When I commit acts of musical fandom, I learn tunes (and have a tendency to pester fiddle and flute players).
When Dara commits acts of musical fandom, major cities are leveled and the Cascadia Mecha Militia is deployed! Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, I give you my belovedest supervillain’s latest composition: Kaiju Meat, her ode to all things Pacific Rim, written for this weekend’s Jaegercon on Tumblr!
Go! Clickie! It’s a free download! THE CASCADIA MECHA MILITIA NEEDS YOU!
I had a couple different people hitting my site today looking for sheet music to La Bottine Souriante tunes–specifically, “Hommage à Philippe Brunea” and “Valse d’hiver”.
Since I am not actually a sheet music site, I direct interested parties to these links:
Failing either of those, TheSession.org may be able to help you. I’ve periodically found Quebec tunes there, though I use it as a tertiary resource.
You may or may not be able to find tunes composed by specific Quebec artists. I’ve found things composed by André Brunet (who in fact has a few of his tunes available in PDF form here, along with tunes by a couple of other people), and a couple of things composed by Olivier Demers (“Gigue à trois”, which is on the Montreal session tunebook site) and the guys in Genticorum (again on the Montreal site, but a couple on TheSession.org as well–notably for them I’ve found “Violon guérisseur” and “Valse de poeles”, the first on the Montreal session site and the second on TheSession.org).
I will also note that the lovely people at the core of the session I go to, La Famille Leger, have a collection of accordion-friendly tunes right over here. I note also that I am NOT an accordion player, but as I am a flautist, stuff that’s easily playable in D is very friendly to my flutes.
Happy tunes hunting, my fellow instrumentalists!
Those of you who’ve read my writeup of the amazing time Dara and I had seeing Le Vent du Nord in Victoria this past April may have noticed how one of my very favorite parts of the entire show was when les gars started belting out “Le Retour du Fils Soldat”. Four-part harmony, right in front of me and Dara, YUM.
I’d said at the time that you should all find this song ASAP, though I couldn’t find a video of it on YouTube. A kind soul has now CORRECTED this little problem, and my friend and fellow devoted Le Vent fan Susan pointed me at this delightful thing.
BEHOLD! “Le Retour du Fils Soldat”, now joining “General Taylor” and “River Driver” on the list of Songs That Have Killed Me Ded of Harmony:
(Apologies in advance to people reading the LJ/DW mirror of this post–Bandcamp embeds don’t work on those sites, so I’m directing traffic for it over to my main site. Click over to the original angelahighland.com post to see the embeds rendering properly.)
Well now, this was a lovely surprise!
Being a fan of Genticorum, and in particular of the work of Alexandre de Grosbois-Garand (and his duo work with his wife Mélisande as well), led me over to finding out about La Prûche Libre, a label for Quebec trad. I saw them posting about a new album via their Facebook page last night–and if I read the post correctly it was in connection with Memoire et Racines this weekend. Which got my interest up, so I clicked over to their Bandcamp page to check it out.
This was the first album of theirs that I looked at!
And while I was at it I checked it out this one as well–because the cover art attracted me. The singer totally made me think “HEY, she’s a brunette Shenner!” Those of you who know me from my Star Wars MUSH days may remember that my character Shenner was in fact a redheaded version of Karen Allen in the Star Wars MUSH movie in my brain, so this is really a roundabout way of the singer reminding me of Karen Allen. Regardless, it caught my eye! So then I actually played some of the tracks, and decided yes, her voice is lovely, so I wanted the music too.
Last but not least I had to grab this one by a quartet called La Cantinière. It’s not even out yet but I’m making a point of pre-ordering it, since it’s involving three of the gentlemen previously involved with La Volée d’Castors–who y’all may recall are one of the major Quebec bands I’ve been adoring for a while now. Those guys are in fact the second ones after La Bottine Souriante who got my attention, since they were the ones who, way back in the day, got mentioned on the OKP on one of the recurring “If you like Great Big Sea, you’ll also like…” threads.
Now, though, I just got email from somebody on the La Prûche Libre staff! He wrote to thank me for the support of their music and to offer me download codes for a couple more of their albums, which I gratefully accepted!
The first of the two albums he offered me is this one. As a long-time fan of La Bottine Souriante I absolutely know the name Yves Lambert. That legendary performer is in fact one of my strongest memories of seeing La Bottine back in 2000, because it was his voice I remember sounding rich and round and full. He’s happily still doing music even though he’s not involved with La Bottine anymore, and so I’d already decided to investigate his more recent endeavors. I didn’t, however, have this album yet!
