Pierre Chrétien Transcript
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Pierre Chrétien:
The first tour we did was in France, and that was completely on our own. We met this sketchy promoter that was in Paris, and that was through MySpace way back when, and we got in touch and he said, let's put a tour together. So we thought we'll give it a shot. We ended up getting something like eight dates or so in France, and we went over and the tour was sold out. Every show was sold out, and the demand was amazing. I remember getting out of the airplane and jumping in the taxi, and our music was playing on the radio, and I thought, whoa, what's going on? And everywhere you'd go, you'd hear our music. And I was like, what's happening? This is so strange because in Canada, no one cared about us at all.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. This podcast strives to inspire you through the personal stories of a diversity of musicians worldwide with indepth conversations and great music that reveal the depth and breadth to a life in music, Pierre Chrétien is a Canadian band leader, multi-instrumentalist and composer who's had international success with his bands, the Souljazz Orchestra, Atlantis Jazz Ensemble, and his Project Cinephonic. And in this episode, you'll learn about all these and hear highlights from some of these albums on the Marlow Records label. Pierre shares how he left his career as an engineer to devote himself to a full-time career as a performer. He also demonstrates some rare vintage instruments at the beginning of this episode, which he's also an expert at repairing. Pierre is so creative and some of his gorgeous album covers are linked to the episode notes on my website, which of course links to Marlow Records. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms. And I've linked the transcript to my website, leah roseman.com. Did you know that this podcast is in Season Four and that I send out a weekly email newsletter where you can get access to Sneak Peeks of upcoming guests and be inspired by highlights from the archive? Please click on those links in the description as well. Now to the episode.
Hi Pierre, thanks so much for joining me today.
Pierre Chrétien:
Hi, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
So you're sitting at your vibraphone?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
This is very cool. We haven't had a vibraphone yet on the series. Do you want to start with a demo?
Pierre Chrétien:
Sure. I'll stand up. It is just to get in the shot.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, yeah.
Pierre Chrétien:
(music) Just to give you an idea.
Leah Roseman:
So with the vibraphone, how is it different than a marimba?
Pierre Chrétien:
So what you have here is two rows of metal bars. Marimba is made out of wood and underneath each of these bars, I don't know if you can see it in the shot there, but there's these rotating discs that are on top of resonators, so the long tubes here. So that gives the vibrato effect, and you can control the speed of it with, there's a little knob here, you can go real slow. (music)And then real. (music) This is the fastest here. This is an older model from the 1960s made in England by a premiere. The modern ones, you can actually type in the beats per minute and get it just perfect, but this is just fine too.
Leah Roseman:
Fantastic. Now, you were, I mean, you're a keyboard player. What motivated you to want to learn the vibraphone at a certain point?
Pierre Chrétien:
It's such a beautiful instrument. I just think it's just so dreamy and it's used mainly in jazz. So you hear vibraphone, it really takes you to a certain place right away. It has that urban jazz sound. And I picked it up. And then at first I was just playing with two mallets, one in each hand. And then eventually I learned four mallet technique. There's a guy called Gary Burton, he's a jazz legend, and he invented this grip here, and he gives really nice tutorials on YouTube on how to master this and the whole motion. So that came about a little later and yeah, that's it.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Now, I know we're going to be playing tracks from some of your albums and talking a lot about your life in music, but I know you have another very cool instrument there that probably most people have never seen or heard before.
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah. What we have here is, it's called a Vintage Vibe, electric piano, and it's actually a modern version of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. It was an instrument that was invented during the Second World War by Mr. Harold Rhodes. He wanted to invent a small piano that soldiers could fit on their laps while they were in the hospital so that they could learn piano and get their minds off of the war. And the first model is he built out of airplane parts and they were acoustic. And then eventually he got together with Leo Fender, the guy who invented the Fender Stratocaster and the Fender Telecaster and the Fender Precision Bass, and they amplified it with a series of pickups. And yeah, the way it works, there's hammers that hit tuning forks, so there's a tuning fork for each note, but they're kind of lopsided tuning forks. So you have, I don't know if you can see here, that these big bars on top, and then there's a smaller tie on the bottom. So it's like a lopsided tuning fork, and then there's a pickup at the end of each, the bottom fork, the bottom tine to amplify the instrument. And on the bottom tine, there's also a spring that you can move forward and backwards and that tunes the instrument.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Pierre Chrétien:
Did you want to hear a bit?
