Joane Hétu’s Diverse Musical Missions

Joane Hétu packs an amazing amount of energy into her short, small frame — energy she willingly shares through her smile, passion, music, and determination. It keeps her busy as a saxophonist, vocalist, improviser, songwriter, composer, record-label owner, co-director of a concert production company, and mother of one. Equally performer and business-woman, her work in both roles bas been enriching the Montréal new-music scene for the past twenty-five years. As a member of Wondeur Brass, Justine, Castor et compagnie, and Nous perçons les oreilles, as part of the Ambiances Magnétiques collective, as head of the distribution company and record label DAME, and as co-director of Productions SuperMusique, Hétu has an impressive track record and now — after a difficult period of neglecting her own music in order to keep DAME afloat — she is more active than ever.

S’improviser

Born in 1958 in Montréal, Joane Hétu took a few piano lessons as a child but did not get seriously involved in music until the age of twenty. Coming late to her vocation? “No way!” she asserts.“Being twenty doesn’t make anything ‘late’! I started playing music when I reached adulthood, and a certain level of maturity.”

She may not have been playing an instrument seriously in her teens, but she was already developing strong individual tastes in music. “In my circle of friends, I was the only girl who had a decent stereo system. At fourteen, I heard John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at a friend’s house. I immediately thought “Yes, I’ve found what I’ve been looking for.” I soon started visiting small record shops and listening to Frank Zappa and the Scandinavian jazz on the ECM label.”

While studying pure sciences in college, Hétu met and fell in love with the pianist Pierre St-Jak. “My whole life turned upside down. Pierre shared my tastes in music and he introduced me to a circle of musicians.” A member of the avant-garde jazz group Nébu, which included saxophonist Jean Derome, St-Jak played with the people whose activities revolved around Conventum, L’Enfant-Fort and La Pouet Pouet Band, all cooperative groups sharing views on musical experimentation and coflectivist, communal values. “It was the late ’70s,” says Hétu. “The Parti Québécois was in power, the first referendum had yet to shatter dreams; it was a time when you could accomplish something without knowing how to do it.”

Soon, Hétu had dropped out of school and moved in with St-Jak. For a while, she earned a living weaving by day and waiting tables by night at La Grande Passe, a bar on the corner of Ontario and St-Deriis that presented improvised nitisic on Tuesday nights. St-Jak and his friends, such as Jean Derome, René Lussier, and Daniel Heïkalo, performed regularly there. At some point, one of those friends left a soprano saxophone at the couple’s apartment. “It was just lying there,” recalls Hétu. “After a few days of looking at it, I picked it up and started playing.” Six months later she gave her first public performance, as a member of Wondeur Brass. In French, to say that someone suddenly becomes something (such as an improviser), the reflexive verb s’improviser is used. In this case, Hétu literally improvised herself

The adventures of Wondeur Brass

In 1980, eleven female musicians, professionals and amateurs alike, came together to organize benefit concerts to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Montréal’s women’s bookstore, Librairie des Femmes. These were important events for Hétu. She met two members of the traditional music group Arcanson, pianist Diane Labrosse and drummer Danielle Palardy Roger. The three women formed a trio and soon founded the company Productions SuperMémé-SuperMusique (later shortened to Productions SuperMusique, or PSM), in order to produce their own shows. The concerts that all eleven musicians gave for the Librairie des Femmes gave rise to an important and influential ensemble. The first concerts, in October and November, 1980, showed more good intentions than good music, but soon a group identity began to jell. The result was Wondeur Brass, the name both a cheeky cross-lingual pun on the brand name of a certain women’s undergarment, and an accurate description of the groups instrumentation: all brass (including a valve bass in the early days), except for the piano and drums. “The schedule was punishing,” Hétu recalls. “We were literally learning to play music together, eight to ten hours a day. I was happy to leave my weaving days behind, but some of the other girls had other plans.” Diane Raymond and Geneviève Letarte soon left the group, the latter to become a fine novelist, only returning to music — this time as a songwriter and singer — a full decade later.

In the spring of 1981,Wondeur Brass presented its first stage show, Anna Thème et Constance Urbaine, complete with costumes, theatrical elements, and original songs. They performed sold-out shows for three weeks at the Clochards Célestes (which would become Montréal’s alternative nexus a few years later, changing its name to Les Foufounes électriques).” It was madness. The crowd was going nuts, the place was packed. I would never know that much popular success afterward,” says Hétu. The mainstream press noted the groups lack of tightness and experience, but praised its energy, its originality, and its feniinist convictions.

