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Quebecois Music

I’m a raving fangirl for Quebecois trad music, now that I’ve discovered many of its fine bands and have gotten involved with a session group to play the tunes. I post about this a whole lot!

Quebecois Music

Quebecois band recommendations: Le Vent du Nord!

Tonight at session, my friend Ellen (sutures1 on LJ) asked me if I’d give her some recommendations about all of the various Quebec bands I’ve been listening to! Since I’m always happy to share fangirly love, and since I’m also newly of the conviction that it’s good for an Anglophone’s mental health to discover awesome bands in a language she does not speak and to therefore be inspired to learn that language, I’m going to oblige.

Which means, of course, that I must first and foremost cover Le Vent du Nord.

It has been a hard, protracted battle between these guys, La Volée d’Castors, and Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer for the position of My Favorite Quebecois Band. However, right now Le Vent is winning for a few important reasons!

One, they have Simon Beaudry! As y’all have seen me gush on previous posts, I’ve got a huge crush on this boy. He plays him a lovely bouzouki and guitar, and sings beautifully as well. He’s the secondary singer of Le Vent, but what songs he does sing lead on are among my favorites. Like, say, “Lanlaire”!

(And besides, Chibi!Simon Beaudry is just the most adorable little guitar player ever. Somebody drew him an awesome Facebook avatar!)

Two, Le Vent’s lead singer, Nicolas Boulerice, plays the hurdy gurdy–and Unusual Instruments FOR THE WIN. His voice has a very distinctive timbre to it, and he’s got a great dynamic range in his style of performance; of the tracks he sings lead on, he goes from lively crowd-stompers to haunting ballads and back again.

Three, as I’ve also gushed in a previous post, Olivier Demers was kind enough to answer an email I sent him with a question about one of their songs, and that right there is worth massive amounts of Awesome. More importantly, though, he is Le Vent’s podorythmie guy AND fiddler, and the various videos I’ve seen of him doing both at the same time are mighty impressive. Also, he apparently gets to do all the charming intros to various songs explaining them to English-speaking audiences. 😀

Four, since I’ve said nice things about the other three Le Vent guys, I should also mention bassist and squeezebox player Réjean Brunet, who as far as I can tell so far gets a bit overshadowed by the other guys–but hey, Internets, a good bass player is the backbone of any band, am I right? I particularly noted M. Brunet in a live vid I found of Le Vent doing an a cappella performance, wherein he got to take his turn singing lead on something; he’s got a very nice voice too, and it ought to get more of a chance to stand out.

Now, all this said, let’s talk albums. Most of Le Vent’s discography is available electronically on iTunes’ US site and on Amazon.com’s MP3 Downloads site; the only album of theirs NOT available in either place is the awesome Symphonique live album I just finally picked up. A quick check of the Canada, UK, and Australia iTunes stores confirms for me that the same set of Le Vent albums are available there as well. So for most of you likely to be reading this post, you should find them reasonably well available.

If you want to avoid both iTunes and Amazon, Le Vent’s own site links off to their Borealis Records page, where you can apparently also order the same albums that are available electronically. Downloads appear to be available but if you explore this route, be on the lookout for downloads possibly being Canada-only. Likewise if you order Le Vent albums from Archambault.ca, the site of a big chain store in Quebec. Note on that latter link: if you order physical CDs from them, shipping charges for a single CD may be higher than the actual CD price, so you may want to consider ordering more than one CD at once.

Now, though, if you just want to get one Le Vent album, which one to get? It’s important to note that Le Vent’s current membership configuration settled into place only as of their previous studio album, Dans les airs. So if you want an album that most accurately reflects their current sound, you should get either Dans les airs or La Part du Feu. I’d be hard pressed to choose between the two. Both have several tracks I’ve been repeatedly playing.

Le Vent’s first live album, Mesdames et messieurs, is decent–and noteworthy for having guest vocals done by Bernard Simard, a previous member of the band, who did a lot of lead vocals on their first album Maudite moisson!. However, if you want to go with live Le Vent, find the Symphonique album if you can! Since it’s not available electronically, you’ll probably have to order it if you’re not lucky enough to live near a store likely to have it in stock. It’s available here and here. And for the sake of thoroughness, please to note my full review post for that album–I very much enjoy this album and have been playing through several of the tracks repeatedly.

