Discovery.

Ever since I’ve started music, I don’t think I’ve gone through one week without discovering something new about it.

I’ll talk about a couple of those revelation that describe pretty well the kind of mental earthquake I can sometimes go through.

I came to the New World in 1987. I landed in Boston to attend Berklee College of Music. I don’t know what I was expecting but I got my first big slap in the face when I met my roommate at the dormitory. He was 19 years old and a saxophonist. On the wall of his room were posters of the Blues Devils or The Cavaliers. There, as big as life, were trumpet players with fancy outfit or snare drummers in a triangle formation marching on a football field. I can tell you this much: we don’t have that in France.

The odd part about that culture was that, at the time, they didn’t have any recordings available commercially. I don’t know if they do now, but my roommate assured me that the only way to hear that music besides being in the presence of the marching band was through a bootleg. He then produced a tape (remember those days?) and put it in his boombox. He pressed the button… And I was lost. It resembled music, but with a brass band turned up to eleven. It was daring and wild. The sounds were arranged, but I didn’t have the gears in my head to decode them. It gave the impression of a wave snaking through the instruments, the dynamics, the texture. It was ferocious and awesome.

The second slap in the face that very year was when Spring break came and I went to Montreal. I had a few friends there and some of them were musicians playing in bands. Their instruments were the traditional Rock n’ Roll ones: Electric Guitar, Bass, Drum, Keyboard, Voice. What was not the same at all was the sounds coming out their instruments and the way they melted together. Now I have the difficult task to try to describe that music. First off, it wasn’t rock. Or Jazz. Or anything else. I am struggling to give you an accurate depiction here. It was, if you will, similar to contemporary classical music when it seems that a symphonic orchestra ejects sounds in a random fashion. The musicians I saw in Quebec hadn’t gone to music school. The technique that the drummer was using had been made up as she went along. She was extremely daring. She could play with her bare hands or scrape a cymbal with the tip of her sticks. She treated the drum set like a percussion orchestra and stopped at nothing to extract sounds out of it. She was good, really good, but in a way I’d never heard before. There is a band right now that’s playing this kind of music. They’re also from Quebec, they have very weird costumes and they are getting hotter by the day as they stun the world with their music. They’re called “Angine de poitrine”. They play like those musician I saw in Montreal 34 years ago. That art form is called “Musique Actuelle”.

I spent some time telling you those two stories because they were the highlights of my first year in America. But I need to remind you that during that year I was also in a music school discovering new things big and small every day about my instrument. Today, I still discover new things, the magic is still there. Some are small, some are big, some are the magnitude of an earthquake. Right now, for example, I am going through a big earthquake: I started to compose. The quest keeps on keeping on.