Québécois
Montréal, Québec
Photo: Dylan Ladds
Québécois trio Genticorum (pronounced ZHAWN-tee-kore-UHM) has brought traditional French-Canadian music to audiences at home and abroad for over 20 years, driven by a love of the old songs and an encyclopedic knowledge of the dance tunes of Québec. With just three musicians—fiddler Pascal Gemme, guitarist Yann Falquet, and accordionist and flute player Nicholas Williams—Genticorum creates a full-band sound through intricate song arrangements, ferocious playing, and the propulsive rhythm of Québécois podorythmie. This seated form of foot percussion is the driving force behind nearly all Québécois music, the “tac tic-a-tac” of the feet pushing the music to greater heights.
Music and dance have been central to life in French Canada since the first colonists arrived in the 1600s, with a distinct musical style that developed around the kitchen hearths and at the community dances of Québec. French songs and stories were passed from generation to generation, slowly incorporating musical influences from nearby communities—First Nations, Irish, Scottish, English, and American—to create a uniquely Québécois music and culture. The instrumental music of Québec happily absorbs new ideas, easily influenced by the latest dance crazes, whether polkas in the mid-1800s or country music in the mid-1900s. In a hallmark of the tradition, Québécois musicians often rephrased their borrowed tunes into delightful tounes croches (crooked tunes), with different, varied meters of rhythm. Tunes were taught or learned at les veillées (evening gatherings), house parties that brought together communities for dancing. Today, Genticorum plays across Québec, and particularly in New England, to rural and urban dance halls with happy dancers looking for energetic traditional music.
Fiddler Pascal Gemme grew up spending time at his grandfather André Billette’s house, where they “would play music twice a day, after lunch, and in the evening, and the fiddle was always out,” he says. The trio, however, has also expanded the repertoire with the structure and power of their arrangements. For guitarist Yann Falquet, that inspiration first came from Québécois guitarist André Marchand of the groundbreaking ensemble La Bottine Souriante. “He had these epic ideas of chord progression that would create tension in the piece,” Yann says. “He had this view that was wider.” Nicholas contributes to this more expansive approach through his background in the New England contra dance scene. Together Genticorum draws out this wider view, buttressing the songs they’ve collected with Nicholas’s accordion weaving around Yann’s guitar, and Pascal’s fiddle lifting them up. Blending three very different voices into one musical vision ties into the group’s original name and concept as well. “Genticorum” is a nonsense word from a favorite traditional song of Pascal’s grandfather. “Outside the song,” Pascal says, “I like the idea of the ‘quorum’ playing music, that idea of being one unified sound. We’ve been playing music together for 23 years, so I think it was a gentil quorum [nice quorum]!”
Though each member of Genticorum is a wonderful singer and instrumentalist, the real magic here is in the collective sound of this trio of longtime friends, as their vigorous music and onstage charm have made them among the most sought-after champions of Québécois music.
Genticorum’s performances at the Richmond Folk Festival are made possible in part with support from the Québec Government Office in New York.