Interview: Guy Thouin and the Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec
- Suivre le lien suivant pour la version française de cet entretien : Guy Thouin.
Guy Thouin was a founding member of the Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec (QJLQ). He played drums on the landmark album which the band recorded for RCI and London Canada in 1968. Between 1967 and 1970, he performed with Robert Charlebois and Louise Forestier. He also participated in a number of musical revues including L’Osstidcho and Peuple à genoux. With the QJLQ, he was part of the line-up that recorded L’Infonie’s first two albums. In 1969, he started studying music at McGill University but his mind was already somewhere else. The following year, he left for India where he spent the greater part of the decade studying percussion. He returned to Montreal in 1976 to resume his musical career.
Tenzier [T.] : Why did you and your colleagues decide to play free jazz in 1967?
Guy Thouin [G.T.] : At first, we approached free jazz as an artistic endeavor. We wanted to break away from both traditional jazz and the mainstream music that played on the radio all the time. We wanted to explore new means of expressing ourselves using music. At least, this is how I saw it since I initiated this project of a free jazz ensemble. I had met Jean “Doc” Préfontaine and Maurice Richard a few years earlier (1964-65). We often played together at a hotel in Pointe-Calumet … but we did not improvise back then. I can’t remember how we met Yves Charbonneau. We probably all hung around the same bars and venues.
T. : You all lived together in the early months of the QJLQ. Did this communal life experience have an impact on the band’s music or ideology?
G.T. : Préfontaine, Charbonneau and Richard lived in my basement in the beginning. This was a convenient means of making sure they would not miss practice! It was around then that we laid the foundations of our music. We tried to establish how far we could go musically speaking. We attempted to define free jazz … we wanted to clarify what it was that we wanted to accomplish. I was interested in a lot of stuff … Noah Howard for example. Préfontaine wanted the QJLQ to opt for a more radical approach … a sort of nihilistic approach. We were slowly leaning toward the philosophy that musical groups such as the Nihilist Spasm Band embraced. We decided to do away with standard chords, fixed tempos and jazz cliches.
T. : Did you consider yourselves Marxist-Leninist back then? Were you already debating questions of national independence and revolution?
G.T. : When we started playing together, we did not know very much about political movements such as the Black Panthers, etc. The QJLQ took an abrupt left turn later in the decade. You are perhaps referring to the commune which the band established in 1970. I had left the quartet by then so I can’t tell you much about the 1970 to 1974 period. I visited the Petit Québec libre once and I remember being handed a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book.
T. : Let’s talk about records. What albums did you listen to when the QJLQ was formed? What were your influences?
G.T. : I remember buying many ESP records. That label really supported free jazz musicians. I am thinking of Paul Bley, Sun Ra and Don Cherry. We also listened to Max Roach, John Coltrane, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Cecil Taylor. We also can’t forget Ornette Coleman’s The Art of the Improvisers and This is our Music. I played those two records for the band quite a lot back then. I was especially inspired by drummer Milford Graves. I went to New York a few times during the late 1960s and I had the chance of seeing Graves and Rashied Ali perform as a duo.
T. : And if you had to pick one album?
G.T. : I would choose Coltrane’s Meditations … which featured Rashied Ali on drums.
T. : Did you ever buy records from the French label BYG Actuel?
G.T. : No. It was hard to find free jazz LPs in Montreal. We became familiar with that music via ESP. However, it’s true that a lot of things were happening in Europe at that time. Many American musicians managed to survive because there was a market for their music overseas. We never really thought about going there.
T. : American free jazz musicians came up this way on more than one occasion during the 1960s and 1970s. Did you attend a lot of concerts with the rest of the QJLQ?
G.T. : I remember seeing Albert Ayler at the Barrel, a jazz club located on Crescent street. I also saw Noah Howard there – he came to my house after that and we rehearsed as a duo for a week. I also remember attending performances by Sunny Murray and Archie Shepp.
T. : You mentioned the Nihilist Spasm Band earlier. You were obviously interested in music that was neither jazz nor pop.
G.T. : I was interested in a lot of things … probably as a result of the years I spent at the Beaux-arts. I was particularly interested in musique concrète. At some point in the mid-1960s, I received grant money which I spent wisely … I asked a friend of mine who studied at Université de Montréal to put together a quadraphonic system that I could use for sound synthesis experiments. I sold this equipment just before I left for India.
T. : Were you and the rest of the quartet trying to push the QJLQ beyond jazz and into the avant-garde?
G.T. : We were not really thinking about it that way. We did things the way we felt they needed to be done at the time. As a fine arts student, I was really interested in all artistic manifestations. I discovered musique concrète and serial music while at Beaux-arts. I listened to a lot of John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, etc. I particularly enjoyed Pierre Henry’s “Variations pour une porte et un soupir.” I found all of this really stimulating.
T. : Did you try composing electroacoustic music?
G.T. : I composed one piece to accompany a laser sculpture that my friend Roland Poulin had worked on. The exhibit took place in 1970 at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal. Imagine a dark room filled with mirrors reflecting a red laser beam. Attendees were scared of the laser. For the music, I used a revox reel-to-reel tape recorder, a piano, a koto, various percussion instruments and a modulator. But this had nothing to do with my work with the QJLQ.
T. : Yet you did play with radio frequencies on the last song of the album which the QJLQ recorded in 1968.
G.T. : You know, I tried something similar with the Grands ballets canadiens. I had been hired as a percussionist and had been told that I could improvise if I wanted to. I brought with me a small recorder which I used to capture the sound of children playing in a park in New York. I gave the material to the sound engineer with clear instructions in terms of when and how to play the tape. Needless to say, my playing and the sound of the children unsettled the dancers. Concerning the QJLQ, the album was recorded in December of 1968. There was an AM receiver behind me so I decided to play with it toward the end of the session … the last signal … a Christmas carol.
T. : When and why did you quit the QJLQ?
G.T. : I quit the quartet in 1970. The QJLQ was becoming more and more political due to the influence of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). I was not interested in revolution. I wanted to QJLQ to focus on music, not politics. In my opinion, anarchy and nihilism could only lead to a dead end. I always felt that we needed a foundation to build our music on. I wanted us to have a basic structure upon which to experiment. We did that a little bit on the RCI/London record – Jean Préfontaine’s “Stalisme dodécaphonique” and “Valse à grand’mère.” That is why I invited Pierre Nadeau to the session. I wanted him to support us harmonically … I had Cecil Taylor’s music in mind when I asked Nadeau to join us in the studio. In the end, I was becoming disillusioned with the band’s direction and I was aware that the rest of the QJLQ and I were drifting apart on a philosophical and political level. That is why I left the band and moved to India so that I could pursue my interests for other forms of music.
Excerpts:
1. QJLQ / Guy Thouin, 1968: “Il n’avait jamais fait si beau si longtemps”
2. Guy Thouin, 1970: “Rien ô tout ou linéaire un”