Leah Roseman:
Definitely. I'm just curious, when did you acquire that particular instrument?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, this is a modern version. It's made by a company out of New Jersey called Vintage Vibe, and I got this one custom made for myself, and I drove down to Rockaway, New Jersey back in 2015 and picked it up myself. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Let's hear something
Pierre Chrétien:
A lot people know this tune. (music)
Leah Roseman:
Wow, it's so cool about the tuning forks, I would think there'd be more of a delay.
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, it's pretty immediate. Yeah, definitely.
Leah Roseman:
Now that is not the Mellotron, which is what I was expecting.
Pierre Chrétien:
Oh, yes. Melotron. I'll be honest, the Mellotron I used on my last, the first Cinephonic album, it's a modern version, so it's a digital version, so it's a little less cool. Maybe it's still recordings of the initial tapes that were made in the sixties, but it's maybe a little less exciting. These are real instrument, so I thought it'd be more interesting
Leah Roseman:
For sure. Well, we're going to get into that Cinephonic album, but since we just were talking about the Mellotron, can you describe the original instrument? I was fascinated to learn about it? Oh yeah.
Pierre Chrétien:
So each key on the Mellotron is actually pressing play on a cassette player. So it actually plays a tape recording of whatever your instrument you choose. By default, the cheaper Mellotrons came with flute, violin, or cello and human voice. But some of the more advanced Mellotrons had dozens and dozens of different sounds. So it was really the first kind of sampling keyboard invented in the 1960s. And you can hear it on songs like Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles, or Knights in White Satin by the Moody Blues. Songs like that, or What's Going On, Marvin Gaye.
Leah Roseman:
So the one that you have that's digital, they're digital samples of the original.
Pierre Chrétien:
Exactly, yeah. But it still sounds old, but yeah, it's a little less exciting maybe.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it's interesting because that first Cinephonic album, which is called Les Paradis Artificiels, right? Yeah. Because when you're listening to it, it sounds very orchestral.
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah. Well, I initially meant it for orchestra, so I wrote it like an orchestral score with all the different steps, but then Covid hit and it was harder to get in touch with musicians. So I thought, let's give this a shot. So I actually performed each line as if I'm that instrument. So I really try to put myself in the mindset of the Flute player or the Bassoonist or the French horn player, whatever.
Leah Roseman:
It's a beautiful album. It must've taken so much work to do that
Pierre Chrétien:
It was long. Yeah, could, it's painstaking going track by track and overdubbing everything. But it was interesting. It was a fun experiment to do.
Leah Roseman:
Well, your second album, you did hire a bunch of musicians, Visions, I thought, could we include the track Combat?
Pierre Chrétien:
Of course. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to talk to that track or that album?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, so that whole album, I wanted to do something different. I've always, since I studied composition with Dr. Steven Gellman, he got me interested in Gregorian chants. He thought my compositions were a little bit, maybe a little stiff or predictable, so he wanted to teach me about different rhythms and different rhythmic structures. So we studied Gregorian chants and ancient Greek rhythms and Hindu rhythms, and you might not think of Gregorian chant as being particularly arrhythmic, but the cool thing about it is that it's made up of additive rhythms. So you have short notes and long notes, but no bar lines, no time signatures or anything like that. So it makes for much more fluid to kind of refer them. So yeah, so that's when I started getting into Gregorian chant. And this time around, I thought it'd be really interesting doing a modern take on vintage medieval Gregorian chant. So it's actually an album of all cover songs of songs from the Middle ages. So Le Combat is actually the most recent one. It was written for Louis the 13th, I think. And yeah, it's a modern arrangement of this. It was for a mass. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So Le Combat means the battle for people that don't speak French. Yeah.
Pierre Chrétien:
The initial piece in Latin talks about the battle between good and evil, and so I gave it the title, Le Combat, because it also had the kind of feel of a break dance and B-Boy battle. So it's a little bit of a double entendre.
Leah Roseman:
You are about to hear Le Combat from Conics album Visions. You'll find the link to Marlow Records in the description of this episode. (music)
Now, both of these Cinephonic albums do sound like soundtracks from maybe the 1960s. You have a certain vibe. Did you grow up loving old film music? Is this one of your things?
