(photo: Matt Meehan)
At the beginning of July I returned to France from the Grand Canyon with two handfuls of rowing calluses, useless in any other compartment of my life, and none on my fingertips--which is exactly where I needed them for the new Suttner concertina that was awaiting me in Chasteuil. I hadn’t touched a concertina in nearly a month, the Grand Canyon in high summer and the West in general being dangerously dry places for centenarian wooden instruments like the Jeffries concertina I’ve been playing all along. I nearly wrecked my Jeffries, in fact, by living with it in Utah for 9 months right after I first bought it in 1999. The poor box was built in England in the 1890s and presumably spent the next century there and in Ireland before falling into my fortunate hands, and its wooden insides were warping so badly, by the time I got it and myself out of the desert, that I had to send it off to Jürgen Suttner in Germany for a full restoration, which took a year and a half. Since then I’ve always lived in places damp enough to put a curl in your hair and keep a concertina happy. But around four years ago I put in an order for one of Suttner’s highly regarded new instruments, and have been waiting for it with increasing urgency. The Jeffries, as beautiful and rich an instrument as it is, has been breaking down more and more often as the moving brass parts inside it inevitably wear out. It’s like some victorian progenitor of a typewriter inside, but more fragile, and the more I’ve learned--by sheer necessity--about its workings the greater the awe I feel that such a demoralizing farrago of spindly brass levers, nubby reeds and bits of leather valve could ever draw breath and make precise music at all.
In the past year the Jeffries has broken down several times, leaving me high and dry while I’ve waited for parts to arrive from my kind friend Mícheál in Ireland. Last June a reed cracked and I had to send him the entire reed-pan so he could use it to fit a replacement from his collection of salvaged reeds.
But most often when something goes wrong it’s a broken lever, which I’ve gotten reasonably handy at fixing by myself, once I have a spare lever to cut to size and bend to fit--can you see the shiny new one in the photo below?
I broke another lever in the Jeffries halfway through a five-day run of sessions in Manhattan in early June, on my way to the Grand Canyon, and had to scramble out to Brooklyn to bum a Dipper concertina off the gracious Anna Colliton, just in time to be able to play an immoderately pleasurable session at the Brass Monkey.
(photo: Zina Bennion)
So I was good and ready for the new Suttner concertina when I started breaking it in--and myself too--at the beginning of July. It’s not quite as sheerly sweet-sounding as the Jeffries (that inimitable tone is the reason the rachitic old instruments are still so sought-after) but it is a much more consistent and responsive instrument, efficient and smooth, and it’s a tremendous relief to be playing a concertina that doesn’t feel like it’s going to fall apart if I play it hard, and then I’m two weeks with nothing to play while parts are posted over land and sea. I do miss the bellows-breath of the Jeffries, the waft of which always carried the allure of long-unopened leather-backed books in some fusty, chain-smoking great-uncle’s private library. The new concertina gives off an innocuous smell, part Elmer’s school glue and part new shoes. Don’t be alarmed, gentle reader, by the unsightly purple wadding--the right handstrap was nagging my knuckles and so I trimmed the leather and padded it out with vet-wrap, which is meant for horses’ forelegs but is uncommonly useful on human legs, oar-grips and what-have-you.
The layout of the 32-key Suttner is a bit different than my 30-key Jeffries, in ways which I approve in terms of overall ergonomics and efficiency, but I’ve had to do some rechanneling of my brain and refiguring of the fingering system I use. This and the general stiffness of the new bellows meant I had my work cut out for me in the scant two weeks before I hit the road for Tocane, the best and longest-running Irish trad festival in France, and it’s only now, over a month since I first pulled the Suttner out of its box, that I’m beginning to feel really at one with it.
* * *
--Madame Bovary remarqua que plusieurs dames n’avaient pas mis leurs gants dans leur verre.--
As anyone with much experience of week-long Irish music festivals can tell you, there’s a certain listless stretch of the day-- commonly referred to as morning despite the fact that it is seldom in fact in the ante meridiem--when the drive to play tunes is suppressed; whether by cumulative fatigue and the lingering ill effects of Last Night’s Fun, or by the fact that the right combination of people haven’t yet collected in a place conducive to a tune. At some festivals one simply spends these nugatory hours wallowing in hoggish slumber, and wakes up roaring for the craic right around dinner-time. But if it’s Tocane and one is living in a tent in a sort of voluntary internment-camp on a football field with a couple of hundred other people, and particularly if the tent city is home to even a few voluble children and one’s very closest neighbors--and dear friends--are three banjo players who never seem to suffer from suppressed tunes-drive no matter the time of day or the weather, one should forget about the long lie-in.
