Kevin Carr on Quebecois Music

Daniel Steinberg:
We’re still missing a few things. You and Josie were very involved in Quebecois music. How did that happen?

Kevin Carr:
Josie and I heard Gilles Losier at Fiddle Tunes in 1980. He was playing these heart meltingly beautiful tunes on the fiddle and we fell in love with them and we decided we were going to go to Quebec. So Josie asked Gilles for names of people we might call and off we went.

We flew to New York and had a real Manhattan experience, then on to Boston. That’s where the coincidences began.

Josie had one name in Boston, and it was Paddy Cronin, who was a fiddler from Kerry. And she said, give me a dime. I’m going to look in the phone book. And I said, honey, come on, do you have any idea how many Cronin’s there’re going to be in the phone book in Boston? And she said, give me a dime. So I gave her a dime. She went over to the phone book, she said, you’re right, God, there’s like 20 pages of Cronins, but there’s only one Paddy Cronin. So she calls the number and somebody answers. And she asks if this was the home of Paddy Cronin, the musician? And they said, oh, yeah. And they held the phone out and said, listen. And there was a session going on and they said, do you play music? You want to come over? Here’s the address.

So we went over there, and we met Vinny Cronin, do you know him from San Francisco? He’s a great flute player. He was Paddy’s teenage son, and he was a great flute player. We hung with after the session, and it was great fun. And Cronin was a wonderful fiddle player and very inspiring. Anyway, we were talking to Vinny and we said, God, you must have just played this music since you were born. And he said, ah, no, I hated it. He said, I hated it until last year when I turned 18. I said, for some reason I thought maybe I should try this. And he found that all that music he’d grown up around had seeped into his soul. And there it was. Anyway, so the next day Josie made another of her phone calls. She called the one number that we had up near Quebec City, which was a young woman named Lisa Ornstein.

And the person who answered the phone said in very accented English, oh, Lisa? Yes. Well, she’s not here. At which point, of course I would’ve given up. But Josie asked where she was. And he said, she’s at her mother’s house in Ohio. And Josie said, do you have that phone number? And so Guy (it turned out she was talking to Guy Bouchard, Lisa’s housemate, who gave Josie that phone number. She called Lisa, and within ten minutes they were the best of friends. Lisa said she would call Guy and that we could stay in her room while she was away. She said she’d be home in a few days and she’d tell Guy to give us a very warm welcome. So we drove into the night to get up into Quebec. I don’t know how we ever made it. We arrived at this old farmhouse in L’ancienne-Laurette, about 30 minutes outside of Quebec City. Guy did welcome us warmly and told us he would be done soon, and to make ourselves at home in the kitchen which we did after bringing in our gear and instruments. And there we sat, listening to some of the most thrilling music we had ever heard being made in the living room of that old house. It was the band, the Bottine Souriante, practicing to record their second album. Josie and I looked at each other and thought that perhaps we had died on the road and were now in heaven. The band finished, came in and saw our instruments, and insisted we get them out. And we played together till the wee hours.

Daniel Steinberg:
Which iteration of Souriante was this? This was with Martin as fiddler?

Kevin Carr:

Oh, yeah. Martin and Yves, Guy and André. Yeah.

Daniel Steinberg:
Daniel Roy?

Kevin Carr:
No, he wasn’t in it yet, but what’s his name? Mario Foret. He was there. I’m not sure he was in it yet, but there was another guy too, I can’t remember. Gilles Cantin I know was in it for a while, but I don’t think he was in it at this point. Anyway,

Daniel Steinberg:
André, of course.

Kevin Carr:
Yeah, André. I remember that night they cooked us eggs, boiled in syrup. It was fantastic. And they said, well, why don’t you come with us tomorrow? We’re going to go canoe camping. And so Josie and I went canoe camping with most of the band. I don’t think André went, but there were the guys and their girlfriends, and there was room for two more. And so we went on this three day canoe trip up into the Laurentian mountains. Just unbelievably beautiful. Fall colors. Wild rivers. Staying in cabins that only had little kerosene lamps. And they all wanted to dance. So they made me play the six Quebec tunes I’d learned from Gilles Losier, over and over. I gulped and did my best.

And after that, we were just best buddies ever. And then Lisa came home and she took us around to meet people. I can’t remember all the musicians we met. We met Jules Verret. We met Claude Methé and Dana Whittle, and Eric Favreau. We were taken down in the country to a dance hall called the chicken coop, where we saw people dancing quadrilles and square sets while clogging, the way they had for a hundred years. I remember talking to the prompter, the caller, and he spoke with a strong Northern Irish accent. And I remember asking what part of Ireland he was from? He said, “Oh, I couldn’t tell you, my family’s been here for four generations. We speak French in the home.” So we learned first hand about the strong Irish influence in Quebec. It was just this totally magical trip, and we came back completely smitten with the music. And soon after that, I think we discovered that our dear friend and wonderful fiddler, Laurie Rivin, was also learning Quebecois music, as were you, and we all started learning tunes and playing together.

