Traveling north

Finding the world in Québec

by Jon Garelick

Jorane

If world music is "music from elsewhere," then what does that make the music of the Festival d'été de Québec, or, as it's translated, the "Québec Summer City Festival"? Here we are in the "cradle of Francophone culture in North America," as our hosts are quick to point out, listening to plenty of Québec-born Francophone song, but also to various international blends of Afropop, Django-style Gypsy jazz, alterna-rock, Cape Breton folk, hip-hop, and more. When the festival began, in 1968, its emphasis was heavily Francophone. But with the passing years, the event has become more and more cosmopolitan.

Which is even stranger when you consider Québec itself. A jewel of a city, high atop a promontory overlooking the St. Lawrence River, offering one stunning vista after another, it is, despite the typical waves of immigration (beginning with the colonial French in the 17th century) and its designation as capital of the province, well, provincial. That is, there are ethnic populations here, but not so you'd notice -- Continued from the cover

not, as in, say Montreal, Paris, or San Francisco, with their Algerian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, African-American neighborhoods, restaurants, presence. The "oldest walled city in North America," Québec has charmingly crooked streets full of charmingly colonial storefronts. When I talked to the festival's artistic director, Jean Beauchesne, and others, they pointed out that Québec is comparable to a state capital, with most of the jobs deriving from the government. So it's closer to Sacramento or Albany than to San Francisco or New York.

That said, the city explodes with warmth after its long dark winters (picture midwinter temperatures that hover between zero and the teens and a seasonal load of 13 or so feet of snow). The appetite of Québecois for out-of-towners like Malian vocal duo Amadou and Mariam, former Zap Mama vocalist Sally Nyolo of Cameroon, India's Trilok Gurtu and Debashish Bhattacharya, and downtown New York weirdo Marc Ribot is voracious. Again imagine: you've been indoors most of the winter, and when you do get out into your relatively small town, you see the same faces over and over. Come July, you want to get outdoors and see something, somebody, different.

My one weekend out of the 11-day event gave me a taste of only a tiny fraction of the 500 shows and 800 artists the Festival d'été bills in its promotional material. But that was enough to whet my appetite for more. The festival boasts about its "human scale" -- and that's true. The event commands the downtown area, with most of the action taking place on outdoor stages in public parks and squares, everything within walking distance. Sitting on the broad steps that climb the hill behind the Place d'Youville, you can take in the Django jazz of guitarists Stochelo Rosenberg and Romane while scanning the mix of generations at café tables in the plaza below, people-watching, and scrutinizing the refurbished rust-brick and green-roofed Beaux-Arts façade of the Metropole hotel and theater complex alongside the looming colonial-era wall of the Old City.

Some of the music is familiar (Romane, Rosenberg, and Angélo Debarre, excellent as they were, provided plenty of the Django thing for one weekend), but the names rarely are. Annie Ebrel is a young singer from Brittany whose style ranges from ancient gwerz chants to modern pop. In a noontime Saturday duo concert with jazz bassist Riccardo Del Fra, she alternated traditional and modern, walked a tightrope of counterpoint with Del Fra, and sang chants completely a cappella. The next day she joined the trio of Del Fra with harpist Kristen Nogues and guitarist Jacques Pellen, who conjured medieval polyphony as well as modernist dissonance.

The festival organizers relish this kind of unannounced (though obviously planned) collaboration. And they recognize "world music" in artists who work in an integral tradition, whether it's folkloric (the Cape Breton Barbarians) or modern (Django jazz -- though it's worth remembering that when he invented it, Reinhardt's music too was a fusion). But the Festival d'été is also a laboratory for new fusions. The danger of such alchemy, of course, as that as varied styles fuse they can create homogenous new-agey glop. An artist like Ebrel, however, can draw from various traditions to create an affecting personal style. (Hey, isn't that what Nirvana did?)