Normally the village of Tocane St-Apres, whose deep drowsy meadows are verge to a particularly languid stretch of the Dronne, offers a range of salubrious daylight activities to counter the musical deleteries of the night. But if it pisses rain all week long like a vache espagnole and generally acts more like late September than early July, one had better have brought a good book. I brought Madame Bovary, along with the French dictionary I must consult on average three times per sentence to get anywhere with Flaubert. A good third of the words I look up turn out to be kinds of carriages, and another third are architectural terms whose English equivalents I’d look up if there were a good English dictionary on hand. The sentence above was one of those rare instances where I could leave the dictionary aside: “Madame Bovary remarked that several of the women had not put their gloves in their glasses.” Simple enough but oblique all the same, standing as a discrete paragraph on the page. The footnote (Gallimard folio classique edition 2001, with notes by Thierry Laget) to this line is nearly a page in length, and explains that a woman at a high-society dinner party was expected to put her gloves in her glass to prevent anyone serving her wine--that is, to attest to her sobriety. “...la femme qui mange et qui boit se dépoétise,” the editor draws from Alexandre Dumas, La femme au collier de velours (1849). "The woman who eats and drinks ‘depoeticizes’ herself." Dumas continues (in my awkward translation): “If a young and pretty woman puts herself at the table, it is to preside over the meal: if she has a glass in front of her, it is to be lined with her gloves;... if she has a plate, it is for her to pluck, near the end of the repast, at a grape, whence the immaterial creature might consent to suck the most golden seeds, like a bee at a flower.” I was just having a good snort over this notion of woman as l’immatérielle créature, and was contemplating a depoeticizing switch from coffee to a demi of the excellent local blonde on tap at Tocane’s Bistrot Rouge, when along came the Kane sisters and Edel Fox, who’d just eaten lunch at the bar next door. It’s hard to think of three ladies who’d be less likely, if confronted with a glass, to think it was for stuffing their gloves into; nor would any of them hesitate to suggest a more appropriate place into which said gloves might be stuffed...
Liz and Yvonne Kane are a Connemara fiddle duo whose Fahy-and-Canny-rich repertoire is full of wild but spare turns--there’s never a gratuitous note, as though they’ve been playing together into the wind all their lives--and when they play they grin so ceaselessly you begin to think laughter is an essential part of their respiration. Edel Fox is a formidably gifted young concertina player from County Clare; I first encountered her ten years ago in Miltown Malbay during the big July festival there. I was walking past an unmarked house when I was stopped by marvelous concertina music coming out from the door: a teenage girl in big bangs and puffy high-top sneakers was playing with an old ganzy-clad man in the kitchen. Edel and the Kanes frequently tour and record together these days, and they all started teaching workshops at the Catskills Irish Arts Week in East Durham, New York around the same time I begin going to that festival. Over a period of four years we had not a few nuits blanches and lock-ins together in Furlong’s pub, of which the lasting impression is of lots of black hair flying and long dresses whirling when the girls set down their instruments and started dancing, amidst beams of morning light that made bottles of Heineken glow like dozens of emerald columns. This was the first July in many years that Liz, Yvonne and Edel weren’t in the Catskills, which overlaps by a weekend with Tocane (as Hubert, Nico, Steph and I arrived and started setting up tents we were receiving texts on Hub’s phone from the Claw, a fiddle player who visited here last year and was just rolling into East Durham for the final sessionspree). It was consoling to have a little Furlong’s Family Reunion in the Frogskills with the Kanes and Edel. There are many ways to skin a cat, of course, but the obvious way to kill collective homesickness is to drown it.
There are three bars in Tocane, strung out along the main place opposite the church. There were moments during the week when it stopped raining for long enough to keep a cigarette lit and a session going outside under the linden trees.
