f46 “T
he truth is that most younger people who play the music today have university degrees,” chips in Hébert’s partner Jean-François Berthiaume – the token male in Galant, who step-dances and provides percussion with bodhran, an old suit-
case, and clogging feet. “We do a lot of research.” The pair belong to a generation of artists who came of age in the mid-’90s, during the last great push for Quebec’s sovereignty, or as Canada’s English-speaking majority see it, separation. The ‘yes’ vote lost in the referendum of 1995, but only by a gnat’s whisker.
Meanwhile the campaign’s broader social and cultural agenda fired up many youngsters unable yet to vote to search out their roots. Québécois traditional music came to be seen within the broader context of world music, largely thanks to La Bottine Souri- ante. Having then recently added a four-piece brass section, the band co-founded by Marchand showed that rural music from the Lanaudière region, north of Montreal, could have a global appeal.
Many of today’s frontline artists – including LVDN’s Olivier Demers and his college pal Nicolas Boulerice, the Brunet brothers André and Réjean, the Beaudry brothers Eric and Simon, Pascal Gemme, Alex De Grosbois-Garand and Yann Falquet of Gentico- rum – cut their musical teeth around this time.
“A lot of new bands got started including Réveillons!” says Berthiaume, who’s joined in the quartet from Laval – a sleepy dor- mitory-burb, hence the exclamatory name – by his younger broth- er David on English concertina, Richard Forest on fiddle, and Marc Maziade on guitar. “I was 17, and that’s when I really threw myself into the music, which was already in my family. By the beginning of the noughties there was plenty happening again.”
Yet only a handful of bands – such as La Bottine, Les Charbon-
niers and LVDN – are sufficiently well known to be able to under- take full tours of Quebec and play in concert halls. There’s no net- work of folk clubs on the English model. Singers and players gath- er sometimes for sessions in pubs, such as Montreal’s Vices Et Versa on Rue St Laurent, and summer brings a handful of fine festivals, above all Mémoire Et Racines, La Grande Rencontre, and Chants De Vielles. But it’s hard to make ends meet.
Most Québécois roots outfits rely on performing to audiences who usually don’t understand the words they’re singing but
realise the music is part of a much greater family. ”It’s basically quite simple,” explains Berthiaume. “The sources of what we call
Québécois music are Scottish, English, Irish and French. And to understand how they’re all woven together today you have to know a bit about our history.”
hat’s now Quebec was until 1763 part of New France, a huge arc sweeping from the mouth of the St Lawrence to the Great Lakes and the Mis- sissippi valley down to New Orleans. The early settlers were few and came mainly from western France. They brought with them a wealth of songs, many of which underwent a sea change in crossing the Atlantic.
W
Take Malbrough – from the 2008 Réveillons! album Mal- brough N’est Pas Mort – which is an old French marching song for the troops, about the funeral of England’s Duke of Marlborough and a classic piece of magical thinking. In reality he was defeating them in battle. The well-known, jaunty French version (its tune got robbed by For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow) is a long way from David
Berthiaume’s cut-the-bullshit Québécois variant. The story in the ‘call’ lines are much as before, but they’re cut through by the ‘response’ lines “It’s not true”, “You’re bugging me with this”, and the gloriously Cartesian logic of “Malbrough isn’t dead because he’s alive”, skewering the elegant French fantasy.
“I wanted us to do the oldest song we could find,” says Jean- François, whose strong build, flowing locks and braided red-blond beard suggest one of Asterix the Gaul’s transatlantic chums. “It’s from 1709 and David, who’s a school teacher with a love of history, found it in the folk archives of Université Laval [in Quebec City]. We try to verify everything.”
The British conquest, following the battle of the Plains of Abraham, led to the loss of almost all ties with France. New settlers arrived, many of them soldiers in the redcoat army, given land in the colony in lieu of pay. The great majority were Scots, and they brought with them the fiddle. The instrument spread rapidly as new colonists and old habitants began opening up to one another.
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