And now, a handful of my favorite Le Vent songs:

  1. “Écris-moi”, on La Part du Feu. Sung by M. Beaudry, a lovely little song in 6/8. Both French lyrics and the English translation are available here.
  2. “Lanlaire”, also on La Part du Feu. Another Simon song, which has an excellent performance on the Symphonique album as well, and which has figured prominently in my Le Vent vid watching! Note also that this is the song with the chorus I discovered is a bit less work safe than you might expect, if you translate it properly. ;>
  3. “Cré mardi”, on Les amants du St-Laurent. This is hands down Le Vent’s best crowd-stomper, belted out with vigor by M. Boulerice, and with an awesome extended turlutte as the entire second half of the song. Great fiddle and footwork here by M. Demers as well. This one appears on both of the Le Vent live albums and is the closer on the Symphonique one.
  4. “Rosette”, on Dans les airs. This was the first of Le Vent’s songs to get my attention, and was the first to sell me on the strength of M. Boulerice’s voice and on the smoothness of all four guys’ combined harmony.
  5. “Le vieux cheval”, on Dans les airs. My fellow Great Big Sea fans will know what I mean when I say that this song is kind of Le Vent’s “General Taylor”. It’s a shanty, and the harmony on the choruses (as of the second verse) is seriously swoonable. I’m pretty sure that’s M. Brunet hitting those rumbly bass notes on the bottom of the chorus, too, if we want to talk other reasons to fangirl over the bass player. 😉

Last but oh my definitely not least, my entire YouTube Le Vent playlist is right over here! I’ve dropped notes on a lot of these calling out why I like them. The “Cré mardi” vid in the radio studio is particularly awesome, as are the casual videos where the band is playing in the middle of a relaxed bunch of festival-goers.

ETA: I have discovered, O Internets, that the aforementioned chibi!Simon pic was in fact the work of Mr. Kevin Bolk! It was commissioned by fellow Le Vent fan Susan Moseley, whose acquaintance I have made on Facebook, and who had him do all four members of the group. Mr. Bolk, it is vital for me to note, is also the artist who did the Star Trek parody webcomic Ensign Sue Must Die!, about which I have previously squeed on this blog. Y’all go visit Mr. Bolk’s site and say nice things about his work, s’il vous plait!

October 19, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

Lessons in French lyrics

It’s probably not an academically approved way to learn a language, and the ultimate result will probably not be a working vocabulary I can use in everyday conversation, but I gotta say: it’s great fun trying to translate Quebecois trad lyrics word by word and phrase by phrase. It’s like the songs are in CODE, and I have to break the code!

And so far I have learned the following things:

One, like most Celtic music, Quebecois trad falls into the three general categories of Whiskey, Sex, and Death. And many songs will fall into all of these categories at once.

Two, there are a surprisingly large number of ducks in these songs. This is not so strange in a song about hunting, but in a song about a wedding night?! I pointed userinfoeeyorerin at the Charbonniers’ “Lundi Mardi Jour de Mai“, and she explained it was a song about a wedding, and then promptly went “buh?!” when she realized the happy couple had ducks right next to their bed. Quackez-vous, baby! Quackez-vous.

Three, French makes even not-work-safe phrases like ‘va te faire’ sound awesome in front of a 69-piece orchestra. Look it up, Internets! And then just imagine the English equivalent in front of an orchestra!

Four, some tiny bits of vocabulary I haven’t hung out with since college are suddenly trying to get back in touch. Why hello there, pronouns! How’s it going, conjugation of être? And you guys have brought me a few more verbs, too! How nice of you!

And now, Internets, I give you a sampling of critical verbs I am picking up from my study of the lyrics of Le Vent du Nord, Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer, and La Volée de Castors!

  • être: to be
  • avoir: to have
  • tuer: to kill (useful for all songs in the Death category)
  • aimer: to love (category Sex)
  • boire: to drink (category Whiskey)
  • jouer: to play
  • chanter: to sing
  • danser: to dance

So yeah. I’m still at the point of most of these lyrics parsing in my brain as ‘blah blah blah’ (only prettier than that, because, y’know, French), but comprehendible phrases are starting to pop out at me. Like ‘rejoindre mon bataillon’, or ‘ouvrez, ouvrez la porte, mon père, si vous m’aimez’.