Pierre Chrétien:
I guess so, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, guys, I knew Moricone and Michel Legrand and François de Roubaix, it was always, yeah, it was part of my upbringing. Even François de Roubaix de wrote kids shows that I used to watch. Chapi Chapo is written by François de Roubaix and things like that. So I guess they just get in your mind, right? It's part of your life soundtrack.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I'm not familiar with those names. Are they Queébecois composers or from France?
Pierre Chrétien:
They're from France. But all those shows played in Québec also, I forget his name, but even the composer from Passe Partout had some nice things too. France and French Canada had a lot in common as far as TV and movies went. I got another guy here if you want to see.
Leah Roseman:
Alright. Yeah.
Pierre Chrétien:
This is a Musser Ampli-Celeste from the 1960s. It's a really rare instrument and well, it's basically an amplified Celeste. You can't see it, but there's bars inside and well, it sounds like this.(music) So that's what you're used to hearing on Celeste, but there's also really nice (music) bottom end to it, and then there's kind of a percussive middle section. Anyway, it was here. I thought I'd show it to you.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So when did you pick up that instrument and how did you come across it?
Pierre Chrétien:
I picked it up at a flea market in Kingston. I think there was an amateur orchestra there, and that's what they were using, because real celestes can be quite expensive, so I guess this was a cheaper option. Nowadays they'd be using synthesizers and digital keyboards, but I thought it was a pretty cool instrument.
Leah Roseman:
Very much so. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking, Pierre, the first time I heard you live, you were playing on the street with Mike Essoudry and Zakari. And so it wasn't the whole Atlantis Jazz quintet. You had a couple of people missing and you had two keyboards or three stacked. Yeah. Do you remember what you would've been using? It was very impressive.
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah. I would've had the Fender Rhodes, electric piano here and on top. I also use a Honer Clavinet. A Clavinet is an amplified clavichord, which is an old keyboard instrument from the Baroque days. If you ever saw one of the original instruments, they're very, very soft. So it was made for intimate chamber music kind of context, but it makes sense to amplify it because such a soft instrument. But when you run it through, at first it was meant to play baroque music, but jazz and funk musicians soon got hold of it, and they found out that it can be very git touristic, especially if you're running through a Wawa pedal. So it makes for really cool effects.
Leah Roseman:
Now, I'll alert my listeners. I did an episode last year with Kate Dunton, who's California based jazz and funk keyboard player who also collects vintage keyboards. But she said they're incredibly fussy. It's hard to find people to fix them, and the prices have really gone up.
Pierre Chrétien:
Right! I was lucky enough to get a lot of my things back in the nineties when these things weren't so sought after. A lot of people were getting rid of them for not too much money at all. But I had to learn how to fix everything myself. And now I'm one of the Go-to guys in town to fix roads and clavet. So it just happened by accident, but it makes for a cool side gig.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Let's go back to your childhood and some musical memories, and I know you have a pretty interesting story if you want to speak to that.
Pierre Chrétien:
Sure. I'm originally from Sudbury, Ontario, about six hours from here. And I moved over to, well, I started taking piano lessons around five years old, and I came from a really musical family, especially on my mom's side, just about everyone played piano. And I remember being a kid and everyone would be around the piano playing Boogie Woogie and Blues and Jazz jams, and I thought, oh my God, I want to learn how to do that. And I had one particular uncle, his name is Pierre, just like me, and he was a really good jazz pianist, a little bit in an Oscar Peterson kind of mold. And he showed me a few things, taught me the Blues scale, and showed me some voicings. And then I was basically on my own after that. So I taught myself how to improvise and got into jazz from there.
And then eventually in 1997, I moved to Ottawa to study engineering at the University of Ottawa. So I was in computer engineering for, well, for a good while. I graduated I guess 2003, and worked in high tech for a little bit, and then I found out it wasn't for me, and things were starting to pick up with the Souljazz orchestra, which got started in the meantime. And then that's when I really decided this is what I want to do with my life. So I quit everything, started over, went back to school, and I ended up getting my Master's in theory and composition at the University of Ottawa, studying with Dr. Steven Gellman and Dr. John Armstrong.
Leah Roseman:
So, I'm curious, did you consider doing a jazz program somewhere?
