You don’t enter Myriam Gendron’s musical universe without taking off your shoes. We do it out of politeness, but also because we really don’t want to walk with our heels among his soft songs, imbued with French laments of yesteryear and tunes from the American land, which build a bridge between past sounds and current folk. .
We take off our shoes for another reason: we don’t go anywhere while listening Mayday, his most recent album. We are forced to stop. To stop everything. Myriam Gendron quite naturally imposes a rhythm of such slowness that it prevents you from doing anything other than paying attention to her singing, never far from prayer, and to her soothing music, even when Jim’s drums White or Zoh Amba’s sax get a little angry.
The art of this folk artisan born in Quebec who notably lived in the United States is an art of updating in the noblest sense of the term. She draws on folk archives drawn here and south of the border to recreate new songs that sound like those of yesterday.
His songs When I was young and beautiful Or The beautiful Françoise, for example, would have their place in the repertoire of a group like Le vent du nord. Except that here, there is no violin or hurdy-gurdy, only guitars – acoustic and electric – that the singer and her accomplice Marisa Anderson touch as if they were trying to create plays of light and shadow.
The magic here is not so much inventiveness, but in the curious feeling of familiarity that emanates from these songs from the first listen. They sound like they’ve always been there. Better, as if we had always known them. We understand why Americans also fall for these tunes, which the artist will perform this Saturday at the Lion d’or and later in the summer as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival.
Extract of Scorched lands
Current folk
Mayday
Myriam Gendron
Feeding Tube Records/Thrill Jockey