Some News - Gaspe Fiddle Goes to Newfoundland

Readers,

I'm pleased to let you know that starting in September, I will be moving to St. John's, Newfoundland to start a Masters degree in Ethnomusicology where I will be pursuing the Gaspe fiddle project full-time.

Although it will be tough to leave the Montreal-area and all my wonderful Gaspesian friends who live here, I know that acquiring some new skills and having the opportunity to pursue this project through academia will be a great way to promote and document Gaspesian music.

I wanted to thank everyone who has helped Brian and I throughout the past few years with this project.  All the folks in Douglastown, Gaspe, Shigawake, and Montreal, your generosity has made everything possible.

I will be back in Gaspe at the end of July for a few weeks to visit friends, relax on the beach, and help out at the Irish Days (July 30-Aug 4).

See you around this summer.

Pat Feeney's Reel - Another Version and Teaching Files

Readers,

In one of our recent posts, we looked at Erskine playing another French Canadian sounding tune with an Irish title, "Pat Feeney's Reel".

Here is Erskine playing this tune in February 1978.  You can really hear his crisp bow attack and footwork on this one.

Pat Feeney's Reel

I've been playing this tune a lot lately.  Its not too tricky and uses the ubiquitous "hook" bowing technique that Cyril Devouge taught me.

Here is a link to the folder with the teaching files.

Hope you enjoy the tune.

Arty Savidant

Arty at his homestead
(Courtesy of Debbie Sams)

Hello Readers,
I've been away for work the past two weeks and am glad to be back. With the help of Debbie Sams, I have been inspired to put together a little post on a fiddler from York, Arty Savidant.  York is a lovely little village just behind the town of Gaspe on the banks of the York river.  Debbie recently sent me some great pictures of Arty who was her great uncle.  You can click on any of these pictures to get a bigger view.

Arty and calf
(Courtesy of Debbie Sams)

Brigid tells me that the Savidants were originally from Jersey and that many of them settled in the English-speaking villages clustered around the town of Gaspé.

When Brian and I began visiting Cyril Devouge in 2010, one of the fiddlers Cyril mentioned learning tunes from growing was a man that used to play for the dances at Haldimand Hall, Arty Savidant.  Cyril considered Arty to be one of the better fiddlers from Gaspe and remembers sitting in the grass outside Haldimand Hall, listening to Arty play for the dances there..  I've previously posted Cyril playing this tune and a video of Brigid and I playing the tune at Pembroke.

Today: Anglican Church at York
(photo: Glenn Patterson)

Here is Brigid, Brian Neil MacKay, and myself playing this tune for Cyril around Thanksgiving, 2010.

Arty is said to have had an excellent fiddle that was passed to Mary-Ellen Drody who married Calvin Savidant, and then to Debbie Sams who is the current owner. Cyril and Denzil Devouge reckoned that this was the best fiddle they ever tried.

I don't know very much about Arty or other the fiddlers from the villages around Gaspe like York, Wakeham, Haldimand, Sandy Beach, and Point Navarre and am interested in learning more.  If any of the readers remember Arty or other fiddlers from around the town of Gaspe please leave us a comment or send me an email.  I would love to feature any pictures, stories, or recordings of them on the blog.

Arty with a view of the York river
(Courtesy of Debbie Sams)

Happy Saint-Patrick's Day

Happy Saint-Patrick's Day to all our readers from Douglastown, Gaspé, and beyond.  I hope our friends in Douglastown had a nice breakfast at the Community Centre and are enjoying the parade.

In light of the occasion, here is a great medley of reels.

Here is Pat Feeney's and Saint Anne's Reels.

I'm not sure who Pat Feeney was but the tune has some typical Douglastown twists in it.  I couldn't find any other reels by this name on the internet.  Who knows, perhaps its a Douglastown tune.  The Our Gaspe Roots website doesn't have any Feeney's in or around Douglastown.

Erskine changes up the second phrase of Saint Anne's and plays a lovely variation in a lower register which gives the tune a slightly different flavour.  On other recordings, he also plays this phrase the standard way.

Cheers

Remembering Cyril

Readers,

A year ago today, we said goodbye to a good friend and lover of fiddle music, Cyril Devouge of L'Anse-á-Brillant, Quebec.

Today, I wanted to share some snippets of a visit Brigid, Brian, and myself had with Cyril for Thanksgiving in October, 2010. We had a nice surprise when we arrived.  Cyril had called up his good friend and outstanding Chateauguay Valley fiddler, Neil MacKay to join us as well as his daughter, Trena Devouge. This was the first time I had met Neil and we have since shared some great times playing music together.  It was also the first time I had met Trena and we've since become friends.  She has helped us out a lot here sending us tunes, pictures, and giving us invaluable info about Gaspesian culture.

Hear Cyril talking about playing with Roland White and Cyril's old horse

Here is Neil playing Cy's favourite tune, the Winter Reel, on my fiddle.

Here is the four of us playing Roland White's tune with Cy joining us on the mouth organ.

On the last tune, we played it in the key of D to match the key of Cy's mouth organ.  On the fiddle, this tune is played in G.

