At 26, Alexis Lombre has been a fixture on the Chicago jazz scene for more than a decade, and lately she’s begun making a mark further afield. She began as a teenage piano wunderkind, and she’s since played in the Great Black Music Ensemble (a project of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and bands led by Jon Batiste, Makaya McCraven, Marcus Miller, and other eminences.
Last month, the pianist, composer, vocalist, and producer shared a bill with the Maria Schneider Orchestra at Ravinia, and next month she’ll join nonpareil vocalist and AACM member Dee Alexander—another longtime collaborator—in an all-women music and dance project called Ancestors Reign at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Lombre is just as prodigiously talented when leading her own band, though, and she’s leaping into that role all over the city.
On Friday, September 1, her trio with drummer Samuel Jewell and bassist Brooklynn Skye plays the Chicago Jazz Festival. On September 16, she’ll debut a new suite at the Englewood Jazz Festival with a band that includes Jewell, bassist Junius Paul, and other artists to be announced. She took inspiration for the piece from her experiences with synesthesia, a condition that links stimuli across senses; Lombre, for example, powerfully associates sounds with specific colors. “My goal for that project is to help the audience connect the senses, so that maybe they could see what I see,” she says.
Alexis Lombre Trio
Part of the Chicago Jazz Festival. Fri 9/1, 12:40 PM, Von Freeman Pavilion (north promenade), Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph, free, all ages
Lombre grew up on the south side, in Englewood, Hyde Park, and Grand Crossing. She started playing the piano at nine; by 12 or 13, she says, “I knew that was it.” The piano felt intuitive to her—obvious, even. Around the same time, she started studying with Willie Pickens, the inexhaustible Chicago piano virtuoso and pedagogue, and he remained a key mentor until his death in 2017.
“It worked for me because we’re both Aries, so we’re both direct and assertive. He’d [teach] like, ‘Watch me play this. . . . OK, now you play it,’” Lombre remembers. “I liked that because it was very straightforward.”
Lombre’s jazz education continued when she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for college in 2015, but it took place mostly outside the classroom. Even before the move, she’d dipped her toes into the Detroit scene on a tip from two Chicago artists, drummer Clif Wallace and singer Meagan McNeal—they’d urged her to check out the Tuesday jam sessions at Cliff Bell’s, a venerable downtown venue that hosts jazz most nights. Soon she began running her own regular jam at another long-standing venue, the nearby Bert’s Market Place, and she threw herself into Detroit’s jazz and gospel circuits.
At the time, Lombre rarely sang onstage, preferring to present herself as a pianist and composer in the straight-ahead mold. That approach bears fruit on her all-instrumental debut EP, Southside Sounds (2017), consisting mostly of original tunes she’d written in high school. But Lombre’s music since then has set her iridescent, soulful voice front and center—as will her first full-length album, a more expansive and genre-agnostic recording that’s due next year.
Alexis Lombre’s 2017 debut EP, Southside Sounds
“For some reason, I always avoided singing when I was younger, because I wanted to be ‘taken seriously’ as a musician,” Lombre says. “I didn’t have to be so austere in that choice. Mentors kept trying to get me to sing all the time, and I thought they were only asking me that because I’m a girl. But when I went to college and turned 18, I was like, ‘Man, I just love to sing!’”
Lombre’s as-yet-untitled album, which she’s also producing, has been gestating for a few years now. Where Southside Sounds was more of a tribute to Chicago’s jazz heritage, this new release turns inward, toward Lombre’s own musical world. That world touches on funk, R&B, gospel, and hip-hop via influences such as PJ Morton, Erykah Badu, and Hiatus Kaiyote. It will be her album-length debut as a singer, a role she teased in 2021 with the single “Come Find Me.”
Alexis Lombre foregrounds her voice on the 2021 single “Come Find Me.”
“I think that’s what’s taking me so long to produce this project,” Lombre says. “I’m taking time to develop this instrument with the same seriousness that I’ve developed on piano.”
The album’s lyrics coalesce around themes of mental health and perseverance—front of mind for Lombre after a globally traumatizing few years. “Lotus,” one of the songs she’ll perform Friday at the Jazz Fest, is an accidentally prescient anthem of resilience that she wrote in high school but didn’t include on Southside Sounds. Another new tune, “Chaos,” arises from Lombre’s experience during the pandemic. “I wrote that about being an empath,” she says, “and feeling all the chaos all around you—making a pact to yourself that you will not let yourself lose your mind.”
Friday won’t be Lombre’s first stomp through the Chicago Jazz Festival grounds, though. In her teens, she frequently performed on the Young Lions stage, most recently leading a quintet there in 2016. But her billing this year, at the Von Freeman Pavilion, makes plain she’s no longer a precocious up-and-comer.
“I’m not even so hung up on genre. I just want to express myself,” Lombre says. “This album is showcasing myself as a vocalist, a producer, a composer, and a pianist. I want to come out as a main-stage artist.”