Daniel Steinberg:
Do you remember when this was?

Kevin Carr:
That was somewhere in the mid eighties. Because then over the next few years, Fiddle Tunes started bringing Quebecois fiddlers out.

Kevin Carr:
Yes. They brought out André Alain who came with Guy Bouchard (with whom we had a joyous reunion) as his accompanist and translator. And Lisa Ornstein came, with accordionist Denis Pepin, and later with her bandmates in Bruit Cours dans le Ville, André Marchand and Nomand Miron. Guy came back twice more over the years with Yvon Mimeault, with whom we got very close. Josie, Laurie and I later in the 90’s went back to Quebec to record with Yvon on his comeback album, Y’Etaits Temp, It’s About Time. Other fiddlers over the years were Eric Favreau, Denis Maheu, Eric Corrigan and Eddie Whelan, Daniel Lemiuex, and Liette Remon.

At some point in the ’90s Guy published a two volume collection of ‘Crooked Tunes’ or Airs Tordus, which were very old tunes of incredible beauty. Guy had started a mail order business selling recordings of traditional music called 30 Below, Trente Sous Zero. He had also initiated a project to record selections from The Crooked Tunes book, but was having a hard time finding fiddlers to participate in his vision of a chamber folk group of all fiddles. Late one night at Fiddle Tunes, I remember, Judy Lipnick and Greg Raskin, and Laurie and Josie and I were there playing with Guy and his wife Laura. They were telling us how hard it had been to get the crooked tunes recording project off the ground and we all said, ‘well, we’ll do it.” And Guy thought about it and then finally took us seriously. And that’s how we started making more trips to Quebec, with Guy and Laura coming out to California a few times as well. We made two volumes of those recordings. They were an absolute ball to make. The first was recorded entirely at Denis Frechette’s (the innovative pianist who helped guide the Bottine Souriante band into new territory and ever greater popularity) recording studio in Joliette, Quebec. Josie had learned to play fiddle instantly because Guy wanted an all fiddle sound. Luckily she had taken fiddle lessons as a child and it showed. She miraculously played all the harmonies on the albums, which were quite popular in folk music circles when they came out. The second volume, Les Deux Rives, was a more complex project, and was finished ten years later.

Denis Frechette. Yeah. Rang Studio Rang 4, I think it was Road 4. Yeah, it was magical. Let’s see, we went once in the summer. I remember. It was warm and beautiful. And then once in the winter to finish it. And then we went back to do the second recording.

Daniel Steinberg:
Before you did the second recording, there was that year of Memoires et Racines scene that I came with you for.

Kevin Carr:
Oh, that’s right. Memoires et Racines was a traditional Quebecois music festival in Joliette that Tetes de Violon was hired to play at. We brought our kids. Daniel, who was about 14 at the time, and not impressed with his parent’s music, witnessed our Tetes group playing, and the audience was mostly young people, and there was an honest to gosh mosh pit in front of the big stage. After the show Daniel said to me, drily, that maybe it WOULD be a good idea for me to teach him to play the instruments I played, after all.

And then we worked on recording Yvon’s record. He wanted some Irish bagpipes on a couple of tunes, only he referred to them as ‘the alembic’ or the still, because of all the brass tubing. Another thing I remember about that recording was that there was one cut with piano backup. It was Josie playing and it was just brilliant. She still doesn’t realize how great it was.

Anyway, then copying you and putting on house concerts, only ours featured Irish fiddlers and pipers, and musicians from Quebec. I remember we had that house concert with Raynald Oullette, the brilliant accordion player, with fiddler Daniel Lemieux, on our back deck. And then we had Denny Mahuex and his surly guitar player. They had been sponsored to play at that big L.A. festival, and they had a gig in downtown San Francisco, but they were advertised with an accordion player. So they came to our place and stayed with us, and I played the accordion with them. Even though I was just learning to play. Again, I knew six tunes.

Daniel Steinberg:
Any other connections with Quebec over the years?

Kevin Carr:
Well we met Davy and Michelle of the group Hart Rouge at the Strawberry Music Festival – we just heard something that sounded Quebecois and walked over and introduced ourselves, then played some together. Then visited them on one of our trips up there.

And then we had our Quebecois focused contra dance band, QuebeQuasi, with you, Laurie, John, her husband, Josie and me. That was pretty darn fun. And then Laurie, Suzanne Friend, Josie and I made a band called ZiggueZon, which added old French Canadian songs, from the book Josie was writing for Mel Bay, to the mix.

