Vancouver Folk Music Festival, Jericho Beach Park, July 17-19, For complete schedule visit thefestival.bc.ca.
Young Québécois folk traditionalists Les Poules à Colin are always thinking ahead.
They've been playing jigs and reels and waltzes for most of their lives to the point where it's almost an automatic act, like breathing. You pick up your instrument and dig in to the music. The challenge for them is to keep things interesting and fresh and they achieve that by continually reworking the tradition into something new. An endless loop of continual innovation.
The band name, Les Poules à Colin, is part joke (Colin's Hens) and part nod to tradition (it's also the name of a song) but the multi-talented musicians themselves are all business.
Béatrix Méthé, Sarah Marchand, Éléonore Pitre, Marie and Colin Savoie-Levac are next generation folk with big, beautiful ideas about what they should sound like. The band perform tunes from their new album, Ste-Waves, at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival on Sunday, July 19. Earlier this week Méthé spoke to the North Shore News about Les Poules à Colin and growing up in the tradition.
North Shore News: Your parents (Claude Méthé and Dana Whittle) are both musicians - did it feel only natural that you would follow them into music?
Béatrix Méthé: Totally. We all grew up as musicians in the Québéc traditional music scene. We were born going to festivals and going to jams.
North Shore News: Like your father you play the violin - was that always your instrument of choice?
Béatrix Méthé: I guess it just happened. I picked up the fiddle because they were all over the house. I started playing classical music at my elementary school. A lot of people think that my dad taught me to play fiddle but that's not true. I really learned at school through classical classes and then at home he would teach me Québéc tunes and traditional tunes and that's how I learned to mix both together to create my own style.
Classical music came first that's how I learned all the basics of the fiddle but I've been listening to trad music my whole life. Really the best of both worlds.
North Shore News: How long have you been performing on stage?
Béatrix Méthé: I've been performing since I was 12, about seven years. I started in a band called Dentdelion with my parents and Colin was also in the band with his mother. The five of us had this band. We started playing a few tunes on stage with them but we quickly learned the repertoire and toured with them. That's how we started to play music together and led us to start Les Poules à Colin.
North Shore News: At what age did you start writing your own music?
Béatrix Méthé: I began writing pretty young. We had a lot of instruments at home and I would just fool around. I think the first tune I wrote was on piano when I was six or something. It's always been a big part of my life because both of my parents are composers. They write songs recreating the tradition - it's their way of (keeping the traditions alive) and maybe some day those tunes will become traditional pieces.
North Shore News: What are the influences on your own music?
Béatrix Méthé: When it comes to fiddle tunes it's more in the traditional way - reels and waltzes and jigs and stuff like that but recently I've been writing more folk/pop songs. My mom is a very good folk singer and she's written songs her whole life in more of the American folk tradition, because she's American. It's pretty new to me. The songs have more of a folky sound but they are still very much Québécois.
North Shore News: You've also studied with Scottish fiddlers. How did that come about?
Béatrix Méthé: I went to Scotland when I was 11. It was a big influence on me because over there all the young people play fiddle (which was not the case in Québéc). There were tons of teenagers - the cool thing was to play fiddle tunes so that was very inspiring to me. We went to a camp on the Shetland Islands called Fiddle Frenzy where we were composing and learning Scottish tunes. We were with two fantastic fiddlers, Maggie Adamson and Laura Lockyer. They were very inspiring as they were young and they were touring and doing that for a living.
North Shore News: What was it like growing up in Lanaudière?
Béatrix Méthé: I was actually born in Vermont but I moved when I was like one-year-old so I don't remember much of Vermont. We still have family there.
I grew up between the American scene and the Québécois scene. My mom has lived for 20 years in Québéc so she's taken the Québéc tradition into her own style too. It's been great to have both. My dad is a pure Québécois fiddle player. He writes music all the time. It's a very musical family. Always someone playing fiddle or guitar and singing. Both of my brothers also play music. It was a very musical childhood.
North Shore News: How did Les Poules à Colin get started?
Béatrix Méthé: Colin's sister Marie and her good friend Éléonore were studying in Cégep. There's this big festival in Joliette called Mémoire et Racines. They played music but it wasn't trad music.They saw youth bands at the festival who inspired them to create their own band.
We wanted to bring this tradition somewhere else and just make it our own. There are not a lot of young groups so we are kind of the new generation. We were just like, 'let's try something and that's how it started.' Me and Colin have being playing together for so long it was pretty easy to get together to play music and then eventually we began creating more of our own stuff.
North Shore News: You are all children of musicians.
Béatrix Méthé: Yes, you could say that. Sarah the piano player's dad is a very well-known guitar player, Paul Marchand, and he's played with my dad in groups called Enterloupe and Ni Sarpe Ni Branche, pretty well-known bands in Québéc.
My mom is also very good friends with Colin and Marie's mom, Denise Levac. She's a very good flute player too and she was in that family band that I was talking about. Éléonore's family is very musical too and her dad is a well-known step dancer in Québéc. It's really natural for us because we all see each other at festivals and camps and jams. We've been friends forever. I can't remember when I met these people.
North Shore News: What do you try to focus on with your repertoire?
Béatrix Méthé: We focus on compositions that either me or Colin has written. Colin and the girls all studied jazz music and we can hear it in the music. The songs are either traditional French songs that we have completely rearranged, changed the melodies and sometimes even changed the words, but we still have this respect for the traditional music.
The old songs we try and make new, maybe more folky or more pop. The title track of the album is more pop so sometimes they drift away from the tradition and bring it to another level but we still keep this Québéc foot-tapping sound. We like to intertwine between the old stuff and new stuff, keeping them both and balancing them. I think that's what makes our sound.
North Shore News: You've been to Vancouver before haven't you?
Béatrix Méthé: Yes for the Festival du Bois. We were so happy to be there and can't wait to come back. It was only one show but it was great.
— Les Poules à Colin perform on Stage 5 on Sunday, July 19 at 5:20 p.m. Earlier in the day, Béatrix Méthé and Colin Savoie-Levac will also participate in the Mad for Trad workshop on Stage 2 at 11:20 a.m.
