Between her, jazz and the festival, it’s “a long love story”: on July 8, the pianist, composer, teacher and band leader Lorraine Desmarais will highlight her 40-year career at the Monument-National, surrounded by some twenty colleagues from the Quebec jazz scene that she has contributed so much to make flourish since her debut with her trio, in the fall of 1982.
“Everything I asked of the organization of the Festival, they always granted it to me. A concert with a symphony orchestra? A project with four pianos? They always said yes to me”, remembers the musician, who stamps her feet while preparing for this unique concert.
“One day, I also told them: ‘One thing I would like to do is play a duet with Chick Corea'”, whom Lorraine Desmarais describes as “my mentor, my influence, the one who made me want to play jazz piano.
The Order of Canada represents success and consistency. I have always toured, recorded, composed, taught. I’m like a juggler, I feel like if I dropped one of those things, I’d lose my balance. All that, for me, is not a job, but a vocation.
A few years later — in 2004 — the FIJM offered carte blanche to the famous American composer and pianist, who died last year. The musician remembers every moment of this evening: arriving backstage at the Monument-National at 6:45 p.m., she met her idol. They chatted a little about what they could play together, then met on stage around 7:30 p.m. Corea then took her by surprise by announcing their program…standards that had not been suggested during their meeting earlier. “We started with Summer time – lucky that I knew it by heart! Radio-Canada has an audio recording of the half-hour that they shared with the public.
Make your mark
But it was obviously not for her meeting with Corea that the musician was received as a member of the Order. of Canada in 2012 and that we will highlight his work in a few days. One of the first women (with Karen Young) to make her mark on the Quebec jazz scene, she also contributed to defining its personality in the very jazz fusion years of the 1980s and 1990s, along with François Bourassa, Michel Donato (we will emphasize its 80e birthday at the Gesù on July 9), Oliver Jones, Alain Caron (and UZEB), to name but a few.
In addition to her career as a composer and performer, she will have trained several pianists who have come to enrich our repertoire and broaden the jazz audience here, including Marianne Trudel, Emie R Roussel and more recently Ariane Racicot, Révélation Radio-Canada jazz 2022- 2023, which launched its first album last May, Soaring. “The Order of Canada represents success and consistency,” says Lorraine Desmarais. I have always toured, recorded, composed, taught. I’m like a juggler, I feel like if I dropped one of those things, I’d lose my balance. All that, for me, is not a job, but a vocation. »
Born in Montreal, she was seduced by the piano at a very young age, playing by ear the pop tunes she heard on the radio, “but once I had rehearsed my lessons, my mother always told me: ‘Practice your classic, after, you will play your popular!” Her training in classical piano (and in violin, her secondary instrument) led her to the University of Sherbrooke and then to McGill University, where, while doing her master’s degree in the late 1970s, she heard jazz, that of Corea and Oscar Peterson, like a revelation. “It’s the spontaneity of this music, its part of improvisation! I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do. I loved playing Mozart, but I was drawn to the unknown, to things that didn’t exist. »
The Disciples of Desmarais
What propelled her
Lorraine Desmarais founded her first trio and hit the road to Quebec in 1982 for the first time. Her participation in the 1984 edition of the FIJM accelerated her rise: with her trio, her own compositions and her admirable technique, she won what was then called the Yamaha Jazz Competition. “It propelled me, it was my springboard. Afterwards, I chained the rounds, the studio, the composition, and I never stopped. Acoustic at heart, Desmarais’ music was also of his time, his first three albums recorded by CBC/Radio-Canada revealing electric guitar solos and trendy synthesizer passages.
Without losing interest in the art of the trio, the musician then experimented with the format big band — two albums, released in 2009 and 2016 — after collaborating with an all-female orchestra in the late 1990s. “When I started, I think I was the first female” instrumentalist on the Quebec jazz scene.
Was it important for you to break into this man’s world? “I was doing jazz just for the love of music — I wasn’t an activist, and I didn’t have time for that anyway,” she replies. All that mattered to me was the music,” she adds, quoting the sisters, pianists and composers, who, like her, paved the way for the youngest, Mary Lou Williams, Marian McPartland, Joanne Brackeen and Carla Bley.
“Even if I have a little the impression that having been one of the few women on the scene at that time could have played in my favor, I made my place. This is what we will celebrate together on July 8, at the Monument-National.