Then when we moved to Southern Oregon, we were very, very sad to lose our little Quebecois music loving community, and though we found wonderful Irish musicians to play with, we despaired of finding anyone to play with the French accent. BUT we were wrong. We met Louis Leger at the local session. He had been born in New Brunswick, was a francophone, a great fiddler and an accordionist. Our tribe. Louis has a son, Devon, who is also a fantastic fiddler. And they have become, over the years, mighty scholars and performers of the Acadian French music of New Brunswick, and Quebecois music in general.

Daniel Steinberg:
Anything else about Quebecois music?

Kevin Carr:
Well in the coincidence department again. The most exciting recording of francophone fiddling in many years was an album of Acadian fiddle tunes by Robin LeBlanc, which was recommended to us by Louis and Devon. It was raw and powerful and soulful, and we were delighted to meet him At Fiddle Tunes a few years later when he accompanied Claude Austin, an older fiddler, to the festival. At one point Devon’s wife Dejah asked Robin how he got interested in traditional music, and Robin said he had actually studied percussion and cooking in college and had decided to go to India to study percussion there, but he went by way of France, and while in Poitou he had chanced to go into a pub that featured Irish music. And while there he fell into conversation with a young American student, who asked where Robin was from. When Robin said New Brunswick, the American told him excitedly that he should go home and study the music there because Acadian music was the best music in the world. So Robin did, influenced also by the fact that his grandfather had been a fiddler, and a distant uncle was a fiddler. And he quickly became a very good fiddler himself. While Robin was talking, Dejah excused herself and came back with photo of a young man. Robin exclaimed “That’s him, that’s the American who told me to come home and study Acadian music!” It was a photo of Devon, from his college year abroad in Poitou.

Daniel Steinberg:
Oh, nice.

The Famille LeBlanc

Kevin Carr:
Yeah. And we got to visit Robin in 2017 when we went to Quebec to visit old friends. Josie and I wrote an interview with him for Fiddler Magazine. He lives a great life with his three magnificently talented musician/dancer daughters, on his 100 acre farm. The Famille LeBlanc has now put out a number of wonderful albums and are having a very nice and well deserved music career.

Daniel Steinberg:
Great! I don’t think you mentioned how it was you started playing accordion.

Kevin Carr:
Well, since I started coming to Fiddle Tunes and hearing Cajun music I remember looking at those accordions and thinking that they were the coolest looking things in the world. And after I was up in Quebec the first time, and I discovered that they played the same kind of one row accordion. And it was interesting because I had the same experience when I first started playing bagpipes Irish pipes. Not so much Irish pipes, but other kinds of bagpipes, which is that I’d hear some recording and think, oh God, that hurts my ears. And years later, I’d hear the same recording and think, God, that’s gorgeous. And even though I was just fascinated with these accordions, when we first started going to Quebec, I sort of inherited the prejudices of both Guy and Yvon. They both disliked accordions because they thought that accordion music had killed fiddling. It took a few years before I heard accordion players like Yves Verret, Raynald Oullette and Gaston Nolet, whose playing was beautifully melodic.

And that’s when I ordered a box from Marc Savoy. But I didn’t know at that time that Cajun boxes were tuned differently than Quebecois ones. And so I got this box and it was great, I was trying to play Quebecois music on it, and it just sounded terrible with the piano. And that’s when I figured out, oh God, I did the wrong thing. And I got another one, but tuned for Quebecois music. I remember selling that first one to Jim Newberry, and then years later asking if I could buy it back, because I wanted to play some Cajun music on it. And he had just sold it. Anyway, I swapped accordions over the years and finally ended up on that trip in 2017 buying a Messervier accordion, which is just a gorgeous thing.

And I have ended up with the fanciest possible Savoy Cajun accordion, which I just love to play. I don’t do very much on it, but I just love the sound of it. And then it turns out you can play some Galician music on one row accordion. So sometimes I do that. Somehow I ended up with half a dozen accordions. I have a three row, which is also good for French and Quebecois music, and a couple of little Italian Organettos, for playing Tarantellas.

Kevin Carr on Wake the Dead

Daniel Steinberg:
I didn’t ask you about Wake the Dead.

