The Lex French Quartet mix and match media influences on their new single Colour Grid — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
Inspired by both the Paul Klee painting New Harmony and Miles Davis’s seminal second quintet, Colour Grid — in keeping with 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 Monreal jazz luminaries 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.
French’s artistic influences don’t end there. In The World’s First Summer is the setting of James K. Baxter’s poem On The Death Of Her Body. 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 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.”
New Zealand-born French is fast becoming a bright star on the Canadian jazz scene. He 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).
Listen to Colour Grid below, watch The Lex French Quartet perform the song live above, and find French on his website, Facebook and Instagram.
