Dayton Music

The end of another Ohio winter (even one as strange as this one has been) is the perfect time for a good old-fashioned Québec kitchen party. Much like a bluegrass picking party, a kitchen party in Québec offers plenty of music and singing, some high-spirited dancing and a pervasive feeling of warmth, community and friendship. Just what the doctor ordered for an end of winter/hello to spring blow-out. And there is no better group to apply this magical tonic than the Quebecois acoustic power trio known as De Temps Antan.

De Temps Antan consists of Éric Beaudry (guitar, mandolin, bouzouki, vocals, foot percussion), André Brunet (fiddle, vocals, foot percussion) and Pierre-Luc Dupuis (accordion, harmonica, vocals, foot percussion). Formed in 2003, De Temps Antan is an off-shoot of La Bottine Souriante, the hugely popular and influential 10-piece Québec band.

The size of La Bottine Souriante precluded it from playing smaller venues, which led directly to De Temps Antan. “The project for the trio was born in 2004, following a request by a friend who does bookings for a room,” says Pierre-Luc Dupuis. “He wanted to hear the three of us playing together. It meant really bringing things down to basics, to the essence of the music.”

André Brunet

The band’s name is a pun that doesn’t really translate from the French, but it means, roughly, both “of olden days” and “from time to time.” The joke dates to the band’s early days when they were all still members of La Bottine Souriante. “It’s because we were only able to perform every now and then, between our commitments with La Bottine,” says Dupuis. “We still managed to tour a bit and to make an album, A l’Année.”

The essence of Quebecois music can be distilled to a single word: fun. Writers generally use the French phrase joie de vivre, but fun serves just as well. “We work a lot to bring the spirit of a kitchen party,” says André Brunet. “It’s really fun to bring people there. Even if they don’t know what to expect for sure, people will go home from the show smiling.”

“Our approach has stayed the same in many ways [as when the three played in La Bottine Souriante], even though we are a much smaller band,” adds Pierre-Luc Dupuis. “You have to play grooves and have fun on stage. You have to be tight and keep the same energy. For us, it’s not only the story of the music we need to tell, but we try to live the story on stage, to really get across what you’d hear and feel and do during a family party.”

Pierre-Luc Dupuis

The repertoire of De Temps Antan is a highly entertaining mixture of traditional songs and tunes and material written by the three band members. “A goal of the band is always to find songs that audiences are not used to hearing,” says Brunet. “Lots of French songs are about church, drinking and women. Finding good old songs is nice, but they are rare.”

Rare or not, the band members have collected hundreds of old songs and tunes from their region and beyond. “A lot comes from our own families,” says Dupuis. “On the album [À l’Année], especially, there’s a lot from the village of Saint-Cí’me, where Eric was born. You get a sense of the richness of just one little corner of the country. Our aim is to keep the essence of that music, but to have an open-minded attitude—in short, to let it live.”

In another aspect of keeping the tradition alive, Andre Brunet has made fiddle history as well, representing his home province with distinction. In 2008, competing against more than 20 top fiddlers from throughout Canada, Brunet took top honors at the Canadian Grand Masters Fiddling Competition. A year later, he won the Annual Pembrooke Old Time Fiddling and Step Dancing Championship in Ontario. Brunet was the first Quebecois fiddler to win either prestigious title.

De Temps Antan has recorded a pair of critically acclaimed albums: À l’Année and Les Habits de Papier. The albums contain traditional material as well as original songs and tunes by the band members, but the music ranges far beyond the band’s Canadian home. De Temps Antan forges a pan-Acadian sound that merges traditional Québec music with the Cajun style of south Louisiana (a perfect example is “La maison renfoncée” on Les Habits de Papier).

Éric Beaudry

Part of this musical connection is historical, rooted in the forced migration of the French Canadians to Louisiana in the 1700s (as immortalized in Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline”). The more recent part of the connection comes from the band’s travels, particularly engagements at music festivals in the U.S., where the three musicians have had ample opportunity to play with and learn from Cajun and old-time country fiddlers. Adding bits and pieces from those styles is just another way the men in De Temps Antan are moving the tradition forward.

Two elements that are deeply characteristic of the traditional music of Québec —the ubiquitous foot percussion and the “mouth music” known as turlutte—might look exotic to outsiders, but each in fact represents a practical solution to a musical problem. The foot percussion, essentially a seated form of clogging that seems to be unique to Québec, stems from the days when a solitary fiddler would be the only one providing the music for a house full of dancers.

To make the music louder and to provide a steady beat that could be heard by the dancers, a chair for the fiddler would be placed atop the kitchen table. “The fiddler would get up on the table and tap in middle of kitchen,” explains Dupuis. “That would make it much louder and get everyone in the whole house dancing.”

To Andre Brunet, the tradition is even more deeply rooted in the Quebecois soul. “We start tapping the feet before walking when we are young,” says Brunet. “It’s the basic rhythm of the Quebecois spirit. It’s just a groove.”

Cityfolk Presents De Temps Antan

April 24, 2012 8pm at University of Dayton’s Boll Theatre

The World Rhythms Series is co-sponsored by Cityfolk and the UD Arts Series

Tickets and More Info

(Written by Jon Hartley Fox)

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French Canadians have a long history of being misunderstood. Only seven million or so people out of Canada’s 34 million total speak French as their primary language, and most of them live in a single province, Quebec. They live on an island of francais in an ocean of English.