Kevin Carr:
No, but that would be a good way to finish. In the very late ’90s Paul Kotapish, Maureen Brennan and Danny Carnahan, Irish musicians and Deadheads all, had begun playing little Grateful Dead riffs in Irish sessions. When Danny got the idea to really work on this as a recording project, he enlisted Paul and Maureen, and then the wonderful singer, Sylvia Herold on guitar, Cindy Brown, a bassist’s bassist, and Joe Craven on percussion. They needed a fiddler and a piper, so, though I was not a Deadhead, they asked me, because I was a twofer. We made the album ‘Wake the Dead’ at Muscle Tone studio in Berkeley, and it came out pretty good – Dead songs reimagined with Irish tunes and instrumentation – so they shopped it to Arista records, the Grateful Dead’s own company. And miracle of miracles the Dead released it on their label, which meant it sold a lot, so we had to become a real band. Joe Craven had way too much on his plate, so he was quickly replaced by Brian Rice, a master percussionist with a Brazilian bent. And we started doing a very interesting collection of gigs, including an annual Day of the Dead gig at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley, which has become a yearly sold out extravaganza, complete with full Galician Gaita band and a 25 foot tall skeleton dancer. This last year was number 25 for us. It really is like nothing I’ve ever done before. Once, when we opened for one of the real Grateful Dead guys’ bands at the Fillmore, I looked out over the sea of stoned whirly dancers and really wondered how in the world I, a dyed in the wool folkie, got there. But it’s been great fun, and though the band members each have lots of other music projects they have to juggle, we really care about each other and love playing together. We’ve released three recordings, with a fourth due out this year.

Wake the Dead videos:

Daniel Steinberg:

What has music been like since you moved to Southern Oregon?

Kevin Carr:

I’ve  had some great experiences since moving to Southern Oregon with musicians I’ve met here.  I got to play with the Rogue World Music Ensemble for several seasons. They did music from around the world, as the name implied, and for me it was like music fantasy camp, as I was called on to play lots of instruments in lots of styles with dear friends like Stephen Gagne and Olof Soderback.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/184RX9RGYb/

And then Maureen Brennan and I did several seasons of Celtic Holiday shows with the Men of Worth, a very successful duo consisting of Irishman James Keigher, who is a great friend and neighbor here in Southern Oregon, and Scotsman Donnie MacDonald. That was great fun, till the crash of 2008 put a kibosh on regional theaters, and the big gigs dried up. We recorded a sweet holiday album called “Winter Carol“, which is sadly out of print.

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k3fX51tkbT50loIk8YbLD_WngJXuH2ANs

Josie created the album cover for that, and a few years ago we all remembered that her compensation was to have been a spot on one of James and Donnie’s musical tours in Ireland.  So we went a few years ago and had a complete ball playing with the locals on the Irish coast and visiting old friends. It kind of felt like completing a circle, because we also visited Rick Epping, who I had met when he was with Pumpkinhead, on my first fateful visit to Ireland. And then we had a big  time with Patrick Ball, who has relocated to Clare.

Altogether Southern Oregon has been a rich musical experience for Josie and me, with lots of opportunities to perform both formally ( festivals like the Yachats Celtic festival ) and informally in an ever increasing number of local music sessions. Plus all the great dances and dance weekends in various Oregon communities.

Daniel Steinberg:
How are you doing these days?

Kevin Carr:
As you know, in recent years I have had some ongoing health issues that have severely limited my mobility and stamina. I’ve had to limit my playing out, and I am not sure how much I’ll be able to continue with Wake the Dead. But since I’ve been ill, I’ve still managed to make the Freight shows the last two years. Wake the Dead continues to gig with an able replacement in fiddler and vocalist Valerie Rose. And who knows about the future. I am getting healthier, for which I am extremely grateful, though the pace of recovery often seems excruciatingly glacial. I continue to play at local sessions and small nearby gigs with friends; sometimes with Josie and Daniel and Steve Shapiro. And I was recently able to do a solo storytelling and music show for the Gold Beach Library.  As I read over and help edit this interview, I am amazed by how lucky I’ve been with the people I’ve met, in all aspects of my life. I’ve gotten to play at literally hundreds of dance and music camps and festivals in 39 states, four Canadian provinces, Cuba and Mexico, six European countries and the Soviet Union. I’ve played with scores of wonderful musicians, and been exposed to rich cultures, and been warmly embraced by folks I’ve met everywhere in my travels. What a life. I am very grateful.

A Discography of Recordings of Kevin Carr, and Bands he’s been a member of:

The Hillbillies from Mars 1993
Wake the Dead
The Big Music – Stories
The King of the Pipers – Stories

The Tetes de Violon / The Fiddleheads:
Airs Tordus/ Crooked Tunes
WakeDeux Rives/ Two Shores
Ospa – Hori Da – Basque Music From Buffalo Wyoming

Orujo – Some Roots Go Crooked – Galician music: Cantigas, Muineiras and Xotas, Quebecois reels, waltzes and complaintes, played on Nyckleharpa by Morgan O’Shaughnessey, and fiddle, viola, accordion and Gaita by Kevin Carr

Family Carr – music from Ireland, Appalachia, Cape Breton, Galicia, Quebec and France played by Kevin, Daniel and Molly Carr, and Josie Mendelsohn, on gaita, fiddle, accordion, guitar, piano and mandolin.