The Holidays are closing in. Are you wondering what gifts to buy this year? You’re looking for the original gift, the one that will surprise and please? Why not expand the musical horizons of a loved one, a colleague at work, or a cousin you haven’t seen since last Christmas? Here’s my highly personal selection of gift ideas to introduce someone (or yourself, you’re allowed to indulge from time to time!) to the wonderful world of "musique actuelle."
That good ol’ song
It may seem a bit easy, but everyone likes a good song. That said, we don’t all have the same definition of what a good song is. And the artists in DAME’s catalog take some liberties with this format — that’s what makes things exciting. But Geneviève Letarte’s Chansons d’un jour will please anyone looking for songs with intelligent, accessible melodies and poetic lyrics. The soft melancholy of Chants des adieux, chants de la solitude will profoundly move dreamers in search of a different voice (Lou Babin’s, irresistible).
You don’t understand French? The lyrics of Jerry Snell’s album Life in the Suicide Riots will make you think hard about the world we live in. And the chugging guitar riffs of André Duchesne ’s Locomotive will catch the attention of any rock fan, even one deaf to French. Speaking of rock, the deconstructed rock of the all-female group Justine can keep you busy for a while, lyrics or no lyrics. Their first album (Suite) is a powerful mixture of progressist rock, while their second Langages fantastiques leans more toward improvised songs. If you want a taste of what songwriting avant-garde artists can come up with, try the compilation album Chante! 1985-2000, a wide and wild selection of unusual songs.
Party time
A time for celebrating, letting off steam, and disobedience, the party when applied to music can give way to a distortion of admitted rules. L’Orkestre des pas perdusinjects a new form of circus life into fanfare music, an infectious R ’n’ B (rhythm ’n’ brass, of course) that will refresh any parade. Its cousin Les Projectionnistes (both bands are led by Claude St-Jean) trades circus for rock and the brass section transforms from funny fanfare to frenetic funk. Taking a different approach, the Fanfare Pourpour leaves the official parade attire behind to favor the spontaneity of a street fanfare. It’s music for "everyone" (Tout le monde, the title of their first album) without dropping to the lowest common denominator.
In a similar spirit, but adding an East-European flavor and an incredible dose of energy is the group Interférence Sardines, which features two members of the neo-trad group Les Batinses. Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms walks a jazzier road, but its frivolous side easily becomes delightfully exuberant. The group’s three albums are all highly recommended, but Carnets de voyage remains an excellent place to start. And I find the same spirit of excessiveness and raw emotion in La boulezaille (Pierre Langevin and Pierre Tanguay) and Plinc! Plonc! (Jean Derome and Pierre Tanguay), two albums where world music, jazz and free improvisation collide.
And to boldly go where few have gone before
Maybe you would like to go further and hook someone on a kind of "musique actuelle" that is more daring and abstract. Here are a few key albums from DAME’s catalogue in improvised and electronic music.
Martin Tétreault is one of the most fascinating experimental artists right now. His technique at the turntable spins 45 questions per minute. His recent album with Diane Labrosse, Parasites, puts disquieting quiet sounds under the microscope. And Studio — Analogique — Numérique, his fresh collaboration with the Japanese mastermind Yoshihide Otomo, proposes cutting-edge sonic research in very original packaging: a box set of three 3" CDs.
A pillar of the avant-garde music scene since the early ‘70s, Fred Frith remains the favorite of many connoisseurs. The two albums by the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet (with René Lussier, Nick Didkovsky and Mark Stewart) are essential listens. DAME also distributes the titles released by Frith’s own Fred Records.
One of the first groups from the DAME stables to have explored electroacoustic improvisation, the Klaxon Gueule trio revels in noisy textures and demanding pleasures. Their last two albums Muets and Grain met critical acclaim. And I also want to mention the Ohmix compilation album, a daring electronic project where select artists (including Martin Tétreault, David Kristian, John Oswald, Terre Thaemlitz, and Ralf Wehowsky) remix the albums of the label Avatar.
Finally, instead of sending out the usual Christmas cards, consider the sound post cards produced by the label Ouïe-Dire. These are regular post cards accompanied by 3" CDs from French experimental artists. And happy Holidays!
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Pas Perdus can mean lost steps, mad steps — take your choice — it all fits this wacky band. The word «perdu» also resonates in French with words like lost, ruined, distracted, doomed, and reckless. They call themselves a marching band-ska-house.
