From Michigan to Chicago
Lance Gerard Loiselle grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, outside Detroit, and developed a career that moves between performance, arranging, recording, and teaching. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Eastern Michigan University, studying band and instrumental music education, before completing a master’s degree in jazz studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Those two areas of study became continuing parts of his professional life: directing ensembles and helping students learn music while maintaining his own performing and recording projects.
His range of instruments has allowed him to work in quite different kinds of bands. Piano and organ connect his jazz and blues work; sousaphone places him at the bottom of a brass ensemble. He has also described himself as a singer, conductor, composer, and recording engineer. Rather than maintaining separate identities for those activities, his career repeatedly brings them together in the same projects. The keyboard player credited as LaeLo with the Secret 4 is also the producer and brass musician credited as Lance Gerard Loiselle elsewhere.
Brass bands and live hip-hop
Loiselle helped found LowDown Brass Band in the early 2000s. Its starting point was a New Orleans-style cover band, but its music developed through the players’ own writing and their interests in funk, soul, reggae, and hip-hop. In a 2017 Chicago Defender interview, Loiselle singled out the Dirty Dozen Brass Band as an important model. Their mixture of older brass-band practices and newer rhythmic ideas showed him how a group could retain its instrumental character while changing its repertoire.
Chicago’s live hip-hop scene supplied another part of his musical education. While studying jazz at DePaul, he played keyboards with Treologic, rendered as Trill Logic in some coverage. Working with emcees made the relationship between jazz and sampled grooves immediate. His association with Anthony ‘Billa Camp’ Evora carried into LowDown Brass Band, where rapping became a regular part of the ensemble. The group’s evolution grew out of those existing working relationships and an expanding body of original material.
The resulting band could appear at a jazz event, a club, or a ska and reggae festival without changing its basic instrumental identity. A 2019 interview around its appearance at the Victoria Ska & Reggae Festival caught Loiselle in that touring setting. His enthusiasm for Michael Jackson, Prince, and Quincy Jones also offered a useful glimpse of the pop and production interests behind his work with a horn-heavy band.
Producing LowDown’s records
LowDown Breaks, released in January 2018, makes Loiselle’s responsibilities especially clear. He produced the album, played sousaphone and sang, and contributed to its composition and arrangements. He shares arrangement credits with Evora on ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Can I Kick It?’ The selections connect the band’s brass sound with ska and hip-hop repertoire, while guests including Ang 13, Fada Dougou, and DJ Alo extend its Chicago collaborations.
His role also reached into the connective tissue of the record. The album credits its short ‘breaks’ to DJ Alo and Loiselle, and credits him with recording some of the vocals. Those details matter to the finished sequence: the producer was working with transitions, recorded voices, and the relationship between songs as well as helping assemble the performances. LowDown Breaks represents a band musician shaping the record’s overall form.
LowDown Nights followed with another combination of brass playing and studio work. Its credits list Loiselle on sousaphone and keyboards, and identify him as the composer of ‘Tuba Titan.’ Several tracks were recorded at Loiselle Studios and remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The record’s official Bandcamp edition dates from February 2022. The credits show his continuing presence as a player and writer even as production responsibilities were shared differently across the group’s releases.
On LowDown Nights, his composition ‘Tuba Titan’ sits within a program that includes ‘Bourbon Street,’ ‘Wake Up,’ and ‘Log On the Fire.’ The album credits separate his writing and playing from its production by Evora and Shane Jonas. It is a useful example of his changing responsibilities inside a collaborative band: a founder contributing an individual composition while other members guide the album’s production.
Piano, composition, and the classroom
Outside LowDown, Loiselle’s projects include the solo piano recording What the World Needs Now and A New Hymn Standard, a collection of hymns arranged in a jazz setting. His earlier professional biography also lists a score for the independent film Sound and work with the Jordan Years. These activities give a fuller sense of his keyboard career than a single band credit: he has worked with songs, film, improvising ensembles, and sacred repertoire.
Teaching has been equally sustained. At Alcott Elementary in Chicago, his work has included choir, school musicals, seasonal assemblies, Fine Arts Night, and graduation programs. His school biography identifies him as a National Board Certified Teacher and describes experience teaching band, choir, and general music in Chicago Public Schools and Catholic schools. From 2010 to 2019, he also directed music at Morgan Park Presbyterian Church and worked with the Beverly Morgan Park Community Choir.
Those positions connect his professional musicianship to music made by children and community singers. Rehearsal, arranging, accompaniment, and leading an ensemble are practical responsibilities in both settings. His influence as an educator comes through that continuing work with participants, alongside the recordings and performances through which listeners encounter his own playing.
LaeLo and the Secret 4
The Secret 4 brought Loiselle’s keyboard work into a group whose other members had backgrounds in Chicago rockabilly and blues. Its band history places LaeLo’s activity with Treologic and LowDown Brass Band in the 2000s before describing their eventual convergence. That background helps explain the group’s mixture of instrumental blues, rockabilly, country, and jazz interests.
His part in this setting is specifically piano and organ. The Secret 4’s 2024 Lab Jam release uses the credit Laelo, while Walk On In gives his full name and the broader designation keyboards. Across those sessions he works with bass, drums, guitar, and saxophone, a different balance from LowDown’s massed brass and percussion. It is another use of the same versatility that has connected his jazz studies, live hip-hop work, record production, and classroom teaching.
His school biography also lists work with Mike Gallagher and Higher Order and the Blue Water Kings. These engagements complement the longer-running LowDown project, keeping him active in smaller groups and different kinds of professional performances.