There she is, close to the entrance, a barely started sandwich. A bit early, the arrival at the small bistro on rue Saint-Zotique… Too bad for the bite, must think Blanche Baillargeon. Smile, to start. Get to know each other, talk to each other, quickly, immediately. Shared feverishness. The nest, his second album, has already delighted so much. A week of joy all around the nest. Forty minutes of a concentrate of spring, renewable, inexhaustible. It’s about understanding why. Love that much! How is it possible ? It’s so unlikely, a priori. Lady ! Songs that aren’t really songs, that don’t have a chorus, instrumental sequences that astonish while rocking, in the same pieces yet not broken up. What?
“I have answers,” laughs the career bassist, the seasoned accompanist, the daring expert with DJ Champion, Clémence DesRochers and other Misses Satchmo, the essential ally of the Fanfare Pourpour, the Imposteures de Christine Tassan, we pass and we forget so much she carried around her mastodon in some twenty years of tribulations. “I think it’s because I compose while singing. Everything is melody, therefore everything can be sung. It starts with the human voice. The pure expression of music, for me, does not start from any technique, from any cerebral conception. »
The right thrust
And how do you do that when you excelled in jazz arrangements at Cégep de Saint-Laurent and studied the double bass thoroughly at the University of Montreal? The simple answer: you have to go through it to forget the technique. Mastery and integration of knowledge. His additional information: “It can happen when you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have time to think. Voluntarily or not, we understand, depending on the circumstances or according to a proven method. “Many of the tracks on the album come from two intensive songwriting sessions. What are called composition marathons. It’s an exercise, initially. You get up at 8 a.m., and at 9 a.m. you start. You go back to the office, as it were. At 5 p.m., it’s over. You haven’t had time to eat, nothing: the requirement is to compose twelve pieces within eight hours. Recorded, because in the evening, the participants get together, and we listen. »
Intense, she said. Violent, yes! “You’re hitting walls, you have no idea. It’s awful! But what it does is you don’t wait for inspiration. You play, you go in another direction, go ! Tired, not tired. Frustration raises emotions, what has to happen! I had my piano, a little percussion, that’s all. I knew that I would not have time to write texts. I could sing melodies, a bit like vocalizations. But vocalizations are not like words. »
The encounter
This is where the poet Patrice Desbiens comes in. Pas lui, his 2014 collection entitled big red guitar. Who was hanging out on the piano, biding his time. Here, if we opened it, there are words in there, right? “Really, it is a marvelous coincidence. It opened to a page, and I tried the words over the melody on the way. It took 32 seconds and it was over. It went so well together: “you take off your dress slowly / your arms in the air / like a tree losing its leaves / it watches you do it gently / and desire / breathes on you naked / like / the dawn”. »
Many of the tracks on the album come from two intensive songwriting sessions. What are called composition marathons. It’s an exercise, initially. You get up at 8 a.m., and at 9 a.m. you start. You go back to the office, as it were. At 5 p.m., it’s over. You haven’t had time to eat, nothing: the requirement is to compose twelve pieces within eight hours. Recorded, because in the evening, the participants get together, and we listen.
When we listen to the result, the meeting does not seem at all fortuitous. Everything flows naturally. One minute to follow the flow of words, one minute of music without words, orchestrated extrapolation, to clearly see the tree, the leaves, the dress, and then another minute to repeat the poem with images in your head. Extraordinary sensory experience. Softness of timbre, the words and arrangements needed to accurately render the exquisite beauty of a moment of eternity.
There are three poems from the same collection thus coiled to the tunes of Blanche Baillargeon. She wrote the others, and three instrumental pieces interfere in the whole thus composed. A nest. A place where you feel good. Where we are born, where we stick our heads out, where we end up growing bolder and flying away. Even with a very heavy double bass, even when you add a clarinet that will vibrate in the lowest notes of the register, you can throw yourself into the void and be carried along in the movement.
Jazz without jazz
“I didn’t even know it was possible. I don’t have a lot of compositions to my credit, I was mainly a support with my double bass. You had to try, the intensive session was the push, and you also needed something unexpected and more, and these were the words of Patrice Desbiens. »
And we had to find a way to it: its kind of combination. An art of juxtaposition, one might say. The words without too much noise around them, the cushion of the double bass, here a piano, there guitars (acoustic, electric sometimes “not too clean”), then, halfway, an instrumental deployment: cello, clarinet, flutes, percussion, drums as needed. As if the melodies had two ways of existing, one nearby, the other in the landscape.
“They’re jazz musicians, mostly, to whom I said, ‘Don’t play jazz.’ Everyone followed the instruction, except Alexis French, who couldn’t hold back and let himself go on the trumpet! It’s good because it springs. But jazz musicians who hold back, who put themselves at the service of the melodies, it’s the greatest generosity that one can imagine: you can hear it, I think. ” Oh yeah. In The flight, it could drop out in improvisations, but it’s just Brubeck enough in measure to enjoy it without giving up on it. Delicacy at every turn.
Go where the melody goes
The whole album is thus tenderly in love with freedom, but without letting go loose. Desire is much more pleasant when it is not instantly satisfied: in The room like the seaIn The night will be shortfinally, in Under your eyes the springIn The boat (where a single note holds the bar), we advance quietly, sometimes we stop to watch, sometimes we dance (there are very dynamic Latin stops in the middle of the disc), but most often we go where the melody goes . “Nothing is forced. There are many, many hours of work so that it’s never too much, and never flat either, it’s a precarious balance, but I think that in the end, you can listen to it. »
A beautiful handmade book, printed in 450 copies, accompanies the disc, also available for digital download. “Music, we want to touch it. Me, that’s where I come from. I grew up in a world where music was close at hand. »
In the eagerness to talk about the album, it was never specified that Blanche is the daughter of Paule Baillargeon and Luc Courchesne, both artists, and the daughter-in-law of the late Yves Laferrière, a musician who took part in many adventures. , including the Contraction group. “I have his bass. And it is to him that I dedicate the album. »
It’s so well said, with the same care as for this entire record. “To Yves, gone, and thanks to whom the music. »