51 f
accordeon and who sang – on our dad’s side in particular,” says Réjean. “When André was ten he decided to pick up the fiddle. I was already playing the organ and learned piano to accompany him. The accordeon came a bit later. Pretty much as soon as we started to play traditional music we were in a duo together as Les Frères Brunet, generation 2 – our dad and uncle were generation 1. We put out three albums, then André joined La Bottine and I joined [quintet] La Volée De Castors.”
The brothers were last seen together in the ironically-named outfit Solo – a seven-piece folk supergroup formed from the combined membership of Le Vent Du Nord and De Temps Antan. It includes another pair of siblings – Simon and Eric Beaudry, both of them guitarists, bouzouki players, and lead singers. The Solo project toured widely in 2017, performing materi- al never previously released by either of the two bands. In December they went into the studio to cut the perversely-titled Notre Album Solo.
“The choreography and concept by Michel Faubert was based on that irony,” says Olivier. “Each musician pretended it was his own solo project and that the oth- ers were accompanying him. Michel want- ed to portray a kind of society where everybody wants to be the one with the solution, and forgets that they’re part of a group – called society.” Laughs all around.
Notre Album Solo will be released in early July at the Chants de Vielles festival, and Le Vent Du Nord are hard at work cre- ating material for their own next album. The band goes into the studio in Septem- ber as a quintet for the first time. “We’ll arrange and play all the new pieces in con- cert beforehand to give them a thorough road-testing,” says Réjean. “We don’t want to be working things out while in the recording process.”
The rise of Le Vent Du Nord to become one of the top roots music bands anywhere reflects the vitality of the traditional and trad-based scene in Quebec. The situation isn’t so rosy, however, when it comes to getting gigs back home. Unlike most of Anglo-Celtic Canada, Quebec lacks a strong network of folk clubs. Bands have to play in theatres and halls where they’re in com- petition with artists from all the other per- forming arts, from stand-up comedy to cir- cus. Groups need to display an exceptional calibre of musicianship and stagecraft.
ue Les Chauffeurs à Pieds from Quebec City – whose name means both ‘The Foot-warmers’ and ‘The Chauffeurs-on-foot’. “As for the first sense, well, two of us are foot-percussionists and when people dance, their feet heat up,” says Antoine Gauthier, founder of Les Chauffeurs, who have released eight albums. “That’s why we have ‘pieds’ in the plural. As for the second, when we started out we were in our late teens and always had to ask people to take us to our out- of-town gigs, as you can’t rent a car til you’re twenty-five in Quebec!”
C
The repertoire of Les Chauffeurs is a mix of traditional songs, particularly chan- sons à répondre, and new songs in a broadly folk and usually humorous vein.
Traditional instrumental sets and tunes alternate with tunes composed by band members. In addition to music, their most recent album De Ses Couteaux Micro- scopiques features environmental sound- scapes – the forest, a river, passing trains – as well as bursts of Antoine’s spontaneous, free-association poetry.
The variety of sonic textures is impres- sive. Like the Brunet brothers, all the Chauffeurs are multi-instrumentalists, which gives them a huge palette of colours. Antoine plays fiddle and mandolin and drums his feet; Louis-Simon Lemieux likewise is a foot-percussionist, hot fiddler and harmonica ace; Olivier Soucy is a gui- tarist, fiddler, pianist and more; and Benoit Fortier plays various recorders and whistles, electric bass, piano, harmonica, and French horn. Like the members of Le Vent du Nord all are singers.
“We’re constantly on the look-out for new sounds, and effects. “We love playing with these things. And there’s an influence from classical music, as Benoit is conserva- tory-trained and brings new types of chords, modes, and combinations. It gives us a much better understanding of music, one that we like to explore. Traditional music for us is the base material that enables us to create without limitations. It’s the language we know and love best, but we see it as a tool to express in a very free way whatever we have to say.”
Les Chauffeurs’ love of the old tunes
doesn’t mean approaching their arrange- ment with a po-faced reverence – far from it on the evidence of Gigue Des Amoureux [The Lovers’ Tune] from their third album III, a jaunty tune from the repertoire of past-master fiddler Isidore Soucy [1899- 1963]. The instrumentation listed in the sleeve notes includes cris de jouissance, or cries of sexual delight. Credited to a cer- tain Éve Libido, they accompany the music in the background – subtly at first, then less so. “At first I wanted to bring a profes- sional sex worker into the studio, but that didn’t get approval from the lads because it was felt she probably wouldn’t be able
Les Chauffeurs à Pieds
to keep closely to the beat. So we asked a musician friend to help out, and she did a really fine job with the rhythm.”
Unlike Le Vent du Nord, Les Chauf- feurs are not endlessly on tour. All mem- bers have day jobs and other commitments that – for most of the year – restrict them to performing locally and on weekends. Olivier teaches, Benoit has several other musical projects, Louis-Simon owns the recording studio where Les Chauffeurs’ albums are recorded on their Scorbut [scurvy] label. And for the past nine years Antoine has worked full-time as director of the grandly-titled Quebecois Council of Living Heritage [CQPV], which brings together ninety organisations, including thirty-three festivals. He’s the right man to ask about the current state of homegrown music in Quebec.
or accordeon or traditional song, and pub- lish The Traditions Of Quebec In Numbers, a series of socio-economic studies. We’re very active at UNESCO in support of the Convention For The Safeguarding Of The Intangible Cultural Heritage. There’s been a steady increase in the number of tradi- tional music festivals in Quebec, but just as we don’t have folk clubs so we don’t really have folk festivals on the same model as the rest of North America with a broad spectrum of different genres.”
“T
Antoine is upbeat about the future, despite the all-too-familiar challenges. “Plenty of young people are getting into the traditions, and there are lots of music camps happening. But there’s no financial support from government at any level, and we have an ongoing problem getting schools and colleges to include our living tradition in their curricula and the courses they offer. There’s very little coverage on the radio. We’re working hard to change that but, all things considered, the music is in pretty good shape now.”
he CQPV is involved in its promotion through sev- eral activities. We organ- ise things like training and workshops on fiddle
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