But there’s more than just the language barrier.

Misunderstandings over politics, religion, social identity and cultural traditions have colored, and occasionally seriously strained, Anglo-French relations in Canada for centuries. Happily, these things often tend to even out over time—perhaps as some sort of sly, karmic payback, Quebec is now home to some of the hippest, happiest music on the planet.

Genticorum, a traditional music “power trio” based in Montreal, Quebec, plays a kind of music that’s as misunderstood as any style in North America. Like their confreres in La Bottine Souriante, Les Chauffeurs á Pied, Le Vent du Nord and other traditionally minded Quebec bands, Genticorum is deeply rooted in the history and culture of French Canada, playing music that is similar to—but also very unlike—the music of Canada’s other traditional music hotbeds, Cape Breton and the Ottawa Valley.

Genticorum was formed in 2000, the three musicians in the band—Pascal Gemme (fiddle, foot percussion, vocals), Alexandre de Grosbois-Garand (wooden flute, electric bass, fiddle, vocals) and Yann Falquet (guitar, Jew’s harp, vocals)—having become friends after playing together at various traditional music festivals.

“We all discovered the traditional music of Quebec before we met,” says Grosbois-Garand. “We all studied instruments that we don’t play in the band. I studied bass and I play the flute. Yann studied electric guitar and he plays acoustic guitar. Pascal studied guitar and he plays fiddle.”

The traditional music of Quebec is a unique and totally captivating blend of musical ideas from near and far. “It comes from Irish and Scottish and music from France,” says Grobois-Garand by way of explanation. “There is a big so-called Celtic flair to it because there are a lot of Irish and Scottish reels that have become Québécois reels. Sometimes the reels will change a bit, or the way of playing them. That mixed with the French song tradition and marching band music from the United States and German polkas and waltzes.

“All that mixed together over a few centuries into what we refer to as Québécois traditional music. Most of the bands, including us, will focus more on the party aspect of it. But we try also to play some laments and some waltzes because it’s not just fast reels and call-and-response drinking songs. There’s much more than that, so we try to give the diversity of the tradition.”

The traditional music of Quebec contains several musical elements that set it apart not just from the Celtic music mainstream but also the regional Canadian styles of Cape Breton and the Ottawa Valley. The most obvious to casual listeners is probably the sound of the singing. The vocals are in French and are characterized by lush multi-part harmonies, call-and-response (chanson à répondre) choruses and a sonic richness not found in most traditional styles. Some of Genticorum’s vocal harmonies have an ancient sound that’s at times reminiscent of medieval madrigals. The band is also adept at a form of “mouth music” called turlutteries (conceptually similar to jazz scat singing or lilting in Irish music).

Driving, intricate “foot percussion”—provided by Pascal Gemme in the case of Genticorum—is one of the coolest parts of traditional Québécois music. Not only does this provide the band with a percussionist at no extra cost, a real boon for a small group like Genticorum, it adds an exciting touch to performances that audiences love, as well as a distinctive rhythmic signature that is quintessentially Québécois.

Maybe someday in the future, a musicologist or anthropologist will explain the astonishing, at times nearly unbelievable, facility that Canadian fiddlers appear to have for dancing while they fiddle, from Natalie MacMaster’s step-dancing to the ensemble work of the Step Crew to the seated tap dancing done by Gemme. If it were just one or two fiddlers who did this, it could be written off to individual obsession and long winters, but it seems like every fiddler who comes out of Canada possesses this wonderfully strange talent. Curious, eh?

Genticorum has released four critically acclaimed albums since 2002. The band’s debut, Le Galarneau, received widespread acclaim in the international music press. Sing Out noted accurately that “For a three piece, Genticorum makes a very full and glorious noise, both instrumentally and vocally” before predicting, “This is a band that’s going to go places.” The follow-up, Malins Plaisirs, earned a Canadian Folk Music Award, Ensemble of the Year, for the trio and was nominated for both Juno (Canada’s Grammy) and Felix (a regional prize in Quebec).

While their CD La Bibournoise, released in 2008, received international recognition,  Genticorum’s most recent album, Nagez Rameurs, was released in 2011 and was promptly hailed as “one of the year’s most unusual and beautiful collections of folk music” (New York Post). Graced by a particularly compelling collection of traditional and original songs and tunes and guest appearances by such musicians as Grey Larsen and Olivier Demers (Le Vent du Nord), Nagez Rameurs won Genticorum its second Ensemble of the Year award at the 2011 Canadian Folk Music Awards.

At last count, Genticorum has performed in almost 20 countries. The band has found enthusiastic audiences wherever it has played, from Scotland and Ireland to New Zealand and Australia. “We are within a certain tradition and play with a certain aesthetic, without really radical changes,” says Yann Falquet of the band’s wide-ranging appeal. “And people are able to enjoy it for what it is, whether they are Scottish folkies or Malaysian teenagers.” And pretty much everybody in between.

Cityfolk presents Genticorum, Sat. Feb 25 at Stivers Centennial Hall at 8 PM. Info and tickets are available at cityfolk.org or 937-496-3863.

(submitted by Jon Hartley Fox for Cityfolk)