Mireille Proulx
violinist-composer
In wedding a classical training to jazz music and by adding her personal touch, she has succeeded in creating a unique style.
– Châtelaine magazine
“No telling how much further your talent will take you,” Dave Brubeck wrote Mireille Proulx after hearing Il y avait des pélicans, the Montreal jazz violinist’s first recording.
Mireille Proulx follows in the tradition of jazz-violin greats Stéphane Grappelli and Jean-Luc Ponty, using her classical background as a springboard to something new in music. In her highly distinctive composing a unique and unmistakable voice evolved on the contemporary jazz scene, where balms for the troubled soul exist in equal measure with invitations to reverie.
Her second CD, Infini Rendez-vous, appeared to great critical acclaim. “It’s a finely worked, sumptuous music,” wrote Montreal’s La Presse, “that’s just right for a champagne-and-caviar evening, or for the sort of rendezvous you wish would be ‘infinite.’”
Mireille Proulx’s artistry and delightful on-stage personality have graced festivals in North America and in Europe (where her performances included launching the 34th edition of the prestigious Festival d’Antibes–Juan-les-Pins), and concert venues across Canada and in the Northeastern U.S.
When Mireille Proulx plays the Festival, suddenly it's a more refined, well-bred, elegant event. No one in jazz produces more exquisite sounds on the violin than Proulx: her classical training comes through in a lyricism, an impressionism and a simple beauty as she interprets compositions of her own making, streaked with dark/light shadings of emotion.
– Montreal International Jazz Festival program notes