Such a description, if you didn’t hear them two years ago at the Atlantic Jazz Festival, will prepare you for this marvellously unbuttoned Montréal horn band who are brassy in every sense of the word.
The compositions and arrangements are all by trombonist, musical saw-yer, and player of various small percussion bric-a-brac, Claude St. Jean. The CD starts with a 5 second welcome track — the sound of a tone arm tracking a vinyl disc leads to a laid back 40s dance band playing You’re Driving Me Crazy. Then the tone arm scratches across the record, the hissing and popping disappears and the trombone/saxes start a typical Pas Perdu intro to Acetaminophene.
A characteristic funky rock-fusion bass line, eventually taken over by the tuba, supports solos and ensemble riffs over ricky-ticky sticks on muted cymbal and snare rim. The band is hot and cheeky, a wild thing, kind of a brass band dixie mix.
Sometimes, as in Route 20, with its deep 60s kind of mayhem, it is hard to believe there are only six players: trombone, alto sax (piccolo, clarinet) tenor sax (flute, mouth noises), sousaphone, trumpet/flugelhorn, percussion/drums and almost everybody plays a noisemaker or rattle of some description. It can be hair-raising.
Alto sax player Levasseur is a dangerous man (a dangereux zhom bloodline?). Typically the band begins a chart by establishing an off-kilter rhythmic lattice-work into whose spaces the melody instruments dodge in and out. This band is about rhythm and sheer for-the-hell-of-it playing, yet it is a very disciplined band. They play apart together.
Every track jumps to a different rhythmic groove, some with a sort of tangoish rhythm stitched together by the tuba and the sticks on the cymbals, and all of it sounding that gapped syncopated line. Incidentally on Arabesque, Levasseur plays a great, meaty piccolo solo. Piccolo may not be your normal jazz voice, though, in his too-refined way, Hubert Laws used to dazzle us with it. The substantial sound of Levasseur is a different animal altogether.
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A côté des figures emblématiques du collectif québècois, Lussier, Derome, Joane Hétu, Diane Labrosse, Robert Marcel Lepage, et désormais Martin Tétreault, gravitent quelques musiciens, rencontrés au hasard des enregistrements des surnommés, tels Rémi Leclerc («Locomotive» et «Les Quatre Guitaristes» de Duchesne) ou Bernard Falaise («Klaxon Gueule» avec Michel F Côté), partenaires d’autres formations. L’Orkestre des pas perdus en est ainsi a sa deuxième réalisation et il cultive toujours son goût pour la fanfare.
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Literally translated to mean Orchestra With Nothing to Lose, L’Orkestre des pas perdus is the most straightforward of the three artists. That is not to slight this six-piece brass ensemble. Indeed, on Maison douce maison, they move effortlessly from funk to New Orleans marching band style to Arabic-like melodies and even throwing in some ska. The album works fine on the feet, though perhaps, next time they could concentrate more on the head.
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press@1071_103
For some years now Québec has been host to a thriving, all but indefinable music scene called Musique Actuelle, which is a constantly mutating hybrid of various kinds of avant-jazz, traditional folk styles and contemporary classical composition. No two artists under this rubric sound the same, some veering close to the plink-plonk free-improv of Derek Bailey, and others cozying up to the herky-jerky hyper-complexity of progressive rock bands like Henry Cow and Universe Zero. One thing they all share is a sense of fun and an irreverence toward their influences. Both qualities are evident in abundance on this second album by the all-instrumental, many-horned sextet L’Orkestre des Pas Perdus. From trumpet to trombone to sax, from flugelhorn to clarinet to sousaphone, brass and reeds rule. The drummer even plays a snare-piccolo contraption, so everyone’s blowin’ wind here somehow or other. The music is an infectious, rhythmically tricky conflation of Zappa, Ska and Count Basie, and all but begs to be dug. So dig.
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Jazz, improvisations et funk débridés pour une musique des plus urbaines et exubérantes. Les joyeux fous de l’Orkestre des pas perdus qui compte dans ses rangs les, entre autres, tromboniste Claude St-Jean et le batteur Rémi Leclerc, ont concocté un deuxième album bourré d’énergie, de mélodies et d’éléments inusités qui arrive à la fois à surprendre, à intriguer et à amuser. Jouissif.
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