Image provided by the Daigle family.
Although violins typically have four strings, Jairus Daigle plays a five-stringed variation, strung with a low C in addition to the standard four. Image provided by the Daigle family.
When someone says “jazz frontman” what do you see in your mind’s eye? If you’re picturing a sharply-dressed cat pouring heart and soul into the mouthpiece of a trumpet or saxophone, you’re only seeing part of the picture. Because while Jairus Daigle stands front and center in the band he leads, and while he’s definitely well-dressed, the first thing you’ll notice about this young jazz prodigy from Lake Charles is the instrument he wields. It’s a violin.
Jairus, 24, has been playing violin since he was 7. But he’s packed a lot of performing into the years in between. That’s what happens when you grow up with a professional musician for a father. Jairus’ dad is Chester Daigle, a pianist who has played with the likes of James Brown, Sly Stone, Jeff Beck, and Jennifer Holliday, who was so impressed with Chester’s proficiency when he filled in at short notice during a concert she was playing in Houston that she gave him a role in her hit Broadway musical, Dream Girls. Since losing his sight in 2007, Chester doesn’t go on the road anymore; but his R&B band City Heat remains a regular fixture of the Lake Charles live music landscape, and father and son play gigs around town several times a week. “I refer to myself as a ‘working musician,’ said Chester. “I’m not a star, but I like working behind prominent people.”
Increasingly, the prominent person Chester works behind is Jairus, his youngest son, who, despite also playing saxophone, French horn, piano, and drums, has been fascinated with the violin since he began attending Lake Charles Symphony concerts as a child, when his father played piano with the orchestra. “I’d go and see him play, and from the beginning I loved the violin,” remembered Jairus, who is as expressive in speech as he is when playing. “It was the most pronounced instrument in the orchestra. The violinists sat at the front, and the person who always shakes the conductor’s hand is a violinist.” Studying with instructors in Lake Charles, Jairus worked his way through the classical repertoire; but bathed as he was in Chester’s musical aura, he and his siblings (four out of five still play regularly) absorbed the jazz sensibility. Gradually, the young musician found ways to interpret all that jazz on the instrument he loves.
Jairus believes that the violin is uniquely suited to the performance and interpretation of jazz. “Classical music is very disciplined,” he said. “Learning it teaches you everything you need to know about reading and rhythm and all the technical exercises that go along with that. But with jazz, you take all that muscle memory you learned in classical and you infuse it with a freedom of speech. Not only can you be the front guy, like the sax or the trumpet, you can also be part of the rhythm section because you can play chords and double stops. So you can do certain rhythms as well.”
You don’t need to know much about jazz to discern that this young musician is really, seriously good. Long before he was out of his teens, people began to notice. Jairus was attending a summer school program at New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts when Boston’s Berklee College of Music visited to conduct auditions. Jairus was offered a place at Berklee, the largest independent college of contemporary music in the world and a leading institution for the study of jazz—an incredible opportunity. But the prohibitive cost made attendance seem impossible until a guardian angel in the guise of Lake Charles businessman William Dore heard Jairus and his father performing at a local restaurant and, upon learning of the boy’s predicament, funded Jairus’ tuition.
The four years Jairus spent in Boston were transformative. “For a musician, it was like paradise,” he said. “There was music everywhere: a guitarist on the corner here, a quartet walking down the street there. Everyone collaborating and networking, and everyone really good! That was the intimidating part.” Jairus credits his immersion in this community of people for vastly developing his improvisational ability. “It was a melting pot,” he said, “and it pretty much opened my mind as far as the way I hear music.” At Berklee, Jairus began blending the jazz he had picked up playing with his dad with elements of other musical genres—Latin, hip hop, hardcore metal, dubstep. “After Berklee, I could hear how a song was structured,” he noted. “I could hear what chords and progressions a musician was using, and I could see how they went together. Then, playing a song becomes like building a house: You build the frame, then you put the pieces on.”
Now Jairus is back in Louisiana, bringing all he learned to the gigs he plays with his band, Jairus Daigle & Lake Charles’ Finest. The band, which also features dad Chester and brother Chester III, both on keyboards, plays an original, highly improvisational set with jazz at its core and elements of other genres molded around it. “Jazz is very universal,” he noted. “You can fuse it with a lot of things. So now I’m trying to come up with more ways to change the sound.”
Currently Jairus has two albums to his name—It’s My Time (2010) and Roam Around the City (2014)—and is at work on a third. In May, catch the band playing at the Contraband Days festival on May 1 at the Lake Charles Civic Center. Father and son also play during jazz brunch at L’Auberge Casino in Lake Charles each Sunday and at La Truffe Sauvage restaurant on Tuesday evenings. jairusdaigle.com to learn more.
To see and hear Jairus and Chester Daigle performing and discussing their musical careers, tune in to Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Art Rocks show, episode #321, airing at 5:30 pm Saturday, May 14, and 4 pm Sunday, May 15, on LPB. lpb.org/artrocks.