(Which is also in a fun song about a girl who apparently thinks nothing of freeloading off a young captain who takes her to a fancy hotel in Paris and wines and dines her. And she fakes her own death, and after three days begs her father to let her out of the tomb.

Either that, or else she’s a zombie. I’m not sure which!)

So yeah. Maybe not a working vocabulary, but if you need somebody to sing about what an asshole the son of the king is for shooting a shepherdess’ white ducks? I’ll be your girl!

October 12, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

More music geekery

And now, in no particular order, some more points of general geekery regarding my ongoing passion for Quebecois music:

One: this morning, I stomped all over 375 calories on the treadmill while listening to Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer’s live album. They made for excellent workout music, and I feel I should get calorie bonuses for trying to sing along with “Les turluttes”, even if I couldn’t keep up in the middle part where they’re all singing together rather than doing call and response. Hell, I have trouble keeping up with that part when I’m not on the treadmill; the operative phrase there is “breath control”!

Two: I am amusing myself transcribing lyrics out of the liner notes of Le sort des amoureux, the Beaudrys’ album, on the theory that if I have them in a file on my phone, I can read along when I’m listening on my commute, and improve my ability to understand these lyrics as words. However, as I type all these French words into TextEdit on my MacBook, I’m discovering a couple of things. One, TextEdit’s spellcheck is doing amazingly well with French words, and two, I’m actually understanding some of these phrases without having to throw them through Google’s translation engine first! More or less, anyway. I am pretty sure I just figured out that this one verse is a mother telling her children they don’t have a father anymore.

Three: Speaking of lyrics, I’ve been looking through the English translations available for Le Vent songs up on their site, and about died laughing when I realized what “Les métiers” is actually about: a girl with multiple lovers, and why their occupations all suck. Except for the fiddler. Of whom she says, “he shall practice on me / he can play the fiddle, I’ll be making music”.

And here I’d gone and added that song to my Francophone Favorites and Le Vent Favorites playlists on the strength of its sweet and perky-sounding performance alone. I had NO IDEA. Lesson learned: Le Vent are apparently periodically quite a bit more bawdy than they actually sound. WOO! ;>

Four: The Le Vent Symphonique album is growing on me hard. I’m finding the blend of the band’s instruments and the orchestra more awesome each time I listen to various tracks, and while I still want to be in a crowd doing “Cre-mardi”, I’m nonetheless seriously grooving on the energy of the orchestra behind the band in that song in particular. I also happened to observe that a few video snippets of this performance are actually on Le Vent’s site, here, and WHOA AND DAMN I wish there was a DVD of this. I would be buying the HELL out of that.

Also, it is amusing to play Spot the Piccolo in the various tracks as well! Piccolo players, represent!

And last but not least, speaking of my piccolo: I am now also amusing myself trying to transcribe M. Demers’ fiddle solo from “Lanlaire”. I wanted to do this just by way of exercising my ear. Last night, though, I found a very nifty little app for the iThings–a thing called Tempo. You can use it to play with the tempo of a track out of your iTunes library, and slow it down without losing pitch. Which is AWESOME. I kicked “Lanlaire” down to about 70 percent speed, and am now trying to inch my way through the fiddle solo to see if I can better figure out the notes that way.

Some sound quality is lost, but the pitch is still on target, and it’s very odd hearing the song that slow, especially the footwork! But I’ll have great fun trying to see if this app can help me figure out the solo. \0/

October 8, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

Mes Aieux En Famille album review!

Since userinfoscrunchions was asking, and since she’s the person who pointed me at Mes Aieux to begin with, here’s my overall reaction to the album I bought in Vancouver, En Famille!

This is a bit of a switch from the rest of the Quebecois music I’ve been listening to. From what I’m learning, this group’s more about modern lyrics than trad ones, although their style is still trad-influenced. Wikipedia describes them as “neo-trad”, a specifically Quebecois sub-genre, and that’s a term I really rather like as it seems to encompass not only the Quebecois music I like to listen to, but also the Newfoundland music. It nicely captures the sense of music that’s a fusion of both traditional and rock.

