Alex Fournier is a bassist, composer, arranger and educator whose commitment to his art, instrument and craft spans a plurality of different musical styles and situations.  Alex began his studies at the age of 13, taking up the electric bass, before quickly moving to the double bass at age 15.  He began studies at the University of Toronto in 2007 under Dave Young, Andrew Downing and Jim Vivian. As well, he began studying composition under Andrew Downing and Phil Nimmons, graduating with a Bachelor of Music with Honours in 2011.  Alex later attended both the Banff Creative Music Workshop and the SIM Workshop in 2013, leading him to an invitation to the Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Conservatory's Jazz Performance program in 2014.  Alex has studied both jazz performance and composition under Michael Formanek, as well as Paul Johnson for classical performance, while contributing to multiple jazz ensembles of all sizes, as well as multiple chamber ensembles that focused on modern music.  Taking both a performer's and curator's role in events presented in both Baltimore and Brooklyn, he gained critical experience in event and series planning, allowing him to make novel connections between performers and genres while furthering his commitment to a pan-genre approach to music.  Alex graduated with a Graduate Performance Diploma in Jazz Performance in May of 2016.

Currently based in Toronto Ontario, Alex presents multiple groups, series and initiatives with a commitment to his musical ethos.  Triio specializes in a style of episodic compositions that focus on the interplay and mutual influence shared between written music and free improvisation, creating the effect of a “living score”. Triio released its first, self-titled album in 2019; its second release, Six-ish Plateaus, in 2022 to international critical acclaim.  Triio's third release in 2023, Magnetic Dreaming, included the commissioning of a short film to accompany the entire 23 minute-plus playtime of the EP, and marked the group's first official foray into a multimedia, multi-sensory experience.  As well, Alex makes up one third of the collective, Money House, which focuses on original compositions and sketches which draw influence from the writing of many of the bebop and post-bop piano trios of the 1950s and 60s.  Money House’s first album, Swing Your Cake, was released in spring of 2024. Alex contributes to the group Huet//Fournier//Kuhl, a collective focused on free and textural improvisation, featuring performers Edwin Huet on electronics and live processing, and Mike Kuhl on drums and percussion.  They released their first album, Rarefied Air, in early 2020.

Alex also acts as a sideman in several other projects, such as Toronto’s original slow-core band and musical institution, Picastro, pop-oriented projects such as Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, the flagship project(s) for guitarist Dan Pitt, The Dan Pitt Trio/Quintet, The Tak Arikushi Trio/Quintet, which is an update to a traditional jazz ensemble focused on the fusion of the Django Reinhardt’s music with traditional Japanese folk music and Action Forever, a project that finds itself halfway between funk and grunge.  He has also performed as a guest with Granny Smith, Passepartout Duo and Mira Martin-Gray.  Alex also hosts his own performance/writer’s workshop series with the help of collaborator, Patrick O’Reilly. The Furniture Music Composition Workshop takes the form of both monthly instalments of curated performances by improvising artists of any discipline from Toronto and beyond, as well as a writers workshop featuring a rotating panel of musicians who perform incomplete pieces, sketches and graphic scores brought in live while offering commentary on the directions that the score can be taken in.

In 2024, Alex embarked on his largest composition project to date.  Inspired by a combination of the lineage of composers from the AACM to the 2010's ECM improvised music roster, as well as a collection of stories by Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges, Alex wrote a series of "companion" pieces inspired by the stories in The Garden of Forking Paths from Borges' collection, Ficciones.  Totalling approximately two hours of music, the ten pieces act as a world of their own, balancing robust melodic themes and harmonic settings that were drawn from a single transposition of a Messiaen mode against a plethora of diverse rhythmic settings and developments.  This project is the culmination of several converging points of study in harmony, rhythm and form that have been written to be accessible, not only as individual pieces that appeal to both the casual listener and the music buff, but as a larger suite that presents itself as ten separate pieces imbued with the ability to morph into one another during the course of a performance of the experimental score.  The Garden of Forking Paths is currently seeing a city-wide residency where each performance acts as a premiere for each piece, culminating in the residency's finale and the suite's recording in 2026 and release in 2027.

Alex has also performed with artists such as Tony Malaby, Sture Ericson, Michael Formanek, Tim Berne, Courtney Orlando, Jacob Sacks, Colin Hinton, Mike Kuhl, Manabu Kitada, Aakash Mittal, TANDEM (Anouck Genthon, Ed Williams Afraux, Tom Malmendier), Peter Formanek, Nick Fraser, Jim Lewis, Karen Ng, Lina Allemano, Andrew Downing, Allison Au, and Tara Kannangara. He has also worked under the direction of composers and musical directors such as Dillon Baldassero in the films Black Cop (2017 - director: Cory Bowles) and The Family (2021 - director: Dan Slater), David Smooke (Now Hear This - Ensemble), Peter "Trey" Dayton (Recinto - Canadian Premiere, Lodgepole Pyre - Editor), Sean Calhoun (Suite for Solo Double Bass - Premiere, Editing) and Dominic Coles (Dr. Construction and/or Ms. Multicolored Flower - Premiere).