For Québec-based bassist and composer Normand Guilbeault, Canadian history is not something reserved for schoolbooks and museum; it's a living thing to be recalled and questioned through music and words. He has acted that mission out in the form of RIEL: Plaidoyer Musical / Musical Plea, a folky jazz cantata based on the life and untimely death of Louis Riel, the métis leader hanged by the Canadian government in 1885. Vancouverites are lucky to be getting a chance to see the production, this saturday (june 30) at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, since with this performance Guilbeault is winding down an obsession that has consumed the past half-decade.

" I think this will be the last time we play it, at least for the while," says the musician, on the line from his Montréal home. "It's a project that has built for some time."Indeed, Guilbeault spent more than two years in Canada and the U.S. researching the writings of and documents pertaining to Riel, and found himself getting incensed at the way the pioneering Native-rights activist has historically been portrayed.

"I gathered all this information to make sure I was making the right
decisions for this presentation. I was touched by the story of Riel, and it struck me me pretty strongly that people know so little about Louis Riel. Sure, they know that he was part of a rebellion, that he had a trial, that he was hanged for high treason, but that's all. The reading told me it was a much more complex story than what we have been told. And it made sense to use this medium (music ) to get a message through. As you know, Riel is still not rehabilitated. They have tried to pass bills, but they never go through- it only took a week for them to vote for their salary augmentation, but for some reason, they never get around to pardonning Riel. It just goes on and on, and people still have a misconception about what happened out west.

My project was made to clarify that, but it's just my vision. I can't say I have the total truth on that, but after reading about 40 books on the subject, in both French and English, I can say that a consensus is coming out of that: that this man had a severe injustice made against him, and the stain is still on him after 115 years. To me, it's clear that Louis Riel was not a traitor. In fact, I consider him a national hero. I'm partisan about that, and that's what my Musical Plea is all about, with apology."

It's definitely a unique presentation, utilizing a dozen performers in all, including two narrators, several singers, drummer Pierre Tanguay, saxophonist Jean Derome, and the wonderfully named trumpeter Ivanhoe Jolicoeur. "There's poetry, some theatricality, slides with drawings from that period. And the music is pretty eclectic: jigs, reels, Native chants, and jazz improvisation. It's hard to pin it down, but the music is definitely custom-made for this group, that's for sure."

The bassist says it took a while to find his feet in this multimedia milieu. " I wasn't sure exactly how I would manage to do this, because I was coming from the jazz world, and I had never really worked with songs and texts. In the beginning, I was struggling to say something. Then I started really getting into the songs, thinking about what kind of music they were listening to back then, what kind of world they lived in. I discovered many interesting things, including a poet from that time, Pierre Falcon, who was writing satiric songs about what was going on." Along the way, Guilbeault started putting new melodies to Falcon's words. Soon, he was developing the blend of old and new that characterizes the work.

One of the central pleasures of getting Guilbeault's two-CD Riel set is the 72 page booklet that comes with it, a collection of quotes, charts, old photos, and text that alternates between French and English, often without parallel translation. " The English have to make a little effort to read the the French, and the other way around, " he explains.

When he's not performing in RIEL, the bassist still plays in straight-ahead jazz settings,such as the trio date he'll at the roundhouse on sunday (july 1) with Tanguay and Derome. Guilbeault is also a founder of the OFF Festival, an alternative to the Montreal international Jazz Festival that happens on the same early-summer dates. " The musicians were getting fed up with bad playing conditions and the low representation in concert places. We decided to stop complaining and do something for ourselves."

This fall he'll be diving into his next, equally ambitious project: a song cycle based on the life and work of Jack Kerouac. Guilbeault is interested not only in the seminal beat writer's French-Canadian roots, but also in the aesthetics of his writing. " His work is associated with jazz, " he asserts, " because of the time and the world he came from. But it's my position that the intonation, the rhythm, and the phrasing of his own readings have a real jazz sensibility. It's full of music, and that's what I want to explore."

KEN EISNER

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