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Le Rex

The renegade Swiss ensemble LE REX reinvents brass groove music with the improvisation-laced ESCAPE OF THE FIRE ANTS, beautiful and fiercely creative music for strange times.

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.

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33
Album Review

Le Rex: Escape of the Fire Ants

Read "Escape of the Fire Ants" reviewed by Glenn Astarita


This young charismatic Swiss ensemble surges forward by melding modern sounds with New Orleans-based traditional jazz and hip groove-building pulses and perpetual motion, executed with manifold time signatures and soaring unison choruses. On its fourth album and second for Cuneiform Records, the musicians' sense of purpose transfers into your listening space as you can detect lots of smiles and conviction emanating from the band's memorable hooks, shifting themes and forceful overtones. Essentially, their seamless integration of trad jazz ...

8
Album Review

Le Rex: Wild Man

Read "Wild Man" reviewed by Glenn Astarita


The band moniker Le Rex is culled from an abandoned theater, discovered on the island of Corsica, but there's nothing bleak or dusky about this quintet's musicality. After a successful tour of the US, they parked in Chicago to record this album, which is the musicians' third effort and first for Cuneiform Records. Essentially, these young lads convey remarkable maturity from a compositional perspective, and keep things novel or fresh amid a host of blossoming developments and tightly enacted grooves. ...

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Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Wild Man

Cuneiform Records
2016

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