But for the most part we played inside, and at night there was always a session going in each of the bars,
with all the attendant boozing and occasional fits of dancing.
Whether by design or sheer expediency, the three bars took turns staying open latest through the week, but never quite until dawn’s early light. The dedicated dewdroppers always ended up outside at the end, whether in the narrow margins under the awnings or under the big blue tent next to the church. Jean-Luc, the proprietor of the bar opposite the church, had an ingenious way of getting everyone out of his bar when it was past four and he’d had enough: he’d ask everyone nicely to leave, then carry two enormous trays of plastic cups of beer onto the tables outside, where his clients all hastened like flies to a honey-bucket, and Jean-Luc could bolt the door and clean up in peace. A session might very well start up,
and at a certain point just before dawn a sweet Breton lad named Antoine would take a collection and run to the boulangerie around the corner for bags of hot croissants. There’d be bands of local teenagers scavenging the drinks too, and one night Paul, the Kiwi owner of the Bistrot Rouge, closed up early and came down to drink with us and try his hand at a bit of the diddly-diddly he was being subjected to all week,
with lessons in embouchure from an English flute and pipes player called Pete.
Pete and his Swiss flute-maker friend Tom and I were the last ones out on the town that particular night--somebody had to finish all the beers Jean-Luc had put out, and the last of the local youths were gone, having slouched off to the campsite in the wake of two young Irish girls after repeated failures to actually be invited to go back with them--a drama to which we’d given our attention at first out of concern for the girls, and then to take pleasure in their stream of pure insolence as they expertly played the boys. It got light, but this didn’t really register with me until I saw that there were wasps arriving to drink the spilled beer on the ground all around us. Wasps are decidedly un-nocturnal creatures; it wasn’t even dawn anymore but full-on day, and I pronounced that it was time to go back to the tents. I mentioned this later in the day to some French friends who’d gone to bed while it was still night, and that evening one of them asked me, “Tu vas attendre les guêpes ce soir?” Will you be waiting for the wasps tonight? And for the rest of the week that was how one expressed the notion of an all-nighter: en attendant des guêpes...
* * *
On the Monday, when we’d been in Tocane for a day and a half that already seemed like at least three, Hub and I had lunch outside the Bistrot Rouge with his godmother, who lives nearby. At the next table was Jacob Fournel, an outstanding French whistle player with whom we’d discovered considerable musical complicity in a big session the day before. We all had our instruments with us at lunch and were keen for a tune together, and by the time we’d finished the meal with coffee it was mid-afternoon and we were wide awake. I’d made a paper crane from my chocolate wrapper (a habit I picked up when I travelled in Japan as a kid; as compulsions go it’s more constructive than shredding my napkin or dog-earing a beer coaster to bits) and I went looking inside the bar for the publican Paul, with whom I’d chatted on a few memorable nights in his bar during last year’s festival. “Here, I made you a bird--and would you mind terribly if we sat down in here and played a few tunes?” Permission was granted, and the golden crane sat on the bar for the rest of the week, like a little luck-totem overseeing the sessions we had au Rouge every afternoon from Monday on, whenever Paul was finished with lunch service and gave us the go-ahead.
Securing the Rouge as our afternoon session-spot was providential not only for the consistent foulness of the weather but because it’s the smallest of the three bars in Tocane, and the only place in town where the size of the session was naturally limited. On subsequent afternoons Hub and Jacob and I were joined by Denis Kersual on pipes and flute and Hervé Cantal on flute and whistle--two very fine musicians toward whom I was predisposed to feel fondly because I’d heard about them from my good friend and mentor Patrick Ourceau, who looked to them for guidance when he was starting to play Irish music as a teenager in Paris.
(photo: Julia Kersual)
Denis--who stands a wild-maned head taller than anybody in the room and is a commanding presence even when seated and strapped into the pipes, regulators blaring full-throttle--proved to be a good ally in the big nighttime session-melées. One night in the uppermost bar on the street Hub, Jacob, Denis and I sat down with Sam (concertina) and Sophie (fiddle) for a tune and the session rapidly metastasized to 50 musicians, of which a good third were playing guitars and bodhrans. When a cluster of five banjo players were gang-banging a reel he’d started at a perfectly reasonable speed, Denis roared “Moins vite!” across the room at them, mid-tune and to immediate effect, becoming at that moment a veritable champion to Hub and I, with our oft-frustrated penchant for what we like to call Old Man Music. Sessions that big are never really worth it; if you get up to buy a round or use the toilet you might not have the will to fight your way back to your seat, through all those banjos and fiddles stringing sets of 19 reels together, each of them determined to have the last word. With the new Suttner concertina I could actually hear myself above all the din, but I found I was just going through the motions, already thinking instead about the tunes we’d play the next afternoon in our calm little snug at the Rouge.