Now, given that we are dealing with French lyrics here, I’m still at a disadvantage–and given that Mes Aieux’s site doesn’t have lyrics posted on it, I’m going to have to doublecheck the liner notes of this album to see if they’re included so I can try to translate them. I’m given to understand that a lot of Mes Aieux’s lyrical topics are focused on life in Montreal, and out of general interest in that, I’d like to know what they’re actually saying! For now, though, I’ll have to focus just on the overall flavor and style of the songs.

I very much like the first track, “Dégénération”, the track that userinfoscrunchions pointed me at on YouTube. The vocals and instrumentation are both very strong, and I also like the reel they kick into at the end! Fortunately also, this is one song someone’s already translated online, and yeah, this is a good example of Mes Aieux’s whole idea of modern themes, trad style of performance. Especially the part in the last verse about turning off the TV and going outside. 😉

The rest of the vocals all over the album have the distinction of including both female and male voices, which by itself gives Mes Aieux some distinction in my Quebecois collection of music so far. They’re also a bit larger a group, with seven strong, so they’ve got more vocalists to play with, and I do quite like some of the tricks they’re doing with layering lead and backup voices.

They do also have more instruments to play with. I hear horns, electric guitar, and a drum kit in there, as well as fiddle and flute, so we’ve got a modern and trad blend of instrumentation, too. Stylistically they’re definitely more rock than trad, though this is not a bad thing. I definitely like the horn section rocking out on track 6, though all the electric guitar and drum kit work is taking me a bit aback, since my ear is geared these days to acoustic instruments!

As I’ve said, I have no French to speak of (aside from a tiny assortment of nouns and pronouns and the occasional verb and preposition), so I have no earthly idea about any local differences in Quebecois pronunciation–but that said, the primary singers in Mes Aieux seem to be pronouncing things more crisply and distinctly than most of the singers on my various other albums. I don’t know if this is a question of individual singing style, or a question of dialect; either way, it’s another interesting data point for me, and one which I hope to learn more about if I get an opportunity to properly learn Quebecois French.

I’m not a hundred percent sure about this, but I’m hearing only minimal podorythmie on this album, if there’s any at all; most of the percussion I’m hearing is more standard rock percussion. There are, however, occasional bits of tracks where I’m hearing something that might be footwork. If that’s what it is, it’s much less emphasized than it is in the more trad-oriented groups. This doesn’t surprise me much, given that Mes Aieux is more rock. It’s a bit weird, though, not hearing the footwork in conjunction with lyrics sung in French!

Some more specific track reactions:

I’m really liking the vocals on track 7, “La Grande Déclaration”. It’s a quieter track, and although I have not an earthly what they’re singing about, the vocals are really nice, and there’s some good fiddle and guitar (both electric and acoustic, it sounds like) and piano here.

Interesting growly-talky delivery of lyrics on the verses on track 8, too; it’s almost rap-like, but not quite there, since it’s still a bit too melodic for that. It’s good, though, and I’m respecting whichever singer in the group this is. (Whoa wait, there are English lyrics in this song! Surprise!)

I totally need the lyrics to track 9 on here, which I am given to understand is about poutine. HA!

Track 10 is pretty cool, with fun delivery of lyrics and some good fiddle and horn. And ooh, is that a harmonica in there?

Liking track 11, too–in no small part because the band’s female vocalist is getting some lead time here. Awesome.

All in all, the album’s not necessarily grabbing me right out of the gate like the more trad bands do. But that said, I’m definitely enjoying it and will probably get more of Mes Aieux’s music, probably their most recent album. Thanks, userinfoscrunchions, for recommending them!

October 5, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

Le Vent du Nord Symphonique album review!

Here’s another thing I’m going to do a whole separate post about from this week’s Vancouver goodness: while I was up there, I made a very specific point of ducking into the HMV in downtown Vancouver, my current only source for Quebecois music when I go up there. And much to my pleasure, they had the one remaining Le Vent du Nord album I didn’t have yet: Symphonique, which is Le Vent du Nord pretty much doing a full concert backed up by the Quebec Symphony Orchestra! As both a newly minted LVN fangirl and a piccolo player who still has very fond memories of her high school days in concert band and wind ensemble, it’s my beholden duty to do a proper review post of this album.