But was Wondeur Brass a feminist group? Did it consciously convey a feminist message — or is an all-female group feminist by definition? “For nine girls to take the stage back in 1980,” notes Hétu, “when both rock and jazz music were ruled by men, was a feminist action by itself. But is there a difference between female music and male music? I don’t think so. And I don’t think we were playing women’s music. At first, we were feminists playing music. Later, we said no, we are feminist musicians. Eventually, we realized we had become musicians, period.”

In 1982, Wondeur Brass released its first and only single, Parano. The group was reduced to seven pieces by then, including electric guitarist-bassist Judith Grüber-Stitzer, who added a rocker’s edge to the music. Two years later, the group was invited to the Festival des musiques de femmes in Paris. “Before going there, we were working in isolation, convinced that we were alone. But hearing and meeting women like Joëlle Léandre, Irène Schweitzer and Maggie Nichols was an eye-opening experience. I believe thats when we became more radical, musically.”

In the meantime, a few experimental male musicians were attempting to organize their own collective for performing and recording, Ambiances Magnétiques. Robert Marcel Lepage, René Lussier, Jean Derome and André Duchesne had released a handful of LPs and were beginning to make contacts with like-minded musicians from abroad.

How did they perceive the daring female musicians-entrepreneurs? “They weren’t too keen on us. They didnt see us as really good mtisicians.” However, Duchesne agreed to sit at the mixing board to help the group record their first LP, Ravir.

By then it was 1985. The music had changed, and those who remembered the group from its early stage shows would have a hard time recognizing Wondeur Brass on its new album. The songs had grown tighter, Labrosse’s keyboards now took up more real estate than the brass, the lyrics were more poetic and less political, and the overall sound more subdued and more subtle than the raucous energy of the groups early days. Hétu is mostly heard playing jagged saxophone lines.

The album sold well (over 4,000 copies) and was even picked up by the feminist magazine La Vie en Rose as a gift to new subscribers. Chris Cutler, ex-drummer for Henry Cow and Art Bears, owner of the record label Recommended (now ReR Megacorp), and a highly influential mover on the avant-rock scene at the time, came to Montréal in early 1986. Duchesne presented him with a copy of the LP. “Chris loved it,” says Hétu. “He picked it up for distribution, included a track on a Recommended sampler, and eventually co-produced our second LP, which came out on both Ambiances Magnétiques and Recommended. Chris opened Wondeur Brass and Ambiances Magnétiques to the world. He dragged us out of isolation.”

Cutler’s endorsement was so persuasive that the Ambiances Magnétiques boys revised their position on Wondeur Brass. Hétu, Labrosse, and Roger were invited to join the collective, and Ravir was soon integrated into the label’s catalogue as a reissue. Already experienced businesswomen through their work with PSM, the girls contributed a lot to the organizational aspect of Ambiances Magnétiques, as well as playing on a number of albums and releasing several of their own. In 1986, as Les Poules (The Chicks), Hétu, Labrosse, and Roger released Les contes de l’amère loi. In some ways, Les Poules signaled the end of Wondeur Brass as a semi-professional collective. The group’s 1987 album Simoneda, reine des esclaves bore Wondeur Brass’s name only because the group had not found something good to replace it with. “We wanted to break free from the group’s feminist image, we wanted to start anew.” The lineup actually consisted only of the three members of Les Poules, plus newcomer Marie Trudeau on bass.

Eventually, they opted for Justine, the name of the main character in the first volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and paradoxically, of the defiled titular character of the Marquis de Sade’s novel. Justine’s first album, a CD this time, enigmatically entitled (Suite), came out in 1990 and remains the pinnacle of female rock in Quebec. Angst-driven, complex, and tightly written, this cycle of songs established Hétu as a singer and vocalist. Here she trully explores her wild side, using onomatopoeias and screeches that will draw comparisons to the japanese singer Tenko.

from Justine to Castor

The group would release two more albums, La légende de la pluie (1992), a dark collaboration between Justine, Tenko, and U.S. harpist Zeena Parkins, and Langages fantastiques (1994), a significantly more upbeat and playful album recorded live in the studio following a successful tour of Eastern Europe. By then, the ties between Roger, Labrosse, and Hétu had started to loosen, their careers gradually taking different paths. Roger would become more closely involved in composition and contemporary music, while Labrosse would start to lose interest in the piano and synthesizers in favor of the sampler and, later, the laptop.

Hétu kept writing songs. Picking up where Justine had left off, she formed Castor et compagnie with Labrosse, drummer Pierre Tanguay, and saxophone player Jean Derome, her life partner since the mid-1980s. The groups main interest in sensual songs and its open-mindedness toward improvisation is closely related to Langages fantastiques, to the extent that many saw in its self-titled debut (1995) a new station along the Wondeur Brass/Les Poules/Justine axis. But that is not completely true. With its focus on Hétu’s voice and the deep-running synergy between Hétu and Derome, premiering here on record, Castor et compagnie is Hétu’s first truly personal statement.