Cy really helped me out with this music and is the person responsible for sorting my bowing out, giving me lots of pointers during our visits. The three clips today really give a sense of what a vibrant character Cy was right up until he was 95. I often think about Cy and his stories and jokes still give me a chuckle whenever I think of them.

Some Videos

Here are some videos from a little concert of Gaspé tunes I played last week at a café in Montreal's NDG neighbourhood.  John Parsons runs a nice monthly coffee house featuring solo performances of three of Montreal's roots musicians.  He has amassed a great collection of videos of Montreal-area musicians on his youtube channel which I encourage you to check out.

It was my first experience playing a show with no accompaniment and I was a little nervous, not knowing how people would respond.  However, once I realized that playing in a solo environment would be the ideal setting to expose people to the older Gaspesian tunes played as it was in the old days, with just the fiddle, I accepted the gig.

I'm still working on learning to clog my feet while I play so you'll have to bear with me and hopefully, tapping my foot on the beat will suffice.  I was really pleased with the positive response of the crowd, most of whom had never heard fiddle played in the old-time solo style before.  A big thanks to John Parsons and his wife Jenny for inviting me to perform and for capturing and editing the video

I was also fortunate to meet a young girl who has been passionately learning the fiddle for the past nine months.  She had seen me play previously at another café and had asked her mother if she could come see the show.  Her name is Stephanie Flowers and she makes an appearance at the end of the third clip.  It was so great to see someone so young who is so enthusiastic about the fiddle and her playing really blew me away.  I have a feeling many fiddle lovers will be hearing a lot more about Stephanie in the years to come.

A Douglastown Brandy

The last two installments of Erskine's music here have been examples where he transforms tunes recorded by commercial Canadian fiddlers, recorded in a commercial style, and adapts them into the old Gaspesian style that he learned growing up in Douglastown.

Today, we are going to go way back and listen to a really old sounding tune that will give you an idea of the sounds that influenced Erskine's fiddle style even as he acquired more mainstream Canadian repertoire from commercial sources.. On many of the earlier recordings we have collected of Erskine, he played tunes that harken back to the older strains of fiddle music in Quebec and the New World.  These tunes do not contain the same somewhat predictable (albeit great) melodic stock that listeners have come to expect of more modern fiddle fare.  They often feature mysterious melodies and unusual timing and today's tune is a great example of this.  

Here is Erskine playing an untitled "Brandy" (what's that you ask?...)

This tune is an example of a Brandy, a very old dance in Quebec that is, roughly speaking, a reel in 3/2 time instead of 2/2 time.  Basically, instead of counting to four in each musical bar, you only count to three. It is likely that there were once many Brandys is Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, but their popularity waned perhaps as the group dances that went along with them fell out of fashion.  There were once many hornpipes in 3/2 time and one theory is that the Brandy may have evolved out from these, though there doesn't seem to be a consensus on this.

I have not heard this tune elsewhere and I don't believe it is a widespread tune in Quebec, though I could be wrong.  On the reel-to-reel discs and early cassettes that Erskine made before about 1965, we find him playing a wide variety of ancient sounding melodies with a hypnotic pulse.  Many of these have a certain similar melodic stock that is quite old sounding with lots of surprising jumps in the melody that you wont find in the modern Canadian old-time fiddle repertoire.  It is naturally closer to what you find among the older generation of French-Canadian players, but even then it seems a little different to me.

For listeners not accustomed to hearing fiddling of this vintage, it might be hard to "grab on" to this tune right away.  I personally find that if you close your eyes and give it a few listens, this tune can really transport you to another time and place.  It has a great pulse with many surprising twists and will taking your ear to some new places.

Here is a folder where I break this tune down for fiddlers to learn

While I always recommend learning tunes by ear, I have provided a transcription of this tune with some nominal bowing suggestions.  Please listen to the tune many, many times before going into the transcription.  It will help you get the feel and hear the phrases better than the written page.  The entire melody is composed of two sections of six bars each making the whole tune twelve bars in length.  Again, each bar has three beats, with four notes grouped in each beat.  There is no repeat after each section.  Although this tune fits nicely into to sections of six bars in 3/2 time, I feel that the final phrase of the first section sort of "bleeds" into the next section.  That is, the first beat of the second section seems to be the culmination of the previous section.  This seamless transition is really unique and creates a cyclical feel.

Here is the transcription

We have featured several brandies on this site now namely, Fat Molasses, Tommy Rooney's Jig, and La Grande Rouge (aka La Grande Gigue Simple).  Based on the number of brandies in Erskine's repertoire, I would guess that these formed a respectable part of the older stock of Douglastown and local Gaspesian melodies.

There are a few resources on brandies in Quebec on the internet, but Pierre Chartrand is one of the more knowledgeable people in this domain.  He is a great step dancer and caller and has extensively researched the older dance traditions of Quebec and French-speaking Canada.  Here is an article where he explains the details of the Brandy dance among others.  I love this quote from the article when Pierre discusses our best known Brandy, "La Grande Gigue Simple":

"Any self-respecting fiddler had to include it in his repertoire so as to be able to satisfy his public""


If you want to hear more brandies, check out  is an album by two Montreal-based musicians that contains a plethora of brandies and many other tunes in non-standard time signatures:

Duo Boulanger-Duval