And the second album is this one. As I hope I explained to the nice gentleman from La Prûche Libre, I wasn’t familiar with M. Lepage. The email I got says he unfortunately passed away last year, but I’ll be happy for the opportunity to learn a bit more about some of the longstanding performers of the genre and to see what they’ve contributed to this music I’ve come to love.
So yeah. Mes petites pouvoirs d’écriture en français, activez! Here’s hoping I replied to the nice man from La Prûche Libre coherently! And here’s to what promises to be a lovely expansion of my Quebec trad collection!
Well, for a small number of bands, anyway! Because apparently this is the week for people to hit my site trying to find out about the instruments played by my favorite groups.
Yesterday somebody came by with the search term ‘what mouth instruments do le vent du nord play?’ Answer: just one! Réjean Brunet plays the mouth harp. You can hear it all over a lot of their songs and you can see it in various live videos. Like this one! The mouth harp shows up in the second song in this vid, “Au bord de la fontaine”, which kicks in around the 6:57 mark. Though I heartily endorse watching the first song, “Lanlaire”, too!
And today’s search term is ‘what flutes do great big sea use’. Answer: none! Séan McCann and Bob Hallett play whistles–Séan plays a small tin whistle but only on “Run Run Away”, and Bob breaks out the big low whistle for things like “Boston and St. John’s”. Behold the whistle in action!
To those of you who came by looking, in case you see this post, I hope this is helpful!
I just need to make it through the Monster Release my team is doing overnight between Monday and Tuesday–and then on Friday I’ll be heading up to Canada to see these guys being awesome!
Because bouzouki slides! And fiddling! And podorythmie in stereo! And harmonica and accordion and mouth harp and goddamn, the voice on Pierre-Luc Dupuis. <3
And I’m tellin’ ya, people, the Monster Release is kicking my ass (lots of overtime put in this past week), so believe me when I say I will be very, very much looking forward to a long weekend of Quebecois trad goodness! Stand by for a full report on same when Dara and I get to Harrison Hot Springs. Complete with Jean-Claude Mamut, the Genderqueer Mammoth!
Rossignolet is rapidly becoming my practice flute of choice–at least, as long as I’m not trying to play along with any recording that isn’t actually in A. If I pretend I’m playing a D flute and ignore how I’m actually a fourth up, this flute’s responsiveness is wonderful for just trying to get fingering patterns down into my muscle memory.
Plus, I just love the way Rossignolet sounds. I posted these to Facebook but for giggles and grins and posterity, here are sound samples of me playing Swallowtail Jig on my three primary flutes of the moment, including the new one!
Anna Plays Swallowtail Jig on New Flute (Rossignolet in A)
Anna Plays Swallowtail Jig on Norouet (Big Flute in D)
Anna Plays Swallowtail Jig on Shine (Piccolo in D)
Tonight, I went through all seven of the Quebec tunes I know so far and then through most of the non-Quebec ones, including Swallowtail. I didn’t hit Si Bheag Si Mhor or Da Slockit Light, but only because my embouchure started getting a bit wibbly and I wanted to work on Pigeon on the Gate, which I need for the Bone Walker soundtrack.
Fun observation of the evening #1: on Rossignolet, trying the embouchure exercise described in Grey Larsen’s Irish Flute and Whistle book, I was able to get three octaves of A as well as the intermediate E between the second and third A’s. That’s hard, people. And leaves me a bit swimmy-headed in a way I rather clearly remember from when I was first learning how to play piccolo!
Fun observation of the evening #2: TunePal can play tunes for you if you bring up the sheet music for one in it. You tap the play button and it’ll start playing through the tune on the screen in MIDI piano, and you can adjust the tempo too. So I fired up Pigeon on the Gate and went through it slowly several times, trying to follow the sheet music. Then I did it a few times more with my eyes closed, to see if I had it in muscle memory yet and if I could play along by ear. Then, I shut up TunePal entirely and tried to play it through slowly by myself.
This actually appeared to work. I cannot play this tune at speed yet but it may actually be getting into my fingers. Even though it’ll take me a bit to polish it up, just because those jumps in the first couple of measures from B down to E then up to D and down to E again are a bit of a bitch on the flute.