Biography
Jeannette Lambert began singing jazz at age nine and began performing professionally at coffeehouses at age twelve. Born in the Netherlands, to a Dutch mother and an Indo (Indonesian-German) father, she grew up in Sudbury, Ontario in Canada. The landscape of Northern Ontario and life by a lake inspired her to write music and poetry early in life. Later, when her mother pursued studies in visual art, her family moved to Chinatown in Toronto. Her mother, visual artist Agatha Schwager, inspired her to combine creativity and intuition and her father, sociologist Walter Schwager, introduced her to jazz music. As a child she learned a large repertoire of jazz standards which she performed with her brother, jazz guitarist Reg Schwager. When she met her husband, jazz drummer and composer Michel Lambert they soon began touring and recording together, performing and living in Amsterdam, New York, the south of France, Toronto and Paris before settling in Montreal, Quebec.
They have two sons, van garden (Jerome) and beamer! (Theo) who appear regularly on their recordings and who have recently launched their own label, Friday Night Inn. beamer! is also a prolific illustrator specialized in rap cover art aka Beamboy.illustrator. He has animated many of Jeannette’s latest music videos.
Jeannette has worked with many internationally acclaimed musicians and performs regularly in France, Holland, Indonesia, Germany, England, the U.S. and Canada. For her seventh cd as a leader, Sand Underfoot, she performed with Barre Phillips, Michel Lambert and special guest Paul Bley. Like her previous recording, Lone Jack Pine, with Michel and Barre, it featured free jazz performed around her poetry. In 2019 she released Genius Loci Mixtape with music composed and recorded while travelling. Described in the WholeNote as “an imaginative and intimate travelogue in music” it features a dozen musicians including Michel, Reg, Barre and many others from Europe and Indonesia.
She co-founded the music label Jazz From Rant with Michel and Reg in 1991, initially releasing recordings on cassettes before moving on to compact disc production and recently one vinyl. Their label has been successful in documenting a wide variety of music and unusual collaborations and their catalogue includes over 60 recordings, including her albums of jazz standards, her compositions and Bebop for Babies, her jazz versions of classic children’s songs. One of their earliest recordings, Ask Her, has been remastered and reissued in North America and Japan.
In her twenties, when she was a punk and went out to punk, reggae and industrial music concerts often, she performed sound poetry and led a series of bands of free jazz including the duo Black Fungus with Michel, a group with 4 guitars (Plectrum Spectrum) and another with 3 voices (Contradiction). She studied with the legendary Cecil Taylor, vocalist Jay Clayton and many others at the Banff Jazz Workshop. She has presented a paper on Cecil Taylor’s inspiration on her work in Brooklyn, New York at the Unit Structures conference. And she is working on Black Fungus Redux with Michel, a revival of their avantgarde steampunk music with a political edge.
She is also a multi-media artist, having majored in film production and film studies at York University. Much of the music she has recorded has been included in her web art and digital films and she is considered a pioneer in internet cinema. Her internet films and web art have been screened in museums and festivals worldwide. Some of these are available to view on her main Youtube channel. She continues to make music videos which have been selected by festivals worldwide, screened this year in Finland and Ukraine.
In the late 1990s she founded the Jazz Grrls online community for women in jazz to tackle gender bias in the industry. A few years ago she conducted several interviews with her favourite female improvisers and innovators which are on her Youtube channel. They discuss topics such as balancing life and art, and the role of mysticism in improvised music.
She has kept a dream journal for several decades and considers active dreamwork a vital part of her creative process. She presented her music and led a workshop entitled Singing Your Dreams at the International Association for the Study of Dreams conference in the Netherlands. She took several online courses in active dreaming with writer Robert Moss and is a member of two international Psiberdreaming groups involved in ongoing psychic research. You can read more about how she uses dreaming in her creative process on this blog.
Her album Genius Loci East includes songs composed during travels in Java and Japan. Genius Loci North, recorded in six different locations in Quebec, her home province, is out now. It features Jeannette, Reg and Michel performing as well as features from friends, family and field recordings from nature. She has travelled to France, England, Italy and Finland to participate in Michel’s Ars Transmutatoria and she mixes and masters his many inventive recordings for these orchestral events. 
She composed her Opera of the Unspoken and after experimenting with new composing techniques, digital tools and workshopping the music with her trio and several vocalists, she released the first iteration of the score, Island of Unrest. In her recent release, Portrait Landscape, she continues this exploration of combining composition with oracles and intuitive structures and collaborating with the natural world.
© Jazz from Rant, 2024