The full extended play by play concert blog post is on the way, O Internets, but until I get back to my computer and can write it up properly (with pics because OH MY YES got some), let me share with you some prominent highlights!
Dara being stunned to be able to use the phrase “bitchin’ metal hurdy-gurdy solo”
Serious La Danse Verticale once the second set started and the show’s host and the band themselves started encouraging people to come up and dance
Dancing with my girl, and singing along, while Simon Beaudry sang “Écris-moi”!
I had a Cunning Plan come to fruition when the band came back out for the encore, and sang “Vive l’amour” for me and Dara and and ! And Dara was all “what did you do?!” and I chirped “Surprise!” and then OMG champagne showed up, because fellow Le Vent fan Susan is made ENTIRELY OF AWESOME.
And because M. Olivier Demers is also made entirely of awesome from his mighty fiddling hands down to his stompy, stompy feet, I made a point of going over to thank him to his face for the band’s participation in the aforementioned Cunning Plan! And he gave me and Dara and maellenkleth all hugs and the very French air kiss to each cheek!
Stand by for the full report in technicolor glory on Sunday!
For those of you who have not already seen this breaking across Facebook, Google+, or Twitter tonight, solarbird and I would like to announce that on March 2nd, we will be getting a Canadian marriage license!
We were already planning this before today’s Washington state law signed by Governor Christine Gregoire. In fact, we are planning this as part of a Grand Four-Day Weekend of Marriage and Music, starting off with seeing these handsome boys perform on the night of March 1st! On March 2nd, Dara and I (and two other friends of ours who I will not identify publicly so as to respect their privacy, but who will be joining us for a dual ceremony) will be taking the appropriate steps to get legally married in Canada! On March 3rd, we will have yet more music as we attend Festival du Bois!
Mad props to gerimaple who has very kindly agreed to put Dara and me up for the weekend!
I have been asked as well if Dara and I are planning anything with the new law being passed in Washington state. To this, I note that to the best of our knowledge, if we are legally married in Canada, then that will count in the state of Washington–assuming that the law is not shot down in November. So for now we will be focusing on Canadian marriage fun, and getting in a boatload of awesome Quebecois music to go with it. :D
And! And! And! This being my and Dara’s 25th year of being together, there’s a whole extra layer of anniversarial awesomeness to celebrate here as well! So if you’re so inclined, raise a jar on March 2nd and think of us!
Tonight, O Internets, I participated in my very first “Chanson et langue” group and Quebecois session at the home of La Famille Léger. And I am here to tell you that that was unmitigated, 100%, home-grown organic AWESOME!
(This post is long, so clickie on the cut link for the evening’s adventures!) (And I need, NEED I TELL YOU, a suitable podorythmie icon now for Quebecois music posts, at least the mirrored ones y’all on Dreamwidth and LJ are seeing. It needs to say My Fandom Wears the Smiling Boots on it. I need this icon like the BURNING OF A THOUSAND FIERY SUNS! Until I have it, I will have to make do with hugely grinning Elvis!) Continue reading “My first Quebecois session: Incroyable!”
Here’s one of the biggest reasons I have fallen so passionately in love with Quebecois music: part of me has latched onto it with an unconscious reaction of holy crap! There’s a whole extra LANGUAGE over here for music to be awesome in!
Which is really pretty silly of me, given that I already had some decent representation of non-English-speaking music in my collection–not only my early wave of Quebec trad with La Bottine’s Rock and Reel, but also Angelique Kidjo, Habib Koite, and the huge pile of Celtic music I’ve got that’s sung in both Irish and Scots Gaelic. Spanish shows up periodically in my playlists as well; a couple of the tracks by the Paperboys are sung in that. Norwegian is represented by Morten Harket, and although it hasn’t made it into iTunes yet because I haven’t bought an electronic copy of the album, German is represented by Falco (yes, folks, I do in fact have at least a cassette copy of the album that brought the world “Rock Me Amadeus”) and by the German translations of the Beatles songs “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”. Even Elvis has a couple of non-English or partly non-English songs, with “Santa Lucia” in Italian and the German bridge of “Wooden Heart”.
And all of this, mind you, is music I’ve loved quite well over the years. But something about Quebecois trad–and the music being sung in French–has excited me in a way that other non-Anglophone music hasn’t managed to do yet.
It may simply be the joie de vivre of the music in general, since as you know, O Internets, I respond very ardently to the entire Quebecois trad genre. Podorythmie as a physical expression of music, and the language-transcending, machine-gun fire of a turlutte, seize me in a way that very little other music in my collection does–and yes, this includes even my beloved B’ys and Elvis, an assertion that I do not make lightly.
But part of it is, I think, also just the sheer awesomeness of words. Which, yeah yeah yeah, I’m a writer, words are what we do. I’ve always liked tinkering around with other languages, though, and when I couple this with music that appeals to me so greatly, suddenly French becomes much, much more relevant to my interests! (And man, if I’d known about this music when I was taking French in college, I think I’d have done a lot better on that course!)