Pierre Chrétien:
I guess I consider myself a musician. I don't like this guy's a jazz musician, this guy's a classical musician. I like it all, and I do it all. And I played in pop bands, I've played in all sorts of things, and I've written symphonies and chamber music. So I felt learning, just taking a jazz program might be a bit limiting. I dunno, I've heard great things about Steven Gellman and they weren't wrong. He's a phenomenal composer and a phenomenal teacher, and I regret nothing. I'm glad I took that direction. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
I was just curious about that. And excuse my ignorance, so computer engineering, is that like the hardware side?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, I started out on the hardware side and then halfway through I moved to the software side. I decided software engineering after that. And I've worked for Nortel, I've worked for different high tech companies in town.
Leah Roseman:
But that kind of problem solving training must help you with fixing old instruments.
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, sometimes you have to do soldering on these things and you have to, yeah, it must come in handy somehow. Sometimes just learning to learn helps.
Leah Roseman:
So you mentioned the Souljazz orchestra. You had many fantastic albums people can check out, and you toured quite a bit, especially in Europe.
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, we've done about 20 tours, mainly in Europe, but also in the US. We've been to Africa, we've been to Latin America, so we've done quite a bit of traveling.
Leah Roseman:
So go to those different places. Did you have agents helping you with connections in different countries? How did that work?
Pierre Chrétien:
The first tour we did was in France, and that was completely on our own. We met this sketchy promoter that was in Paris, and that was through MySpace way back when. And we got in touch and he said, let's put a tour together. So we thought we'll give it a shot, and we ended up getting something like eight dates or so in France, and we went over and the tour was sold out, every show was sold out, and the demand was amazing. I remember getting out of the airplane and jumping in a taxi, and our music was playing on the radio, and I thought, whoa, what's going on? And everywhere you'd go, you'd hear music, and I was like, what's happening? This is so strange because in Canada, no one cared about us at all. So I thought it was really strange. So yeah, once we finished that tour, because it was also out and it went so well, it got the attention of a big agent with the agency group, and then we had a proper agent to help us book these tours. But I was still responsible for tour managing, so booking all the hotels and planes, trains, metro, the whole shebang.
Leah Roseman:
So it's a pretty big band. How many members were touring?
Pierre Chrétien:
We're six people, so
Leah Roseman:
Oh, okay!
Pierre Chrétien:
Not too bad.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I guess I hadn't counted it up in the photos with all the, I dunno, Bari Sax and big instruments. It looks impressive
Pierre Chrétien:
It looks impressive. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, yeah. You have so many great albums out, and you've designed a lot of those album covers, haven't you, Pierre?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, yeah. I'm also a graphic designer and visual artist. Yeah, at first I'd let other people do it, but I dunno, I wasn't always satisfied, so I thought, oh, I'll give this a shot. So necessity is the mother of invention, so I kind of got into it. I enjoyed art as a kid, but I never thought as an adult I would pick it up again. So yeah, it's been interesting.
Leah Roseman:
Did you get any training for graphic design, or you just did it on your own?
Pierre Chrétien:
A little bit through software engineering, maybe along the years, but no, mainly self-taught. And I like the human touch also. I don't like using the computer too much, so whenever I can, I try. I use India ink to draw a lot of things, just to give it a more organic feel rather than just using shapes on a computer.
Leah Roseman:
Such a talented guy. Well, of Souljazz, I mean, do you want to share a track from one of your albums?
Pierre Chrétien:
The big hit was Mr. President back in 2006. That's what kind of launched our career. I played that one to death, so I've kind of heard it enough. There's one tune, in Kingdom Come, I really like it features this vibraphone here. It was from an all acoustic album. At first, we were known for doing Afrobeat and very heavy dance music, but I thought it'd be really interesting to do dance music, but with only acoustic instruments. So it's double bass and vibraphones and trumpets and trombones and that kind of thing.
Leah Roseman:
You're about to hear Kingdom Come from the Souljazz Orchestra album, Inner Fire (Music)
Pierre Chrétien:
And yeah. Oh, and I play harp on it as well. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I was going to ask you about Harp, because I've heard you on some of your tracks playing harp. So it's really an actual harp that you own?
