Baragwin

Here’s yet another treasure of musical tradition from the Francophone provinces of eastern Canada, which have in common historical connections to an immigration from western France, including the culturally Celtic region of Brittany, beginning in the 18th century.

The Baragwin ensemble — their name combines the Breton words for ‘bread’ and ‘wine’ — was founded in 2016 to celebrate the musical stylings of their native Bellechasse, a region of around 3,000 square kilometres south-east of Québec City. The group’s guitarist, Olivier Leclerc, has served as director of Bellechasse’s House of Culture. For a couple of tracks on Baragwin’s debut album, Mike Labonté, who plays fiddle, mandolin, and harmonica, has set to music lyrics that he discovered in a ‘family book’ maintained by his grandmother, in an antique French dialect. Frédéric Drouin, the third member of the group, channels the Celtic influence upon the region via the Irish bodhrán, as well as with podorhythmie, Québec’s seated variation on Irish step dance, sounding out jigs and reels. Other songs here, many vocalised in solo-and-response form by all three men, tell the tales of love and war, percolated by vocables. The spirit of this disc is lively and ingenuous, without need of the occasional detours towards instrumental or compositional showiness.