Mon pay, c’est la musique

Review by Ken Waxman

When it came to the acceptance and adaptation of Free Jazz in Canada starting in the mid-1960s, not unlike other national situations, there were two solitudes – well actually three. Whereas most of English Canada remained true to the Swing-Bop ethos that characterized most  Jazz in the local music industry, some sonic rebels in Québec began experimenting with unfettered improvisational concepts. But here again there was a further division. In the main the anglophone musicians in Montréal with a few idiosyncratic exceptions, continued to confine themselves to the defined Jazz sounds played in the rest of Canada, while a growing number of French speaking Québecois stylists experimented with new sounds

Consisting of taped interviews with 11 contemporary musicians – eight French-speaking and three English –  music historian John Gilmore uses these oral reminiscence to trace the socio-political situation that created this 1965 to 1975 flowering of exploratory sounds in Montréal as well as its subsequent decline and disappearance.

For a start Montréal has always had a close connection to New York which meant that post-Coltrane Free Jazz was quickly imported to the city via records and visiting American exploratory improvisers, The connection was also made as the Black Power movement against white exploitation affiliated with many of those New Thing players was viewed as a credo not unlike what was proposed by the burgeoning Québec separatist movement which linked English speakers dominance in the province in the same manner. One popular book even dubbed French Canadian as Nègres blancs d’Amérique.

Most prominent of the Québec Free players were the members of Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec (QFJQ). With a shifting personnel, the members who often played for little more than free beer, according to one QFJQ founder, did so in a few locations far removed from the mainstream Jazz scene. At first the scene was centered in a couple of grotty city clubs and later as part of a communal house in the countryside, which burned down suspicious circumstances. Although there was a brief association with soon-to-be Québecois superstar singer Robert Charlebois, personnel and political disagreements eventually led the group members back to their avant-garde roots.

While the band’s credo was, according to QFJQ drummer Mathieu Léger, “Joue. Joue … N’importe quoi”, American cellist Tristan Honsinger who also had an association with the band in the early 1970s, polemics and politics were more important to long-time members saxophonist Jean Préfontaine and trumpeter Yves Charbonneau than the music itself. With “The Internationale” the only tune played in the first of the group’s usually abstract sets Préfontaine and Charbonneau were later in the night too wasted on several substances and embedded in political discussions to continue playing music.

Those two had already died by the time Gilmore began his interviews so that it’s the QFJQ’s original drummer Guy Thouin, Léger and bassist Yves Bouliane who recount the group’s history here, with their views likely colored by subsequent events. Quoting the phase that gives this volume its title, Bouliane explain that his dedication was to his instrument rather than politics, which caused fissures in the QFJQ.

Gilmore’s research also reveals that were other free players at that time, who were mostly on their own or only tangentially involved with the QFJQ. While most of the musicians here had some musical training, including stints in conservatories, when it came to free music, almost all were autodidacts. This includes saxophonists Bryan Highbloom and Raymond Torchinsky, two of the few anglophones , who were part of that scene. Together with Québecois s multi instrumentalist Raymond Gervias they would usually improvise in their own apartments, or sparingly in groups with other players similarly inclined towards total improvisation. Their territories were locations like L’Atelier de musique expérimentale and Véhicule Art where they interacted with visual artists, film makers and the like.

A special case is clarinetist Robert Marcel Lepage. Although a close associate of Bouliane, he never attempted to play with QFJQ preferring his own inspirations,. Like some of the others he abandoned music for a period before becoming a successful composer of film and television scores for Pierre Hébert and other dedicated cineastes.

Most of the others followed a similar trajectory after 1975. Thouin became part of jazz fusion and conventional Jazz groups as well as adding a deep immersion in Indian religious thought and practices; Highbloom and Gervias were for many year involved in introducing school children to freer music and encouraging them to play it in classrooms. Highbloom was also a music therapist, while Gervais became a conceptional and sound artist and organized Jazz programs for Radio-Canada. Torchinsky became a geographer, while Bouliane found fame as a celebrated painter.

Gilmore’s volume is a valuable guide to Québec’s free music scene at that crucial time and chronicles the various twists, turns and intersections that took place. One interesting factoid was that at least three of the players ended up working at different record stores owned by Dave Silver at the time.

The one drawback of the book is that of the form itself. Oral history allows the subjects to speak at great length about their concepts, history and ideas with very little editorial input. What that means is that along with valuable information passed on, so is the minutiae of their personal lives.

However with some of the chief players of this historic interlude now dead, and the remaining ones in their seventies or eighties, L’amorce de l’improvisation libre au Québec is a valuable addition to the too few books on 20^th Century Canadian musical history.