Pierre Chrétien:
An actual orchestral harp on Rising Sun. I played a pedal harp, the really expensive orchestral ones. And on Inner Fire, I played just a lever harp. They're a little less expensive, but you have to make sure there aren't too many that could get tricky with the levers.
Leah Roseman:
Did you rent the harps?
Pierre Chrétien:
I did. I did. There's a great lady in town that, Vixen Harps. She rents out. She has a wonderful collection. Yeah, so I had to teach myself quick how to play harp, but it is such a beautiful instrument.
Leah Roseman:
Hi. Just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. If you want to check out over a hundred episodes you may have missed in addition to your podcast player or YouTube, I have an extensive website, leah roseman.com with show notes, transcripts, the complete catalog of episodes, and you can sign up there for my weekly newsletter to get access to sneak peeks of upcoming guests. Please do share your favorite episodes with your friends, follow me on social media and share my posts. And if you can spare a few dollars to help support the series, that would be amazing. And you can find that link in the show notes. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode.
If we could talk about the Atlantis Jazz Ensemble. Last year you put out Celestial Suite, just phenomenal album. It's been getting lots of attention. I was hoping we could play the track, Joyful Noise.
Pierre Chrétien:
Sure.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to speak to the concept of the album and the group?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah. So the group got started around 2013, I think. Zakari Frantz from the Souljazz Orchestra. He had a residency at Le petit Chicago, which doesn't exist anymore, but he wanted to put together a group. So he asked me to join, and we had Mike, Mike Essoudry on drums, and at the time we had a different bass player and a different trumpet player, I think. But anyway, that's how it out. And eventually Alex Bilodeau joined and Ed Lister. Pretty soon I started writing for the group. We were doing covers, but I always find it's more interesting to do your own compositions, and I felt the group lends itself really well to spiritual jazz music. So music that's kind of conducive to spirituality, and a lot of songs therefore have more of a kind of mantra, feel, a bit of a repetitive feel, and inspired by guys like John Coltrane or McCoy Tyner, Pharaoh Sanders.
And yeah, we came out with a first album in 2016, Oceanic Suite, and it did really well. It was the number two song on the jazz charts that year, number two album on the jazz charts. And then unfortunately, we lost our bass player, Alex Bilodeau ended up moving to Boston, and he was studying with guys like Dave Holland and Cecil McBee big stars in the jazz world. And so we took a little break for a while, but then we hooked up with Chris Pond, who's a really good young double bass player. And we got the group started again in, I guess it was 2021, 2022, and we had a residency on Somerset Street with the Pandemic. We were doing more outdoor concerts for a while. So yeah, so we were playing on Somerset Street and decided to write new tunes and get new material going again. And the residency allowed us to connect as a group and solidify the songs. And then in the fall of 2022, we ended up going in the studio and over two days, we recorded the album just live off the Floor.
Leah Roseman:
Now you're going to hear Joyful Noise from Celestial Suite by Atlantis Jazz Ensemble. (music)
Just a quick break from the episode to point out that I recorded a wonderful episode with the drummer Mike Essoudry, who's the drummer for Atlantis Jazz Ensemble. And if you missed that one, you should really check it out. I'll be linking Mike Essoudry's episode directly to this one in the show notes.
Now, back to the episode, I was able to hear you guys two or maybe three times, I think, that summer. And it was really magical, just outside and just between different restaurants that had patios, and that's the kind of thing now that things are sort of more normal, some of those opportunities have gone away, more streets were closed off. It was kind of special.
Pierre Chrétien:
And I kind of liked how the sound kind of bounced off the buildings. It gave it a really cool vibe. Yeah, it was fun.
Leah Roseman:
That was your son, right? Running around?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yes. Oh yeah, he loved those. He loved going to the concerts. Yeah, I had my son running around the whole time, and he'd have his monkey and a little stroller and he'd run around with his monkey.
Leah Roseman:
Well, so for both of those albums, you call them, do you want to talk about the concept in terms of that?