I have only minor quibbles with it, and they mostly have to do with the mixing of the LVN instruments vs. those of the orchestra behind them. As a casual listener it’s not clear to me what the musical intent here is: whether LVN should be seamlessly blending with the orchestra, or whether you should still be able to distinguish, oh, say, Olivier Demers’ violin vs. the violin section in the orchestra. It’s easier with Nicolas Boulerice on the hurdy gurdy, since the sound is so distinctive. But I frequently lost M. Demers’ violin against the rest of them, as well as his footwork. In some places as well, such as in “Rosette”, the boys’ vocals were a bit overwhelmed by the orchestra.

And I’ll say right out that although I adore “Cre-mardi”, and while the orchestra did perfectly decent punctuation to the rhythm of the song, it just didn’t sound nearly as awesome as when it’s done as a proper crowd-rousing foot-stomper–like in this video right over here! That song right there is very specifically why I want to see LVN live, since it’s so far their liveliest, audience-participation-iest song, and I am quite prepared to hey-up-a-diddle-um-day-da right back at ’em. 😉

But really, these are fairly minor quibbles. On several of these tracks, the orchestra actually blends quite beautifully with the band. The instrumentals in particular are awesome: “L’heure bleue”, and “Petit reve III”. On those tracks, they achieve the exact right balance between the band’s instruments and the orchestra’s. “Elise” and “Les amants du Saint-Laurent” work well as examples of tracks where the orchestra enhances the overall flavor of the song, and where they don’t overwhelm the band’s vocals.

Also, I have to give the album mad props just for being the only current recorded version of Simon Beaudry singing “Vive l’amour”, since the studio version of this song was done before he joined the band. And on LVN’s previous live album, Mesdames et messieurs, they brought back the original guy who sang lead on that track for that performance!

And while we’re on the topic of M. Beaudry, his other major song on this album is “Lanlaire”, which as y’all know I’m already strongly partial to. So I made a point of listening more closer to this song than several of the others–and I do quite like the drum strikes in the background on the second verse. Well done back there, timpani player! And since I’m trying to commit M. Demers’ nameless bridge/outro bit to memory, I also noted that the orchestra did not fully accompany him on those parts, but they did echo him on several passages nicely. There’s some nice swooping from the strings back there, too.

Someone–either M. Demers or else a soloist from the violin section, it’s not clear to me which since it’s not called out in the liner notes, and I don’t know the original studio version well enough to say for certain yet–has a nice bit in the middle of the second to the last track: “Octobre 1837”. In the bridge in the middle, the performer does some tricky-sounding descending syncopation with his fiddle on top of the rest of the instruments, and gets some well-deserved applause right in the middle of the song after that. Well done there, whoever you were!

M. Boulerice fares the best out of the band in the overall mix, I think. His voice is more powerful than M. Beaudry’s, so he stands out better against the orchestra–and for that matter, so does his hurdy gurdy. (Also: as a former symphonic band student, I have to just giggle my head off at the mental image of the first chair of the hurdy gurdy section. But really, do you need more than one? XD )

Checking the liner notes on the album, I see that Airat Ichmouratov was apparently doing the conducting of the orchestra, and I see a total of 23 violin players, 8 viola players, 8 cellists, 5 double basses, two flutes (woo! flute section represent! And one of them’s a piccolo player! / ), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, one low trombone, one tuba, one timpani, two people on general percussion, and one harpist. So that’s 67 people, a pretty good-sized orchestra! I am now definitely curious about whether they’ve got some recordings of their own, and I may need to seek them out.

All in all I’m very pleased to have found a copy of this album and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the band. In several ways I actually like this performance better than the other live album, just because the orchestral angle is of more musical interest to me–though if LVN ever do a rowdier live album, I’ll be much more interested in that!

October 3, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

Most awesome fiddle player of the week

Y’all remember I was gushing over “Lanlaire” by Le Vent du Nord, right, and in particular over this video of it?

