Inspired by both the painting and Miles Davis’s seminal second quintet in its approach, “Colour Grid” – as well as the band’s upcoming debut album In the World’s First Summer – aims to exemplify communication and improvisation.
“Miles Davis’s quintet was a band that prioritized communication and improvisation, embraced lush and open harmonic soundscapes, and above all, placed the spirit of spontaneity at the center of everything,” muses trumpet leader Lex French.
French has been enthralled by the group ever since adolescence. “When I was about 16 years old, in 1998 or ’99, I bought a copy of Miles Davis’s 1967 album Miles Smiles and was immediately captivated,” he recalls. “Ever since that first listen, I’ve wanted to lead a group that followed in the footsteps of Miles’s second quintet.”
He found that in François Bourassa (piano), Morgan Moore (bass), and Jim Doxas (drums). “They are all improvising musicians of the highest order who can bring their individual and personal approaches to the music but also function as members of the group in order to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts,” French asserts.
In the World’s First Summer is a setting of James K. Baxter’s poem On the Death of Her Body. While the first single “Colour Grid” is inspired by Paul Klee’s painting New Harmony, the song “Falling Up” was a tune that floated around in French’s head for approximately five years before he figured out how to write it down and keep the spirit of the song intact.
Several of the other pieces – “Nana,” “Going Home,” and “V’la L’bon Vent” – are arrangements of folk songs from different traditions. “My arrangements of these songs are attempts to make sense of this music that reaches through time and still manages to tell our stories,” says French.
“Bye Bye Blackbird” brings the listener back to Miles Davis and the end of his first quintet with John Coltrane. “Check out the version on Live from the Olympia,” notes French, “and you’ll see the first glimmerings of his second quintet off in the distance, the same glimmering light that reached through time from 1967 to 1999, grabbed hold of me and never let go.”
Hailed by Radio Canada jazz critic Stanley Pean as “an extraordinary trumpeter”, New Zealand-born Lex French is fast becoming a bright star on the Canadian jazz scene and is a highly in-demand composer and arranger.
Lex possesses a unique voice on the trumpet and plays with technical virtuosity and abiding musical inventiveness, often being compared to legendary trumpeters Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, and Kenny Wheeler. He has more than 100 recording credits as a sideman, and over the course of his 20-year career he has collaborated with jazz luminaries such as Diana Krall, Aaron Parks, Patti Austin, and Bennie Maupin.
Lex is also an internationally sought-after composer and arranger and has recently been commissioned to write works for jazz orchestra, jazz quartet, and string quartet. He has released two albums as a leader: Prevent the Future (2017) and The Cut (2014), and his most recent project includes original compositions inspired by visual arts and poetry, arrangements of folk songs from around the world, and standards from the jazz canon, all played by a band of Montreal jazz luminaries.