Pierre Chrétien:
Well, I guess I felt I would write the album, and then I felt that it had a kind of connection, so it made sense to call it a suite of sorts. Yeah, the first album was called Oceanic Suite and all the, I guess I was listening to a lot of impressionist music, Debussy La Mer, things like that. I guess that's what I had in my mind. The songs all had this kind of fluidity to it, and I was also experimenting with different pulse leers, so you'll have eighth notes and then dotted eighths and triplets all superimposed, so it feels like different waves in the ocean. So that's the kind of thing I had in mind with that one. And then this new album, all the songs had a theme of either the sky or spirituality. So Celestial Suite felt like an appropriate name for it. And yeah, I like tying things together, having an album be a whole rather than just different disparate tracks stuck together.
Leah Roseman:
So having such a successful band as a Souljazz Orchestra, has that helped you with connections in terms of getting your albums out there?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yes and no. The audience for Atlanta Jazz Ensemble is a little bit different maybe with Souljazz Orchestra. What I found after a while is that there was such an expectancy of making people dance and groove and party that it was hard to do anything else but party music. And I was kind of itching to do other things too, and I would try with Souljazz sometimes to stretch it out. But when it's two in the morning and you're playing after a DJ and everyone's ready to go, well, it's hard to do introspective ballads and things like that. You could get things thrown at you on stage. So that's what made me want to develop Atlantis Jazz Ensemble. But for sure, there's still overlap, and it did help. All the connections we made over the last 20 years. Definitely helped promote Atlantis Jazz Ensemble as well. Just to let you know a little bit about Blue Nile, the bassline for that came during an improvisation, during a Souljazz Orchestra concert, actually, and over an Ethiopian jazz tune. And I kind of remembered it, and it triggered me to write the song Blue Nile. So it's based on the Tizita Minor mode, which is one of the Ethiopian modes. And the Blue Nile is a river in Ethiopia, so that's where the title comes from.
Leah Roseman:
Now you're going to hear Blue Nile from Oceanic Suite by Atlantis Jazz Ensemble.(music).
Yeah, very cool. I love Ethiopian food, so I've mostly heard Ethiopian music in the restaurants, that association. So when I heard that tune, it was just like brought me back.
Pierre Chrétien:
That's great.
Leah Roseman:
Eating injera. Okay, thanks for that.
Pierre Chrétien:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Now with Marlow Records, it's your record label.
Pierre Chrétien:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
And do you actually record on analog still?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, we actually have a kind of hybrid thing going. So we will use computers for editing and things like that, but all the tracks are still bounced to tape to get that sound. I find it just compresses things in a really nice way, and it just warms up every instrument. So yeah, it's kind of both.
Leah Roseman:
If you could explain, technically, I don't understand how it would compress it on a tape, as opposed to
Pierre Chrétien:
When you record the record head, it can't react as fast as a computer can. So it tries to do the wave, but it is not quite as accurate, so it's a little lower and a little lower. So the waveform is actually compressed that way, so it just warms up the sound. All the transients that hurt your ears are just kind of softened up. If you listen to a vinyl record or a cassette tape, you'll notice things don't hurt your ears as much as a really sharp digital recording on a computer.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Pierre Chrétien:
It's that kind of thing.
Leah Roseman:
That's interesting. Well, for one thing I was curious. I mean, are you distantly related to our former Prime Minister with the name?
Pierre Chrétien:
I don't know. I don't think so. Well, all Chrétiens are probably connected somehow, but no, I don't think so.
Leah Roseman:
How about your process of writing? I mean, you came from this on the paper tradition, and then you do a lot by ear.
Pierre Chrétien:
All Atlantis, all Souljazz, all Cinephonic stuff is still written on paper. So if you see us on stage, you'll see the sheet music's there. Well, for everyone else, I try to memorize things. I don't always like reading on stage, but at the same time, I find a good jazz composer, it's not about how many black dots you put on a page, you're also writing a blueprint for an improvisation. So I think it's important not to be too prescriptive and leave space and not make it so complex that it impedes the creativity of the musicians. So it's a fine line. You want to write things that are interesting enough that it stimulates the musicians, but not so complex that it stops their creativity. Everything's still written on sheet music though,
Leah Roseman:
But do you use a computer, like Finale or something, or you're writing by hand?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, in the early days, I used to write everything by hand and not make photocopies or anything, and then the musicians would lose their charts and then I'd be like, ah. And then I couldn't remember the piece. And then there's that piece that actually disappeared because of that. So now I use Finale. Yeah, it's a lot better. You can just print out another copy.