Mets ta langue, released three years later in 1998, pushes the gradual transformation initiated in Wondeur Brass to its inevitable end. The song format has all but disintegrated under the pressure of avant-garde-driven deconstruction and free improvisation. What remains is stunningly beautiful, but shares very little resemblance to the avant-rock of the early 1980s. Likewise, Hétu’s vocal art bas reached a new level, extended techniques and atavistic sounds constantly threatening to take over the words (as they actually did on her 2000 solo CD Seule dans les chants).

It was Hétu’s swan song as a rock singer. The album was received very coldly, which prompted her to scuttle the band and withdraw from the rock scene, focusing instead on composition and improvisation. “I didn’t drop songwriting altogether. We are still doing songs with Nous perçons les oreilles [her duo with Derome]. And improvisation has always been a part of my music, just like songwriting will always have a say in my compositions or my improvisations. Its the industry that draws a line. Whether you perform songs or free improv will determine which clubs and festivals you can play. Remaining active on all fronts at all times is hard. In the end, I simply went along with what I was being offered.

“And the difference in financial needs is so important with songwriting. When it comes to recording, everyone is more or less equal in improvisation, while some people are able to invest linge amounts of money in song-based albums. Recording a song requires more studio time, more personnel, and in my line of songwriting, I could rarely afford that.”

Is she interested in coniing back to songwriting? “Yes. I have several notebooks full of lyrics. And I am working some of them into the MercrediMusic workshops we are currently doing in Montréal. I try to see how I can adapt a lyric from one context to another, when the music has no relation to the words. But I will never put together a group like Justine again. I don’t want to play music that is always the same anymore.”

There are two sides to a desk

Hétu claims her studies in sciences are in part responsible for her pragmatic, down-to-earth side. Ever since she started playing music, she bas been taking care of everything herself — management, concert production, accounting — through PSM and Ambiances Magnétiques. By 1990, she was ready to take a big step, one that would drag her slightly away from the stage and into the office. “After 10 years spent in collectives, both on the creative and business sides, I needed a project of my own. In 1990 I had just had a daughter, money was short, and Productions SuperMusique could not financially sustain the three of us — Diane, Danielle and me.”

The success of René Lussiers award-winning album Le trésor de la langue had stretched the volunteer-based operations of Ambiances Magnétiques to its limits, so Hétu got the idea of putting together her own distribution company, which she named DAME, for Distribution Ambiances Magnétiques Etc. The members of Ambiances Magnétiques (nine by then) retained the right to release whatever projects they saw fit, but Hétu suddenly found herself running a record company. And, therefore, on the other side of the desk. Was that a difficult change? “I never put myself in a position where I would have to say ‘no’ to an artist. Releasing an album through DAME takes a lot of commitment, so the artist and I must be 100% sure that DAME is the right channel for him or her.”

Over the past fifteen years, Hétu has fought hard on behalf of experimental music — what she calls musique actuelle — both promoting it as a legitimate genre and convincing governments to subsidize it. Musique actuelle is “music with a cross-stylistic approach, presenting some level of improvisation, in which the composer is also the interpreter,” she explains. Her prominence as an activist can also make her a target whenever things go wrong. Some artists feel uncomfortable with Hétu’s definition of musique actuelle. Since the late 1990s, a younger generation of Montréal musicians bas emerged. They record for labels such as Constellation and alien8, and perform in spaces such as Casa del Popolo and La Sala Rossa, and some of them perceive Ambiances Magnétiques simply as an old and established clique. The label bas made a laudable effort to recruit new blood, and its older artists are mingling more and more with the younger crowd, but tensions have led to a few crises. Guitarist René Lussier, the label’s best-selling artist, left in the late 1990s. Drummer Michel F Côté last year started his own label, &records, which bas recently released the fourth album by Klaxon Gueule, another of Ambiances Magnétiques’ high-profile artists.

Meanwhile, the ever-shrinking involvement of the governments in experimental arts has made it almost impossible to plan ahead, leading to an almost catastrophic financial year in 2000. “Government funding bodies dont like to subsidize things that they don’t understand,” Hétu points out. “No subsidies means death for any avant-garde art organization. And it means the death of a nation. At an everyday level, the people benefit from our research, even if they don’t think they understand it. Deep down, mainstream music evolves to the beat of the underground.”