One of Québec's rising young stars is Jorane -- a vocalist/cellist with flowing tresses and an octave-leaping soprano that's earned her comparisons with Kate Bush and Tori Amos. On Friday night she played to a packed little bar on a hillside rock club (all of Old Québec is a hill). Jorane cultivates the Bush/ Amos mysticism, and the 300 or so who waited more than an hour for her to appear (a single $8 button gets you into all Festival d'été events, and the club shows are first-come, first-served) maintained a reverent hush during her performance.

She was joined by a second cellist, a second soprano, a double-bassist, and a percussionist. The music had a folkish tinge, and Jorane played with rhythmic cycles of overlapping arpeggios as if she were Philip Glass. She mixed up textures as well -- any of the three string players could bow or pluck, and she had a great rapport with the second vocalist. Other musics were conjured: medieval modes, Moroccan percussion, even Japanese vocal music. There were playful passages where the two vocalists got up from their seats, played a cowbell on the floor, encouraged the crowd to join them in a hide-and-seek call-and-response of "hey/wow." The music was all very carefully arranged, and at times I wished she'd just let someone cut loose with a bow solo, or work up a frenzied duet passage, or rock out, or at least play louder. On the one Jorane album I found in town, she does cut loose, and some fans told me that she usually plays with a rock band. The show may have been precious at times, but you could see why Jorane is a star.

Hearing music you've never heard before, in a city you've never visited, you can only hope for the kind of cognitive dissonance that's a revelation. Early Friday night my wife and I found ourselves seeking shelter from a rainstorm under a huge linden tree on the Plains of Abraham, where in a 15-minute battle on September 15, 1759, with both the French general Montcalm and the British general Wolfe mortally wounded, the Brits defeated the French and, as our Michelin guide told us, "sealed the fate of the colony." Across the park, we could hear the French rock band Mass Hysteria cranking out industrial-strength start-stop guitar rhythms while the singer conjured Trent Reznor's mewling scream and the crowd spoke the international language of mosh. The music itself threatened at any minute to veer from Pretty Hate Machine to "Macarena." For a minute I considered that maybe "Head like a Hole" really is a macarena.

That's the other thing that happens when "world music" begins to take on a benign universality: diversity begins to equal sameness. You begin to hear all compare and no contrast.

On Sunday night we hurried from the Place d'Youville to the Pub Saint-Alexandre, which with its brass and mahogany storefront and extensive beer list suggested an Irish pub. The program announced only "Los Amigos Especiles" but promised a surprise. That was Debashish Bhattacharya, an Indian musician who's devised his own double-neck 17-string acoustic guitar and plays it on his lap with a steel slide. At last year's Festival d'été, Bhattacharya caused a sensation when he appeared with local slide-guitar and dobro specialist Bob Brozman.

Now Bhattacharya was joined by three family members, including a tabla player, a player of the plucked-string rebab, and the vocalist Sutapa Bhattacharjee. Although Bhattacharjee stood, playing a harmonium and singing in the pure nasal tones, melismas, and bent pitches of classic Indian song, the material had surprisingly familiar folk structures with verses and choruses and easily apprehendable melodies. "This is a baul, a Bengali Gypsy song," said Bhattacharya at one break. "It's in 6/8, very hot and spicy." The string players kicked in up-tempo with something that for all the world sounded like bluegrass plucking before slowing down for the vocal part. There was a sing-along. Brozman joined the band on second guitar, and before long a backbeat began to assert itself in the guitar chords. With a slight shift in emphasis, the Indian folk song had become a Bo Diddley shuffle.

After the show, feeling peckish, we finally found an ethnic restaurant, the all-night Zorba. We ordered a souvlaki sandwich and the local fast-food favorite the poutinne -- French fries with brown gravy (or red sauce "Italienne") and curded cheese. Before long Bhattacharya arrived with his band. They ordered, and the juke box went into Elton John's "Island Girl." Bhattacharya began to snap his fingers. An Indian musician, in a 24-hour Greek restaurant in French-speaking Québec, snapping his fingers to Elton John: there was something very world music about it.