Leah Roseman:
But your Cinephonic albums, I mean, it's all arranged. It's not so much improv. Are there arrangers that really influenced you in terms of style?
Pierre Chrétien:
Oh, definitely. Well, I mean there's classical musicians, love Debussy, Ravel Stravinsky, Bartok, and then from the jazz world there's Gil Evans and Duke Ellington. And from the cinema world, there's an Ennio Maricone. Those are probably the main ones I'd say.
Leah Roseman:
What do you think about in terms of the way the business has changed now with streaming and publicity is mostly on social media, you've lived through a lot in the last 20 years. What are your perspectives on that?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, it's funny. When we started out, there was no YouTube, there was none of that. And everything was still CDs and we were making a lot more money back then. Yes, it's been difficult. It's really getting hard. Platforms like Spotify, they don't pay a lot. And I saw a documentary on it the other day. It showed why things were like that. So when Spotify went public, the big major labels, Universal and all those, they owned shares in Spotify. So they negotiated to give musicians as low a cut as possible so that the shares would be as high as possible so that they could maximize their profits and minimize the pay to musicians. And the rest of the people that weren't on these major labels had zero say. So that's why we're stuck with the situation we're in now. And it's really, it's frustrating. Thankfully, my projects, I don't know why, but they seem to do really well on physical media. The vinyl is selling really well. CDs are selling really well. The last Atlantis album, the vinyl, I got 500 pressed, they sold out within a few weeks, so I had to get another 500 repressed. And that's running out also. So that's keeping me going. Thank God. The vinyls still around and CDs are still selling a little bit, but it's tricky.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I mean, I bought your digital albums on Bandcamp, so you are doing well over there. Would you rather people.. see my problem? I know if I buy directly from an artist off their website, they make a little bit more than Bandcamp, but then I have to put the music, you know what I mean? It's like I have to organize it differently.
Pierre Chrétien:
Bandcamp's great, I love Bandcamp. They really take, what they take is so minimal and compared to the Spotify's and YouTubes and all those, it doesn't compare. So no, no, I love Bandcamp. And actually they take care of a lot of things like the taxes and all the deductions that need to be taken out. So no, I always route people to Bandcamp.
Leah Roseman:
So how about your lifestyle as a musician? If you look back like you were going to be computer engineer and then you made this huge switch and now you're a dad, how do you think it affects your life to your working life?
Pierre Chrétien:
Well, it was a big plunge to take. My parents weren't very happy when they told them that I'm not going to be an engineer, and all that schooling was for nothing. And all of a sudden I'm starting over and I'm going to be a musician. And musician. People have ideas. I guess you say musician, people think either megastar or a bum, and they don't realize that for a lot of people there's an in-between, there's a middle class musician that, I'm not rich, but I am doing fine. So yeah, it was a big plunge to take. But if you work hard and you apply yourself, I think it is possible to make a decent living.
Leah Roseman:
In terms of the hours, is it hard for you to unwind after gigs? How do you manage that? With being a dad and stuff.
Pierre Chrétien:
There's a lot of hours. I mean, you're working from home, right? And it never stops. It's from the morning and at night when I'm watching TV with my wife while I'm making the boxes for all the orders that came in during the day. So I'll have my stack of boxes and put that away. So from morning until the time I go to bed, I'm doing something work related. So it is a lot of work.
Leah Roseman:
Do you have a way of managing the constant emails and you sort of apportion time so it doesn't sort of suck your energy?
Pierre Chrétien:
I try to reserve time every morning for creative work before I open up the email and all that. I work best first thing in the morning when I have my coffee. I find that's when, I dunno, I'm at my most creative, even when I wake up in the morning, when you just get coming out of your dreams. I find that, I dunno, as a composer, I find I get a lot of my ideas at that time for some reason. And a lot of times I'll run to the piano and jot things down. So I try to reserve that time every morning and then I'll open up my email and get going after that. And usually I go to the post office every day so that there's time for that. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Do you writing new music, do you have new projects in the pipeline?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, I'm always writing new music. It's funny, in the last 25 years I've produced around, I dunno, almost 20 albums, but they've always been, quintets are bigger and they all have horns almost. And it's always been big things. This next one, I had like to try something like a trio album, just piano, bass drums. Maybe quartet, maybe vibraphone here and there, but something small, an intimate and softer. So I dunno, I think it'd be an interesting challenge.