(photo: Julia Kersual)
Hub, Nico and Steph all had to leave on the Thursday morning, but I was able to arrange to stay until Saturday. The football field began to empty out and soon my tent stood alone out in the open. Classes had finished on Wednesday afternoon, and as Thursday night stretched toward Friday morning I said goodbye to the gang of profs from Ireland. The Friday afternoon session at the Rouge was only Hervé, Denis and myself, playing the sort of very relaxed Old Man Music that was pretty much all we were able for, at the week’s end. That evening Denis and I played our last session of the week in l’arrêt d’autobus, a little cement structure near the tents that was probably meant to shelter a few juvenile footballers but was just big enough for two musicians (if one of them has a full set of regulators), and looked for all the world like a little bus stop with no road passing by it. We kept playing ‘one more for the ditch,’ for we were already in transit, staving off the inevitabilities: the last noisy hasping of case-lids as we put the instruments away, the final tray of beers to evict us all from Jean-Luc’s later on, when we joined the others in town, and then the folding of tents in the morning and the rolling away out of Tocane for points diverse around France.
* * *
I got a lift eastward the next day with Matt and Laurence Meehan and their three-year-old daughter Saoirse. Matt plays the fiddle and Laurence the concertina; they live less than an hour from me and Laurence comes to me for concertina lessons. We were towing their ancient caravan (which had lost its door on the way over to Tocane, but Matt had enlisted the help of a luthier and skipped fiddle class one day during the week to reattach it) and we had plenty to talk about and new cds to listen to, so it didn’t matter that we couldn’t cruise very fast and lost a lot of time going the wrong direction out of Tocane in the first place. We stopped to picnic at a small aire (rest-stop) near the town of Monbazillac, and since there were no toilets we each made little excursions out into the rows of vines after lunch. I’d just come back to the car when a man came up to us and said that he was the owner of the land; I thought he was going to yell at us for taking a leak in his grapes, but instead he wanted to sell us black-market wine from the boot of his car. He opened a dusty, unlabeled bottle for us to taste his Monbazillac (“Only a drop for messieur who has to drive, but the ladies can drink all they like!”) which is a sweet white dessert wine, and since it was quite nice and only 5 euros a bottle we each bought several, noting as we did so the economy of the fact that what he was selling us was the same color as that with which we’d watered his terrain. The vintner, who had a funny squeaky voice, made us a present of the bottle he’d opened for us to taste, so we were all sorted for a nightcap in the caravan when we finally stopped to sleep late that night, in the parking lot of the polo grounds in Grans, where Hub lives.
I’d left Old Red--the ’95 Renault truck that Nancy and Pascal let me use--in Grans, so after coffee and croissants with Hub we took the road again in separate directions, and I got to Chasteuil in the early evening, just in time for a big feast with Nancy and Pascal chez moi, prepared by Chloé, the owners’ daughter, and her boyfriend Clément, who’d been at the house all week while I was away. Handily I had a bottle of Monbazillac sans etiquette to offer after dinner...
* * *
(photo: Lee Bennion)
I only slept in my bed one night before setting off once again in Old Red for a small festival up north in Hautes-Alpes of the Savoie. My friend Sam was teaching the concertina workshop; he and Sophie mentioned it to me when we were hanging out on the last day at Tocane, and with all the week’s tunes still turning round and round in my head I couldn’t stay home, knowing there was the chance for a good session within driving distance, even though I could only go up for two nights of the weeklong festival. I chose the smallest roads possible all the way up, the roads that are white on the map and are often scarcely wider than the car. My French friends slag me that it takes me forever to get anywhere when I drive, but they forget that the first time I saw any of their country I was on foot, with a backpack and a tent, and that’s still my default pace--as far as I'm concerned, the autoroute is about as interesting as playing a set of 15 reels in a session with several dozen musicians that all think they’re in the Bothy Band. By the route I chose, the drive was about seven hours. I broke this up with a night at the Ducke’s house near Gap and a few tunes in the morning with Steve, and then continued northward through increasingly high valleys and passes.