I have been thrilled to find and join a mailing list for fans of Quebecois music in the Pacific Northwest to indulge these interests. And starting tomorrow night, in fact, I’ll be participating in a newly forming group to learn French specifically by learning Quebecois songs. Much to my massive delight, the first song we’re going to be working with is “C’est une jeune mariée” by Le Vent du Nord!
Ladies and gentlemen, I gotta tell you, the fight for my playlist loyalties these past few months has been tremendous. I never thought that I would encounter any kind of music that could yank my attention for more than a few days running off of Great Big Sea–but apparently the entire genre of Quebecois traditional music, spearheaded by Le Vent du Nord but with generous help from Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer, De Temps Antan, and La Bottine Souriante, is giving my beloved B’ys a massive, massive run for their money.
In many ways, Le Vent have kind of become my Quebecois Great Big Sea. There are four of them, and certainly with the exception of the hurdy gurdy of M. Boulerice and the flying feet of M. Demers, the instrument lineup is very similar–fiddle, accordion, guitar, and bouzouki. (And as I think we’ve established at this point, I am extremely partial to pretty bouzouki players!) Vocal-wise, there are very, very few things on this planet that can make me swoon like the voices of The Doyle and The McCann, but the boys of Le Vent are coming close. Tight harmony will get me every time, especially on shanties–and Le Vent have got a couple in their arsenal that are laying down strong returning fire against “General Taylor” and “River Driver”.
But here’s the real challenge. How are they LIVE?
I have had it strongly suggested to me that Le Vent, in fact, gives better show than Great Big Sea. That, my friends, is a STRONG CLAIM INDEED. As any of you out there who have read my copious collectionof GBS show writeups knows, I have a long, honorable, and passionate history of fangirling the hell out of Great Big Sea concerts. So Le Vent du Nord? They have an EXTREMELY HIGH BAR TO TOP.
March 1, 2012, O Internets, is the day I get to find out if they can do it.
I have secured for myself and solarbird tickets to our very first Le Vent du Nord concert, up in Vancouver BC. The venue is here, a community center, which suggests strongly to me that this is actually going to be a tinier show than I’ve been used to for a while ever since GBS started playing the Moore here in Seattle. I’m ALL FOR THAT. A great deal will depend, however, on the crowd! Don’t get me wrong, when I go to a GBS show the attraction is of course the B’ys, but a huge part of the fun is also the passionate response of the crowd. GBS fandom’s battle cry isn’t VERTICAL MOVEMENT! for nothing, after all.
Now, if this were a show in Montreal, I would absolutely expect a Le Vent crowd to go nuts–e.g., like the crowd in this video, going delightfully berserk for “Cre-mardi”! The critical question will be whether a Vancouver crowd will get similarly excited, and whether this will be a sit-in-chairs show, or a General Admission show.
So it is ON. Le Vent du Nord, your challenge is laid. You have the tools. You have the talent. But do you have the thermonuclear stage charisma that can magnetically pull me to my feet, get me clapping and stomping, and singing at the top of my lungs despite the fact that you’re singing in a language I don’t even speak? Because if you can pull that off, messieurs, I will happily make my concert battle cry bilingual, and will be crying “La danse verticale!”
Can you do it? I look very, very forward to finding out!
After a bit of judicious flinging of phrases through Google Translate, and cross-checking verbs against my shiny new 501 French Verbs book, I can now say the following things about myself:
Je suis une musicienne amateur. Je joue le piccolo, la flûte, et un peu de guitare et bouzouki. Je parle seulement un peu français. J’ai deux chats. Ils sont nommés Fred et George. J’ai lu un nombre ridicule de livres.
I particularly like that last one, since if I understand it correctly, it’s “I’ve read a ridiculous number of books.” Thank you, compound past tense!
Also, it occurred to me that one phrase right out of my beloved “Trois Navires de Ble” from GBS makes grammatical sense to me, too. I.e., the chorus: “sur le bord de l’eau nous irons jouer dans l’île”, or, “at the edge of the water we will play on the island”. A good chunk of that song still doesn’t parse to me, but that line does. It’s responsible for me being able to parse the title of the Le Vent song “Au bord de la fontaine”, and it’s why I could parse the chorus of La Volée’s “Belle, embarquez!”, too, since “sur l’bord de l’eau” is in that. (Note the smooshing of “le bord” into “l’bord”. I am advised by cow that Quebecois French likes to do that kind of thing!)
So this is all fun! I’ve started slapping lyrics onto the various song files in my iTunes collection, so that I can read along with them as I listen on the bus going to and from work. It is helping LOTS for my ability to comprehend these words as words.
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. :D
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:
“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.
“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. ;>
“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.
“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.
“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!
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 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!
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/
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!
