With Maryse Letarte, Christmas never comes too soon, as you can imagine. “It’s Christmas already for me, but before the gifts,” says the singer, songwriter and performer of the modern holiday classic footsteps in the snow, published 14 years ago. “It’s always special for me to see that I exist in the minds of many people at this time of year. I reappear from a box, like a garland! » joke the spokeswoman of the 29e edition of the Noël dans le parc festival, which officially begins on Saturday.
Tradition will look better for this “normal” edition of Christmas in the Park, which returns with its musical program at Parc des Compagnons-de-Saint-Laurent (Plateau-Mont-Royal), Parc Lahaie (Mile-End) and at Place Émilie-Gamelin (downtown), where Maryse Letarte will give the opening concert on Saturday evening in the company of Salomé Leclerc and the trad ensemble Lendemain deveille.
And as in the good old days (read: before the pandemic), there will be something for all musical tastes: cumbia with Son Sono on December 8, electro and pop on December 9 with Super Plage, Sophia Bel and Jesse Mac Cormack, reggae-dancehall on the 15th with Okapi, Face-T and the Solidground orchestra, heavy rock with the return of WD-40 on the 22nd, and Rouge Pompier the next day, among other festive guests. The other two locations will host choirs, clowns and the vocal trio Les Fées de Noël.
From Quebec to Spain
Year in, year out, Maryse Letarte gives around ten Christmas concerts each winter drawing on the original repertoire of footsteps in the snow (2008) and its sequel, The parade (2015), which she presents today as “a souvenir album of the Christmases that I lived with my young daughter at that time”.
It’s always special for me to see that I exist in the minds of many people at this time of year. I reappear from a box, like a garland!
For a musician these days working on an upcoming album of pop songs unrelated to the major holidays on our calendar, would being so intimately associated with the holiday season be a curse on her career? ” Oh my God no ! On the contrary, it is a source of pride! she jumps.
“I pinch myself every Christmas. It’s an honor to tell myself that I come back to people’s minds every year, especially since, usually, an album doesn’t last long, except for the great classics. I could never have wished for a success like that”, which has crossed our Nordic borders since a certain German disc jockey fell for the song boom boomthen spread the musical good news like a magus of radio waves.
“I even knew that a school in Spain was blackmailing boom boom to children to make them learn French! says Maryse Letarte, who is still surprised. The enduring success of footsteps in the snow will be the subject of a documentary, on which the documentary filmmaker and director on TV Jean-Sébastien Lozeau is currently working and which should be ready next year, to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the release of the album.
Could Maryse Letarte be our Christmas queen? Of course it is, but the question still deserves to be raised in the light of recent – and contentious! — holiday music news.
A coveted title
Just imagine that last October, pop star Mariah Carey applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the name “Queen of Christmas”, as well as the expression “Princess Christmas” and the acronym “QOC”, less for the prestige of the crown than for the freedom to market a thousand and one objects bearing its title. ” Are you serious ? asks Maryse astonished. “That’s all I don’t like, the commercial escalation, the excessive consumption” that often comes with Christmas.
Fortunately, the Patent and Trademark Office did not respond to the interpreter’s request for All I Want for Christmas Is You, not out of common sense, but because another musician pretending to the title of Christmas queen objected to Carey’s efforts. The independent artist is called Elizabeth Chan, she makes a career in music only to sing the birth of baby Jesus and has just launched a new album (12 Months of Christmas), as she has done every December since 2013. Chan doesn’t want the trademark, but most of all doesn’t want Carey to stop her from being, in her own way, a Christmas queen too.
“When my daughter was very small, the queen, the representative of Christmas — other than me! — it was Ginette Reno”, because of her famous album Christmas with Ginette Reno, published in 1967 and reissued many times over the years. “The classic of classics! The first time I played the album to him, it was so funny! My daughter was two years old, if I remember correctly, I had her play this in the solarium, and she was waddling around while I was preparing supper. Suddenly, she comes out of the solarium saying to me: “Mom, mom, the lady has just wished us a Merry Christmas!” It is a memory that I will keep all my life. Afterwards, when Ginette Reno was singing the national anthem before the hockey game, I said to my daughter: “Look, it’s the lady!” »