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Le Bruit Court Dans La Ville
Tony Montagu introduces a trio of Canadian veterans making great traditional music.
S
ome purists maintain you have to be born into a folk tradition to truly master it, or at least to grow up in the culture. Ornstein, who lives in Portland, Oregon, belies that argument. A Jewish girl raised in the American Midwest by a mum who played harpsichord, she fell in love with traditional tunes in her teens – old-time Appalachian music, and in time Canadian. In the ’70s and ’80s Ornstein was a leading figure in Quebec’s folk renais- sance, learning and collecting from the old musicians and sharing their knowledge.
“My major sources were Louis
Boudreault, a legendary fiddle-player from Saguenay–Lac-St Jean; the Verret family from Lac-St Charles, a multi-generational family dynasty mainly of fiddlers but also accordeon players; Keith Corrigan and the communities of the Jacques Cartier river val- ley; André Gagnon, a fiddle player from Lot- binière, and Henri Landry. I learned from the endless rounds of music at kitchen parties and dance halls, and of course visiting the musicians in the Joliette area when I was in La Bottine – like the uncle of Gilles Cantin, one of the co-founders with André.”
Marchand on guitar and almost-co-founder Lisa Ornstein on fiddle – plus traditional singer Normand Miron on three-row accordeon and harmonica. The trio plays acoustic, no frills, kitchen music, and takes you straight to the heart of rural Quebec.
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“We’ve been together as Le Bruit since the late ’80s, but we knew each other well before that – André and Normand are old friends from the early ’70s,” says Ornstein. “One year we got invited to play at the Champlain Valley Folk Festival in northern Vermont, and it was such an instant click. Right away we were all on the same page.”
Thumb forward a few chapters, and Le Bruit Court Dans La Ville [‘There’s a rumour round town’] has returned from an inspiring trip to France and its first West Coast tour, in support of its latest release, the excellent Les Vents Qui Ventent [2014]. Suspiciously the album includes two songs in succession –
e Bruit Court Dans La Ville is a Canadian supergroup in the old mould: two veterans of La Bottine Souriante – co-founder André
Le Coucou and Papineau – about philander- ing wives.
“It’s a philandering housewives album, what can I say?” jokes Ornstein. “One thing I love about traditional French song is that there’s no pretence about the sanctity of married life. There are plenty about beauti- ful, romantic love and courtship but there are just as many about philandering hus- bands and wives – songs on the lines of ‘I love my husband, but I love him more dead than I do alive’. They’re down to earth about the improbable difficulties of life.”
But they also love fantasy. Les Vents Qui
Ventent opens with Tandis Que Nous Fai- sions L’Amour, a call and response song about a king’s daughter spurned by her lover for a wiser woman who can bring on the snow, hail, or winds at her will and cause the sun to shine at midnight in her bedroom. Sung by Miron in a country voice, and propelled by feet and droning fiddle, it’s a gem of folk poetry, and is followed by a tune of Ornstein’s named La Magicienne in the shamanic lady’s honour
As for regional styles in the music, Orn- stein links them to favourite dances. “For example in the St Lawrence valley – all the way from Montreal to Quebec City and beyond – there’s a tradition of the quadrille, which has influenced the repertory and the styles of playing. Whereas if you go to Saguenay–Lac-St Jean you’ve got cotillons and contra dances. Down in the areas south of Quebec City square-dancing is the most widely-known social dance. And the more you get towards the Gaspé peninsula, to my ears, you hear an Acadian lilt, and you get some of the Cape Breton influences in terms of the repertoire - because if you live way out in Gaspésie, you’re getting the Cape Breton radio stations.”
The recent tour of Normandy has given the members of Le Bruit Court Dans La Ville the impetus to create a new album and show that will span continents. “We’re exploring the connection between Quebec and northern France,” says Ornstein, “which is something that really struck us on the two visits we’ve made there in the past eighteen months. We met a number of singers and heard quite a lot of recordings of older peo- ple singing. The affinities – the kinds of songs, and in some cases versions of songs – are very strong, both in melody and text. We can’t wait to get back there to dig deep- er into it all.”
lebruitcourtdanslaville.com F
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