Cold comfort

Quebec's winter carnival brings festive cheer to a searingly chilly city. This year it included an Irish contingent, reports Siobhán Long

It's 15 below zero, yet nobody seems to notice. But then if you've weathered the mercury plummeting to 50 below - and the gateway website to your province's music is christened Thirty Below - chances are that a mere 15 degrees below zero is hard evidence of spring's impending arrival.

Quebec, the only fortified city in North America, whose old town is a Unesco World Heritage Site and which hosts a huge annual winter carnival, is in holiday mode. She wraps her sapling trees in hessian to protect them from the searing wind and insists that under-fours be transported across the city in sleighs, wrapped in the kind of swaddling we thought we'd only see in biblical epics. And the city uses the carnival as an excuse to hang on to her Christmas decorations until mid-February.

In the best pagan tradition of banishing the darkness, Quebec doesn't so much light a candle as ignite thousands of them. It's the biggest winter carnival anywhere, and while we might be forgiven for assuming that carnival and winter go together like Rio and woolly vests or New Orleans and virtue, somehow it all fits. And the 100,000 visitors who come along to celebrate are proof enough that you too can have fun, even if you are wrapped in long johns, thermals, snow boots and ski suits, with an occasional blue appearing around the lips.

For most of us, our exposure to the music of French Canada is limited to occasional turns around the concert hall with Les Bottines Souriantes or Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The primacy of the accordion and the delight in linguistic sleight of hand might have tickled our consciousness, but the chance to dip our toes any deeper in the pool was rarely there, as so few musicians had their music aired on radio and even fewer managed to haul their instruments across the Atlantic.

Although most might make the connection between Acadian music from Nova Scotia and Cajun, its bequest to the southern state of Louisiana, Quebec has been particularly slow to promote its musical identity beyond the boundaries of French Canada.

Desi Wilkinson - Belfast flute player, member of Cran and holder of a PhD in music and identity in Brittany - isn't quite as nonplussed as the natives by all this furore. Invited to bring an Irish delegation to the carnival, to celebrate this year's Irish Day, he's assembled a troupe of four dancers, one of whom is a mean bodhrán player too, and a formidable box player. Long a fan of Quebec music, Wilkinson was drawn to French Canada by more than his fluency in French.

"I've always listened to Quebec music," he says, "and I was over here last year at a festival called Festival Mémoire & Racines, a traditional-music festival which happens in a place called Joliette, outside Montreal. All the original Bottines Souriantes came from there, so it's a bit like Clare on the west coast of Ireland in terms of its traditional music."

Wilkinson says the invitation gave him the ideal opportunity to showcase the best of the music of Limerick, where he is based and where he wrote his doctorate, in the mid-1990s. Fed up with reading only about the city's downside, the delegation was determined to let the music and dance speak for themselves.

This was no ragtag collection of strays eager to step on a plane out of home. Wilkinson's newly christened Planxty O'Rourke featured two dancers long schooled in Riverdance and Lord Of The Dance. Led by the fluently French-speaking Mairéad Ní Bhriain, with the dancer and bodhrán player Darragh Keily, the box player Evan Liddy and the dancers Laura Mulqueen and Renée Hayes, this quintet embraced the challenge with the ease of well-schooled professionals. (Alongside the musicians, a trio from the University of Limerick - Sarah O'Flaherty, Dave Lilburn and Mike Byrne - lent their artistic imaginations to a snow-sculpture competition running in parallel with the carnival's music programme.)

"Our main idea was to have a good visual impact, with fast movement," says Wilkinson. "And with that we were able to charm the boots of assorted bureaucrats!" As well as sharing tunes across the traditions, such as The Traveller, or Le Voyageur, which Wilkinson lilts in turn to illustrate the staccato rhythmic differences between the Irish and Quebecois versions, he suggests it was the kinship he felt for the music that drew him to French Canada.

"I got immersed in the francophone world when I was studying the music of Brittany, but I really see Quebecois music as a halfway house between France and Ireland in that francophone world. The music is so evidently a cousin of Irish music, with a slightly different rhythmic emphasis - almost with Irish music pushed slightly to the side!"

The fiddle and box are the cornerstones of Quebec music, with virtually no flute tradition at all. This anomaly didn't leave Wilkinson out in the cold at local sessions, one of which we were lucky enough to happen upon in the terrazzo-floored Le Patriote, in a quiet little street in Quebec, long after most of the locals had left for home. With almost a dozen Quebecois and two Danish musicians in his midst, including the guitarist Paul Marchand, the fiddlers Daniel Lemieux and Eric Favreau and the box player Stephane Laudry, Wilkinson had little difficulty revelling in the Quebecois tunes, relishing in particular the chansons à répondre, or call-and-respond songs, so beloved of the local tradition.

"Irish music is still seen largely as an anglophone pursuit here," he says, "but the underbelly of the music cuts across the anglophone and francophone barriers. I've heard that whenever Quebecois musicians go to Celtic music festivals across Canada, and if there's a Celtic music love-in at the end of it, it's usually the Bretons and the Irish who are invited on. The Quebecois aren't yet perceived as belonging to that Celtic world. In this very fluid and very hard-to-pin-down world of so-called Celtic music you could come to the music from anywhere.

"I think the artistic mix of Irish traditional music and French Quebecois music which the original inhabitants would have had was very much a history of people who had nothing, working in hard jobs, and having a bit of crack and exchanging a few tunes at the end of the day. And then as now, there are no great agendas, no grand plan, no manufactured fusions. If you leave things alone anywhere this is what will happen. People of like minds will get together, whether they play different musics or not."

[ www.carnaval.qc.ca ]