Konitz. Her own site says her first record was made with Konitz: she is the bassist on his album Medium Rare (Label Bleu, 1986), alongside the accordionist Francis Varis, the guitarist Dominique Cravic and the drummer Jean-Claude Jouy.

Hearing Charlie Haden changed how she thought about the instrument. From 1986 she moved from standards toward freer music in two groups, the quartet of the saxophonist Eric Barret, with Marc Ducret on guitar and Peter Gritz on drums, and the Malo Vallois quintet. She also met the drummer Daniel Humair, who plays on the 1993 trio record Jazz y Toros that she made with the pianist Stéphane Kochoyan at IRCAM. In 1989 she played with the Vienna Art Orchestra, and the Vienna Art Special band directed by Mathias Rüegg recorded Fe & Males (Amadeo, 1992) with her and the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen in the line-up. In 1991 she was a founder of Incidences, a collective of musicians from Montreuil that included Jean-Marc Padovani, Sylvain Kassap, François Corneloup and Franck Tortiller. Tortiller offered her a carte blanche at the Festival de Couches in 1993, and she used it to form her first group.

Machination, with Noël Akchoté on electric guitar, Jensen on trumpet, the singer Corin Curschellas and Peter Gritz on drums, took its name from a Robert Wyatt song. It was her first band as a leader and the first time she wrote music, a long suite that mixed improvisation with a few melodies. The group played festivals including Banlieues Bleues, La Villette and Jazz sous les pommiers, and recorded live at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris on December 7 and 8, 1994. Deux Z released the album in 1995, her first as a leader.

The next fifteen years were crowded. She plays double bass and Chapman Stick on Yves Robert's Été (Deux Z, 1999) and began a long partnership with the clarinettist Sylvain Kassap, first in a quartet (Strophes, recorded in January 1998 with Christophe Marguet on drums), then in a second quartet called Boat and in a duo that has made two albums. In 1996 the label Nato, run by Jean Rochard, invited her to a collective tribute to the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti. It led to the collective Los Incontrolados, whose staged piece on a text by a fighter of the Iron Column premiered at the Sons d'Hiver festival in 1999, and to meetings with Tony Hymas and Evan Parker. With her brother Jacques she made Stations avant l'oubli (1998), a record of improvisation and poetry on Dominique's texts, with guests she names as Benoît Delbecq, Guillaume Orti and Bruno Chevillon, two actors and the rapper D'. Over the next years she worked with choreographers and theatre companies, performed with the contemporary-music ensemble Ars Nova and with slam poets, joined the vibraphonist Alex Grillo's group L'Amour, played in the nonet of Denis Colin, and met Breton music through the Molard brothers and their project Bal Tribal. In 2005, wanting to take stock, she began playing solo, with a few songs running through the sets, and formed a quartet with the violinist Jacky Molard and a duo with the actress and singer Violaine Schwartz.

Les temps changent (émouvance, 2007) came ten years after Machination. Recorded in January 2007 with François Corneloup on baritone saxophone, Hasse Poulsen on guitar and Christophe Marguet on drums, it carries liner notes by Robert Wyatt, and French Wikipedia lists a "disque d'émoi" in Jazz Magazine and an "Élu" from Citizen Jazz. The same quartet made Désordre (Innacor, 2013), and in a 2013 interview with Politis she described a group that plays without a fixed hierarchy and took its title from a book on anarchism. From the 2000s she spent more and more time in Brittany, and French Wikipedia says she eventually settled in the Morbihan. Noir lumière, her trio record with Corneloup and the drummer Simon Goubert, was recorded in February 2010 in Langonnet in that département. Her other records of these years include the duo album with Violaine Schwartz (J'ai le cafard), N'Diale (2010), made by Jacky Molard's quartet with the trio of the Malian singer Founé Diarra, and Busking (2015), a duo with Hasse Poulsen.

Since 2020 she has been the bassist in Marguet's bands, on Happy Hours (2020, with the trumpeter Yoann Loustalot and the pianist Julien Touéry), Pronto! (2022, a quartet with the saxophonist Daniel Erdmann and the pianist Bruno Angelini), Echoes of Time (2024) and Island (2026), the last two with the guitarist Manu Codjia and Régis Huby on electro-acoustic tenor violin. In 2016 she recorded Alice's Evidence with the pianist Sophia Domancich, the saxophonist Géraldine Laurent, the trombonist Ray Anderson and the drummer Nasheet Waits. With Kassap she made the duo album Dédicaces (émouvance, 2023), and she plays in a duo with the clarinettist Catherine Delaunay. Puzzle (Jazzdor Series, 2025) is her most recent record as a leader. She composed five short pieces and invited Corneloup, Ducret, Kassap, Molard and Dominique Pifarély to rework them, each piece honoring a woman such as Jane Avril, Angela Davis, Emma Goldman, Louise Michel or Thérèse Clerc. She first played it on stage in March 2022 and recorded it at WMStudio in Bringolo, and the label announced a release concert at the Jazzdor festival in Strasbourg-Berlin in June 2025. The quintet on her website is Delaunay on clarinet, Robin Fincker on saxophone, Stéphane Bartelt on guitar, Goubert on drums and Labarrière on bass. Her website also lists a show with the storyteller Praline Gay-Para, and French Wikipedia adds that she regularly leads workshops at the Jazz Campus en Clunisois festival.

Labarrière came to improvised music from the standards repertoire and the Paris club scene, and she dates the change to hearing Charlie Haden, whose way of placing the bass in an ensemble was, in her words, radically different from what she had known. The other name she keeps returning to is Robert Wyatt, who gave Machination its title and wrote the notes for Les temps changent. Her own writing favors small groups with an unusual front line: baritone saxophone and guitar, clarinet and bass, a voice beside a trumpet. She is as comfortable with groove and trance-like repetition, which she ties to her encounter with Breton dance music, as with open improvisation. Her work also reaches into theatre, dance, poetry, slam and the traditional music of Brittany and Mali, so only part of it sits inside the usual jazz categories.