I arrived at the end of the afternoon in the ski village of Albiez-Montrond, which was hosting the 2nd annual Celti-Cimes festival (a cime is a summit or a peak).
There were enough people walking around with fiddle-cases to assure me that I was in the right place (I’d come over the backside of the mountain and had first looked for any sign of Irish music in the hamlets of Montrond and Albiez-le-Vieux), and before long I found Sam and Sophie, who I’d last seen only three days before in the Dordogne. The difference was that here they were en vacances in earnest, though Sam was teaching; they’d left their 7-month-old baby with granny and grandpa for the first time and were champing at the bit for a night of tunes and a graisse matinée to follow it. It was a good thing this festival was so much smaller than Tocane, for the weather was even worse and there were only two bars to hole up in at night. It was pure pleasure to be in a session the first night with Gerry (fiddle) O’Connor and Gilles le Bigot on guitar. Gerry’s a good leader in a big chaotic session full of débutants, striking up plenty of lively standards punctuated here and there by the odd gem of an unusual fiddle tune; and more essentially imparting a notion, so often missing in any country like France where Irish music has been transplanted out of its natural habitat of pubs and kitchens, of the social nature of the music, and the importance of the breathing-spaces between notes and tunes. When one nervous fiddle player near him commenced to strangle the fifth reel of a set that he was playing much faster than he was able, Gerry restrained him with a touch at the elbow--“Take a break, man, relax! Have a drink...”
The next day Gerry and Gilles left for Bretagne and were replaced as profs by Gerry’s craic-happy son Donal and the other members of the band At First Light.
(photo: Vincent Barboni)
Both bars in town were thronged with locals who were enthusiastic about the music, or perhaps just for the occasion to spend a few rotten wet nights inside the bar, drinking the local dark beer Piste Noire (its a slippery slope!)
and feeding on the baskets of bugnes the woman of the house sent around in the middle of the night at the Bar Constantin. At first glance these savoyard snacks might look like battered ortolans but they are nothing so exotic. They’re battered nothing, fried dough with a bit of powdered sugar sprinkled on top.
I’d planned to sleep in the back of Old Red, but in weather so miserable I was very grateful when the organizers of the festival, who I met in the first night’s session, offered to put me up in the gîte with the profs. There was snow not far above us the next day, when the clouds lifted enough to glimpse the knees of the Aiguilles d’Arves, which peaks I suppose I’ll have to go back to Albiez sometime to see properly, but in the meantime I bought a postcard that looked like it had been sitting on the rack at the Bar Constantin for a good few seasons.
The idea of snow at such proximity was a good pretext to indulge in a fondue on the second evening, between an afternoon of tunes with Sam and Sophie in the Constantin and the night’s crowded session under the same roof. This was comfort food at its most elemental and dépoétisé, just bread chunks dredged in rich goo, like an inside-out toasted cheese sandwich--the cheese, however, being a mixture of Comté and local Beaufort simmered in white wine, and washed down with more of the same (I’m told that if you drink anything but white wine with a fondue it becomes an undigestible knot in your gut).
Just as in Tocane the week before, it was this long afternoon session more than anything else that was worth all the effort of getting there. I met Sam and Sophie in Tocane last year and saw them in a big session in Paris in April with the Ourceaus; this year in Tocane they were fairly preoccupied with la petite Agathe (who already makes agitated concertina motions with her hands whenever she hears music). So this was my first chance to have a nice quiet session with them, to really swap tunes and savor what we have in common.
We were in out of the rain, in a beautiful old wood-lined bar where we could play for as many hours as we liked, making our way through the customary afternoon-session progression of coffees and Perrier before hitting the Piste Noire; all the while remembering and reminding each other of tunes we hadn’t played in a week, or maybe a year, recording each other’s unusual tunes for learning later--for these are the moments of intense cross-pollination that feed us for months afterward, in this land where there’s no Irish music but that you go many’s the mile for it.
