CHANTS TRADITIONNELS DE HAUTE-BRETAGNE
BOGUE D'OR 1989
Chanteurs et musiciens de Bretagne n°3
TRADITIONAL SONGS FROM UPPER BRITTANY
GOLDEN CHESTNUT-BAR 1989
Singers and musicians of Brittany n°3
Dastum, 1990, DAS-113
This is one of the few tapes that Dastum never reissued on CD. As the title shows it is about an annual competition for singers ans musicians in the Eastern part of Brittany where the Breton language was never spoken or disappeared during rhe Middle Ages. But there is another language spoken along with French , a dialect called Gallo, a Romance dialect. The term ''upper'' means that this part of Brittany is closer to Paris than ''lower Brittany'' and had implied for a very long time that Eastern Brittany was more ''civilized'' than the Western part where Breton is still in use. But of course the Gallo dialect was also considered as a local dialect of no importance which should have disappeared as well for the benefit of French. When the Breton folk revival started it was all about the Breton tongue and history and Gallo was not part of that cultural and political movement. The people of Upper Brittany considered themselves as Breton as the others and managed to set up many associations and bodies in order to preserve their own culture.
One way of preserving that dialect and musical culture was to organize a competition open to all. Here we have the final competition, after the qualifying rounds were over, held in Redon on the 29th of October 1989. It's called ''Golden Chestnut-bar'' because chestnuts are a major product in the local economy.
Singers are quite dominant and the interest of this competition is that everybody being welcome it gives a vivid image of what the local singing was like at the time with children, adults and older people, all singing on their own with sometimes the help of the crowd which respond to the singers when necessary. All the repertoire is traditionnal except for the song on B7 composed by Marie Morin who sings it herself.
The competition involves instrumental music as well with the traditional duet or couple bombarde and biniou and some accordion (diatonic) playing. Two tracks are devoted to the duet with bombarde and biniou with some marches from Redon and Josselin while two more tracks have dances played on the box.To be precise, these instrumental tracks were recorded much later but with the same musicians for technical reasons.