That vid was super-handy in letting me figure out a few things about the song. As I’d posted before, I was able to follow the melody on my piccolo and from there figured out what key it was in. Seeing Simon Beaudry’s guitar in the vid let me figure out what set of chords he was using–i.e., that he’s got to be using D minor chords if he’s capoed on 5. (Me, I punted to E minor chords capoed on 3, which are a lot easier for me; D minor is still giving me issues if I try to play chords at any given speed.)

What I could not figure out from the video, however, is what fiddle player Olivier Demers is playing on the bridge and on the outro; he’s playing too fast for me to follow. I tried letting TunePal on my iPad listen to the recording, and it had no idea what the tune was–which is not terribly surprising, since TunePal, helpful though it is, is fairly scattershot about how well it picks up on stuff.

Turns out though that there’s a reason it had no idea what that tune was.

See, I sorta kinda emailed M. Demers and asked him about the tune. *^_^*;; The LVN boys have email links on their bio pages on their site, so I looked at Olivier’s page on Saturday, went .oO (what the hell) to myself, and clickied! Told the gentleman I was a newbie session player and a new LVN fan, and asked if he could identify the tune for me so I could maybe look it up online and learn it. (Because it’s either that or I try to transcribe it, and then learn it that way, which’ll take me a lot longer. Because I can’t play by ear well enough to try to pick out a tune without the intermediate step of transcribing it out first.)

He emailed me back! And said he actually wrote the tune himself for the song! And said he’d send me the sheet music later since he didn’t have it on that computer!

I’ve heard from a couple different directions now (hiya, userinfoscrunchions!) that the LVN boys are sweethearts, and this is clear proof. Olivier Demers for me is now this week’s most awesome fiddle player! I’m going to be fangirlishly squeeing about this all week, so y’all be warned. And then I’m going to see if I actually can transcribe the tune, because it’ll be an amusing exercise, if sheet music actually shows up in my inbox, to compare against it and see if I can get it right!

*squee!*

September 26, 2011 by
Quebecois Music

Too much awesome for one band alone

All this starts, as many things musical do for me, with Great Big Sea! As I’ve mentioned, the first time I saw GBS perform, La Bottine Souriante was part of that show. At the time they were nine members strong, and I was almost as blown away by them as I was by GBS.

Also from GBS, I get to La Volée d’Castors. I found them thanks to a thread along the theme of “if you like Great Big Sea, you’ll also like ” on the OKP, though it took me some time to actually do anything about it–i.e., to find their music, see if I liked it, and actually buy it! I’m just sorry I didn’t find them sooner. 😀

From LVC I get to Le Vent du Nord, because I found Le Vent buying LVC albums on iTunes. LVN popped up in the list of ‘people who bought this also bought’ albums. It turns out also that Réjean Brunet, current member of Le Vent, also used to be in LVC!

Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer I also discovered on iTunes when I started buying LVC and LVN albums. Again, it took me a bit to actually decide to buy their stuff–but I decided this was clearly Important when I read their web page and discovered a) they’re an a cappella group, and b) two of their members are former La Bottine Souriante guys! One of them in particular, Michel Bordeleau, was in La Bottine when I saw them perform in 2000.

De Temps Antan and Galant, Tu Perds Ton Temps are my most recent acquisitions, thanks to M Kenney, who’s dropped me several comments on the topic! De Temps Antan are connected both to La Bottine Souriante AND to Le Vent du Nord, since all three guys in De Temps are either current or former La Bottine members–and Éric Beaudry is of course the brother of Simon, over in Le Vent.

The Beaudry boys are connected back to the Charbonniers, since André Marchand, current Charbonniers member, produced their album Le sort des amoureux for them.

The Galant girls are also connected to LVN, since M Kenney informs me that they, Le Vent, and the Charbonniers have all performed together, doing a song called “Diable et le Fermier”, written by Nicolas Boulerice of Le Vent. Here it is, on YouTube:

Long story short, clearly all the best bands in Quebec are tied together in one great big web of AWESOME. I love that! And I’ll be amused to see how many more ways I can find to tie all these groups together, and if there are other groups in the web as well!

September 23, 2011 by