Lorraine Desmarais

About

The artist

Lorraine Desmarais is a Laval-based pianist, composer, arranger, conductor, and educator whose career has connected Quebec jazz with international stages for more than four decades. The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec identifies her as a Quebec jazz pioneer, and its 2025 honours record documents her work in all five disciplines. Current local reporting calls her a Laval and Auteuil artist, while the Governor General's honours registry independently lists Laval, Quebec. Current activity is documented by a 2026 Festival International de Jazz de Montréal performance report, forthcoming 2026 Apple Music concert listings, and a 2025 Laval interview reporting that she was preparing another album. Her exact main Spotify identity currently exposes seven album and single containers: six albums and one single from 1991 through January 2023. This provider-scoped count is narrower than the 12 original-composition albums described by her booking agency and the 13 career albums reported by CALQ and Laval press because some projects and earlier recordings are not represented as album or single containers on this exact Spotify profile. Representative records on the reconciled Spotify identity include Vision, Lorraine Desmarais Big Band, Couleurs de lune, and Street Beat Suite. Street Beat Suite presents eight original compositions for her trio with bassist Alec Walkington and drummer Camil Bélisle. Her documented distinctions include the 2002 Oscar Peterson Award from the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, membership in the Order of Canada in 2013, three Félix jazz-album awards, the 2024 CALQ Artist of the Year award in Laval, and appointment as a Compagne of the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec in 2025. Her current booking representative provides the safe professional inquiry route. No record-production role is published because the reviewed sources establish composition, arrangement, conducting, performance, and musical direction, but do not establish a producer credit. The exact bilingual payload was reviewed for identity, current Laval geography, active status, provider-scoped catalog, career-count context, credits, achievements, relationships, contact safety, producer exclusion, and media treatment. Spotify media is rendered live with provider attribution and a monogram fallback.