The Centre for Jazz and Popular Music will
present renegade Swiss ensemble Le Rex on Wednesday (October 9), 2019.
Le Rex reinvents brass groove music with
the improvisation-laced with beautiful and fiercely creative music for strange
times. The album Escape of the Fire Ants
announces the arrival of Le Rex as an international force: “street smart &
road-tested, ferociously grooving & lyrically charged, a new millennium
jazz brass band infused with indie rock energy & attitude.”
Harry Lime, the charming but dastardly
anti-hero in the classic 1949-film noir The
Third Man, famously dissed Switzerland saying "they had brotherly
love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce?
The cuckoo clock." The renegade Swiss quintet Le Rex isn't making up for
lost time, but there's an urgency and creative ferocity to their music that
would make Lime reconsider his unfair denigration. Featuring four expert horn
players and drums, the band is a rising force on the European music scene, with
an irresistibly grooving sound honed on the street and designed for maximum
impact in clubs and concert halls.
Slated for release on Cuneiform Records on
April 5, 2019, Le Rex's fourth album Escape
of the Fire Ants is the band's most confident and cohesive, marked by
consistently compelling compositions, careening melodies and thick, lapidary
harmonies. It's cosmopolitan music drawing on far-flung influences and
connections to Chicago, Belgrade, Cape Town, New Orleans, and Lagos. Rather
than flaunting an eclectic palette, Le Rex transmutes its source material into
seamless original works reflecting the group's singular collection of personalities.
Featuring German-born alto saxophonist Benedikt Reising, tenor saxophonist Marc
Stucki, trombonist Andreas Tschopp, tuba player extraordinaire Marc
Unternährer, and drummer Rico Baumann, Le Rex reflects the fundamental strength
that flows from musicians who've put in the time to forge deep ties on and off
the bandstand.
Join Le Rex at the Centre for Jazz and
Popular Music, University of KwaZulu-Natal Howard College Level 2, Denis
Shepstone Building, on October 9 at 18h00 (doors open at 17h30). General
admission R80 (R50 pensioners, R25 students R25).
For more information contact zamat1@ukzn.ac.za
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