The multitude of guitars hanging on the walls or lying on the floor is revealing: Jocelyn Desjarlais is passionate about music. Not only can he instinctively play any instrument, but he is also one of the few bagpipe makers in the country.
“Music is unique to humans. With the exception of birds, they are the only animal species on Earth that can express themselves in this way,” says the retired businessman, sitting in the middle of his favourite room, upstairs in his ancestral country house in Saint-Adrien-d’Irlande.
Everywhere you look, there’s an acoustic or electric guitar, a banjo, a keyboard, a clarinet or a harmonica. Some of them required trips of several thousand kilometers south of the border, says the musician, a rather rare Yamaha guitar in his hand. “As soon as I found it on the Internet, I jumped in my car.”
PHOTO ANDRÉ LAROCHE, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Here, music is king.
A microphone, serpentine wires, a few amps and a computer complete the decor. Here, this self-taught musician is swimming in happiness. He can spend entire days composing, playing and recording tunes that he then offers to studios and professional artists.
“What music makes resonate in me is difficult to describe, but it is essential to me. There are more colors in music than in painting. It brings me an incredible feeling of communion that borders on ecstasy,” he confides before relating an anecdote to illustrate his point.
“To get into Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago, you can bring your guitar to get in for free, as long as you get on stage. You want to die on the spot. But as soon as the music starts and you jump on the train with the others, it’s a rush of emotions like no other! All the musicians are different and, in a band, there is a place for your difference,” he says, while playing Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY JOCELYN DESJARLAIS
Jocelyn Desjarlais is passionate about music.
Music, an anchor point
Music, for its part, made its way into Jocelyn Desjarlais’ life as a teenager. At 16, he learned to play guitar by ear. He then discovered an ability to master a range of instruments. Is this a gift?
“No,” he retorts, straight away.
“Fingers don’t learn to move on their own. It takes a lot of practice, which is very demanding on the brain,” continues the man who suffers from a form of hyperactivity. “My brain never stops. I always need something to focus on to calm it down.”
He discovered that “something” in Florida while volunteering for hurricane victims in the early 2010s. A manager asked him to join some musicians to raise money. It was there that he first saw and heard a very small bagpipe with a softer sound than the well-known large bagpipes of Scotland.
“My brain locked on to it. I absolutely had to know how it worked. It became an obsession,” recalls Jocelyn Desjarlais, without knowing at the time that he was embarking on a long journey.
The problem is that the manufacturing secrets are well kept by a few British craftsmen. They hold the keys to the mystery of the Caramilk and they do not want to share them. Nobody believed that I would succeed in building a bagpipe one day.
Jocelyn Desjarlais
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PHOTO PROVIDED BY JOCELYN DESJARLAIS
It took years of trial and error to unravel the mystery of bagpipe making.
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PHOTO PROVIDED BY JOCELYN DESJARLAIS
After years, he finally solved the riddle!
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Years of testing
Determined to defy the odds, he built himself a small woodturning workshop in the basement. For more than two years, he doggedly searched for ways to transform pieces of wood into beautiful flutes. This search, punctuated by repeated failures, led him to old publications by the English maker Colin Ross. But it was a video of an Italian woodturner, found on the internet, that allowed him to solve the enigma.
The apprenticeship was not over, however, since a bagpipe is made up of a multitude of small parts that must be made yourself. “And there is no one more conservative than a bagpipe player. Everything must be done in the traditional way, with no room for modern materials,” the craftsman explains.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY JOCELYN DESJARLAIS
Jocelyn Desjarlais at his work table
On a table on the veranda is spread out an entire arsenal of precision tools, often themselves hand-made, to design the valves, bags and other components of the instrument. The maker must master not only wood turning, but also cabinetmaking, welding and shoemaking. This journey, spanning around ten years, has been strewn with pitfalls.
Why did you continue? “To satisfy my brain. All alone at my desk, concentrating on small gestures, I calm down,” confides Mr. Desjarlais.
All these efforts are rewarded. The quality of the bagpipes made in Saint-Adrien-d’Irlande is now recognized, he believes. “Every year, I would go and show my instruments at the Kinnear’s Mills Celtic festival and no one wanted to hear them. Then, one day, a professional tried them. The rumor did the rest.”
What is the secret? “I will never tell,” Jocelyn Desjarlais replies with a laugh.