For the love of winter

These difficulties have kept Hétu from writing and performing as much as she would have liked. “Then again, I need this balance between music and business in my life. It’s just that lately the business platter bas had more weight on it, and I am now ready to tip the balance to the other side.” And she has. In the last two years, Hétu has been touring a lot with the reformed Les Poules (now a textural improv trio) and Nous perçons les oreilles. The latter duo is perhaps one of the oddest — and most likeable — projects she has been involved in. Both Hétu and Derome play alto saxophone and sing, their repertoire a mixture of childlike songs full of quirky plays on words and telepathic free iniprovisations. Their chemistry onstage draws the audience into their intimacy, sharing their private vocabulary and total understanding of each other. “We completely endorse each other’s musical choices. Playing with Jean, I never develop enough distance to take niyself out of the equation and make judgments about the other players calls. Everything happens in the moment and in total acceptance of the other. And in our best performances, the ‘yes’ we give to each other seems to say ‘yes’ to the audience. We achieve a symbiosis between ourselves, the audience and the physical space. It is my favorite group.” It is also in this group that Hétu continues to develop her vocal range, adding new sounds, cries, and emotions to her highly personal improv vocabulary.

Much as it is underperformed and underdocumented, Hétu’s biggest and most fascinating project of late is her Musique d’hiver (Winter Music) cycle. Planned as a triptych (the third part is still in development), Musique d’hiver combines structured iinprovisation, composition, and songwriting. Ambitious and original, the work draws from American minimalism, Québec folk and Hétu’s deep love for the Québécois winter.“l am first and foremost a Nordic type. Maybe that’s why I was so fond of ECM-type jazz as a teenager. Despite the banality of the topic, I felt an irrepressible urge to tackle it.”

The first piece, also titled Musique d’hiver, was premièred in February, 2000, and came out on CD a year later. It consists of four movements, one for each month between December and March. Written for flutes, saxes, and vocals (Derome and Hétu), piano (Guillaume Dostaler), accordion (Labrosse), and percussion (Pierre Tanguay), it does more than pay tribute to winter, it depicts it in great detail — the first flurries of december and the excitement of the holidays, the subsequent torpor of January, the blinding reflection of sunlight on the thick snow cover of February, and the maddening yearning for longer and warmer days felt in March. The score includes a number of impressionistic melodies, simple songs, and sound events, sequenced in time and scored through a system of colours and symbols that allow a certain level of improvisation and textural developments. Hétu was able to record Musique d’hiver in Radio-Canada’s Studio 12 (a luxury) and release it on CD in 2001.

“My technique was not quite right for that one. The musicians had to juggle with page after page of directions! I perfected my approach and pushed things further in Nouvelle musique d’hiver.” In that second work, a pre-recorded narrator has taken over the role the songs played in the first one. Also, two musicians have been added (clarinetist Lori Freedman and turntablist Martin Tétreault) and all musicians play electronic instruments in addition to the acoustic ones featured in the first work. The music relies less ou melodies and more on emotional climates. Still, the compositional side is just as strong, and the result is again a stunning representation of each winter month. Nouvelle musique d’hiver had its first (and to date, only) performance in March, 2003, as part of the first edition of the Montréal Musiques Nouvelles festival. Will it ever be recorded? “I really want to. I feel like I need to commit it to disc in order to move along to phase three.” For the companion CD of this issue of Musicworks, Hétu has prepared a selection of excerpts from all four movements of the work, recorded at the première performance.

So what will be phase three? “I would like to do it with a mixed choir. And use more improvisational rules. I would conduct it, using body signals to shape the music. There were five musicians in the first piece, seven in the second, and I don’t intend to go smaller for the third one. It is just like a symphony: the last movement has to be grandiose. But I dont see it happening within the next few years.”

In the meantime, Hétu has kept, and will keep busy. There were numerous concerts on her spring, 2005, calendar, including the ongoing MercrediMusic series — a laboratory she curates with Derome and Lori Freedmam — and an Italian tour for Nous perçons les oreilles. But the highlight of the leason took place April 1 and 2, with the celebration of Production SuperMusique’s twenty-fifth anniversary. PSM presented Palimpseste d’orchestre, where the Ensemble SuperMusique — a shapeshifting group of Ambiances Magnétiques-related musicians — performed three new pieces by Hétu, Labrosse, and Roger, all inspired by and revisiting their common catalogue, back to the days of Wondeur Brass.

And in the Spring of 2006 Hétu will present her next large-scale project, a collaboration with multimedia artist Manon Labrecque: La Filature (a play on words, as “filature” means both secretly following someone, and spinning, a weaving term). “It will be a stage piece, theatre set to sound. The text is the sound. The music is the piece’s starting point — it gives life to the piece.”

Somehow, it feels like we are back to Wondeur Brass’s early music-theatre shows. But there bas been a lot of water under the Pont Jacques-Cartier since 1979 — when the young amateur, playing on stage for the first time, had no idea she was taking her first steps to becoming one of Quebec’s most unique musical voices.