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ore than forty years since the first renewal of popu- lar interest in traditional music, fronted by bands such as La Bottine Souri-
ante and Le Rêve du Diable, the roots scene in Quebec has acquired the maturity to experiment and push constantly at boundaries of genre and style.
The artists of Montreal-based trio Bon Débarras have carved out a unique place for themselves with witty and verbally nimble songs, sharp musicianship, smart arrangements, and more than a touch of the variety show.
“I was born into a family of musicians, singers, storytellers, and step dancers and I fell into traditional music when I was a small kid,” says Dominique Desrochers, who writes and sings, plays various instru- ments, and is an agile step dancer, or gigueur. “Like every teen I got into other stuff later – rock, heavy metal, and so on – but I also really connected with traditional gigue. I was in folklore ensembles and it’s there I had my first classes in gigue from masters. At the same time I did interna- tional dances, and the ones that grabbed me the most involved using the body as a percussion instrument – such as South African gumboot dancing. At the same time I developed a career as a musician.”
The different strands of Dominique’s art as a performer came together after co- founding Bon Debarras [Good Riddance] with Jean-François Dumas ten years ago. A fellow multi-instrumentalist and songwrit- er, Jean-François picked up his skills in the course of travelling the world with his gui- tar for many years, entertaining people – and above all learning. “I was interested in every culture and tradition I encountered. Quebecois music came later. I started to play mandolin, then picked up banjo. I’d also heard Alain Lamontagne play har- monica when I was thirteen and it marked me for life. I longed to play like him and to tap my feet like a madman. Like Dominique I’m also influenced by Ameri- can folk, Cajun, and country.”
Bon Debarras’s self-titled debut in 2009 was nominated for an ADISQ – the big music award in Quebec. They followed up in 2013 with Errance, moving more towards their own compositions. Fiddle and viola player Marie-Pierre Lecault joined three years ago to replace bassist Cédric Dind-Lavoie, adding a woman’s voice to the singing and injecting new drive into the trio’s sound. “I was born into a family of musicians, and I’ve been play- ing violin since I was two and majored in classical violin up to university. But at the same time I played traditional music.“
La Grondeuse A Fille/Reel Bipolaire, the folk-instrumental set that opens Bon Débarras’s third album En Panne De Silence, showcases Marie-Pierre’s supple and spirited fiddling. She also sings lead on the hilarious Rill Pour Rire – an urban lowlife ditty that was a big hit forty years ago. You don’t need to speak French to enjoy the rhymes and rhythms of this bril- liant put-down of an aspiring bed compan- ion. “The guys wanted to cover it for a long time but it needed a female interpreter,” she says. “It’s hard to see a man doing it! As
Bon Débarras
soon as I joined they asked if I was interest- ed. We play it in a stripped-down acoustic way with repeating patterns. It’s the only song on which I sing the lead.”
Dominique contributes four composi- tions, and commands a range of different idioms from rural folk to slam poetry. “I dived into traditional music and research into songwriting. I put together a step- dancing spectacle for a dance company, and wrote a show around the poetry of Gaston Miron [1928-96], which made me want to work with that kind of popular language and approach. I like urban music a lot, and slam attracted me in particular. There’s a strong community in Montreal.”
“So I wrote some ‘portraits’, like All
You Can Beat – the psychological sketch of a tapageur [roisterer] or step-dancer, all of it flavoured with traditional music and fragments of text. Bon Débarras is very per- cussive – as much in our words as our music. For the first album we took traditional texts from the archives and gave them new arrangements. Little by little we added our own material. Jean-François and I have our own distinctive styles, ways of talking, and delivery of a song, which gives colour to our show. We like playing with that.”
Jean-François's contribution Le Théâtre De La Ville is a beautifully crafted short-story-in-song – a tale of childhood trauma. “It’s something that happened to me, but I didn’t want to put it in the first person. Everything in the song is true. I went back to the theatre and met the tech- nicians who had worked there. They knew what I experienced, and told me that a child died there, and the theatre had a ghost – which I hadn’t known at the time.”
How do such relatively long, word-rich songs go over with English-speaking audi- ences? “We play a lot for Anglophones in the US and Canada, and came to the UK in 2014 for three weeks,” says Jean-François. “People may not understand all the words but they appreciate the rhythmic aspects and recognise the Anglo-Celtic side of our music. It’s in the jigs and reels of course, but there are other close links and reso- nances – those between Dominique’s danc-
ing and English clogging for instance.”
With solo dance and body percussion, frequent instrumental changes, and of course the audience animation that’s such a strong feature of Quebecois bands, Bon Débarras’s live performance carries echoes of the old-time variety show. “The first thing that our US agent said to me when we met was, ‘there’s something about the circus in what you do’,” recalls Jean-Francois.
L
e Vent Du Nord, Les Chauffeurs A Pieds, and Bon Débarras embrace a growing awareness and respect for North America’s First Nations and their culture.
Le Vent Du Nord were inspired to write La Marche Des Iroquois for their current album Têtu; Les Chauffeurs’ 400-km canoe trip downriver for the book and album De Ses Couteaux Microscopiques is inter- spersed with reference and allusion to ‘les autochtones’ and their knowledge of the natural world; and Bon Débarras end En Panne De Silence with Makushami/Nitassi- nan, a traditional dance of the Innu or Montagnais from north-east Quebec.
“Makushami is a gathering, a feast and celebration to the rhythm of the Innu’s traditional drum the teueikan, and Nitassinan means ‘our land’ in Innu- aimun,” explains Jean-François. “We’ve added a reel and some turlutte [mouth music] to it. I’ve got a job outside of Bon Débarras, working for Wapikomi Mobile, an organisation that brings cinema to autochtone communities. It’s a great pro- ject and has taken me all over Quebec – which is home to eleven First Nations. Dominique has also been to these commu- nities, and it made us want to write a song as a homage. Quebecois folk and roots music is often identified with particular places and regions, and there’s a national- istic side to that. We want to see things from a wider perspective, and draw atten- tion to the people who were here so long before us and that we love so much.”
leventdunord.com/en leschauffeurs.com bondebarras.ca/en
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Photo: Vitor Munhoz
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