Leah Roseman:
You mentioned you'd done some writing and I don't even know what to call it, Classical music, like orchestral and stuff. Where's that stuff been played or is that more when you were a student?
Pierre Chrétien:
It was when I was a student and a little bit after as well. It was for my Master's thesis. It is a symphonic poem. It's called Tezeta, and it mixes Eastern African folk music with jazz and with orchestral classical music. You'll hear a little bit of Stravinsky and Debussy in there. And it was performed by the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra in 2010, alongside works by Shostakovich and Bartok and it is a pretty involved work. It took two years of work to get that going. And classical world's tough, though I had say, it's especially tough for young composers because people want to hear the hits. They want Mozart and Beethoven, and there's not a lot of room for young French Canadian composers out there. And I find a lot of new composers tend to write in a kind of samey style. There's a lot of tone clusters and that style.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I think it's changing now, but I know exactly what you're talking about
Pierre Chrétien:
For a while. There's just such a sameness to a lot of new works and I felt I didn't always fit in with that. I used atonality and I use 12 tone rows sometimes, but I vary it up. And there's some sections that'll be just pentatonic or very tonal and then very chaotic. And I like variety, I like color, and I find just writing tone clusters all the time just gets to be a bit too samey for me.
Leah Roseman:
Yes.
Pierre Chrétien:
So I thought the whole classical world was difficult to, it's hard to make a living doing just that unless you teach or something else.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I was curious. Are you teaching at all?
Pierre Chrétien:
Nope. Just a full-time musician. Yeah. And that's fine by me.
Leah Roseman:
Did it ever come up when you were younger that people asked for piano lessons or,
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, I have given private lessons a little bit, but my preference is just to focus on my own music. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And with your son, are you going to teach him at all or?
Pierre Chrétien:
He is taking piano lessons right now, and I do supplement his lessons with my own little lessons. I'm teaching him jazz and improvisation and all that.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, that's cool. Just to close out, it might be interesting to reflect on your teen years. You didn't really talk, you were doing classical piano and RCM exams, and I'm guessing you mentioned you had your uncle pianist who was showing you stuff. So was there an element of burnout in terms of that classical path at that time?
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, so I took classical piano until grade 10, Royal Conservatory. That's when I was in grade eight at school, and I just wasn't very interested at that point. It's the rebellious teen years and playing classical piano didn't excite me as much and I was listening to jazz and hip hop and soul and funk, and I wasn't really encouraged to get into that at all. Eventually I came back to it in high school. I started taking alto saxophone, took clarinet for a while. I took up guitar. I took pipe organ for a while also. So I was having fun, just diversifying and learning new things. And eventually in university I got back to it very seriously. But had I had more options to learn maybe jazz or improvisation or maybe things that interested me more, I think I would've stuck it out. But the way the program was structured, I just wasn't interested anymore.
Leah Roseman:
I have a feeling that I think it's too little emphasis on people's personal creativity, whether that's composition or improvisation or, I dunno, just choosing their own repertoire, looking for difficult pieces to play.
Pierre Chrétien:
Yeah, just regurgitating Mozart sonatas was just, it was killing me.
Leah Roseman:
When you started the Souljazz Orchestra, you were collaborating with a lot of African musicians here in Ottawa?
Pierre Chrétien:
Well, a lot, a few, but it had a big impact. Played with guys like Mighty Popo Ela Jumbay, Beautiful Nubia, and also a Malagasy group. And at the same time on my own, I was getting interested in African music at first through just more Afrocentric jazz guys like Herbie Hancock or Pharoah Sanders, and then through actual African musicians like Fela Kuti, Mulatu Astatke there a whole bunch. And yeah, I just loved the polyrhythms and I studied it a little bit more. I found a book around that time too. It was written by A.M. Jones, it's called Studies in African Music. It was the first important book of transcriptions of African rhythms, came out in the 1950s and it inspired a lot of musicians, so they have it at the Ottawa U Library. So I took that out and that helped a little bit too, and it stuck with me ever since. It's always kind of a part of my vocabulary now.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, thanks so much for this today. Really interesting.
Pierre Chrétien:
Hey, thanks for having me, and good luck with the series.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Pleased to share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. The link is in the description. Have a wonderful week.
