Building bridges with the OSM
Jim Cuddy and Kevin Parent put their songs in the orchestra’s hands
It wouldn’t be the first friendship forged in battle. Or bottle, rather.
“Kevin (Parent) and I go back quite a few years, maybe 18 years, when Blue Rodeo played the Festival d’été in Quebec City and Kevin was the headliner,” explains Blue Rodeo co-vocalist/guitarist Jim Cuddy.
“We were shocked at how big he was, how big the audience was, how much they loved him and what a great performance it was. I went out with him later that night. We had an absolutely epic, epic night.
“I went straight to my plane and fainted on the flight from Montreal to Toronto. That’s how epic it was.”
Now it’s a classic case of epic begetting epic as country-angled rockers Cuddy and Parent team up again for the first performances this season in the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’s OSM POP series, under the direction of associate conductor Simon Leclerc.
Over the course of two nights, Cuddy and Parent will sing songs they selected from their respective repertoires, including two songs together, sans guitars and sans band. Not counting, of course, the estimated 85 to 90 classically trained musicians backing them on the stage of the elegant Maison symphonique.
It’s the continuation of a playing relationship that dates back to that fateful night on the Plains of Abraham, after which came a duet at the Paul Simon tribute at the Montreal International Jazz Festival in 2006, and in 2007 Cuddy
AT A GLANCE Kevin Parent and Jim Cuddy at the OSM, Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Maison symphonique, as part of the OSM POP series. Tickets cost $42 to $110 via osm.ca
guested on Parent’s English-language release Fangless Wolf Facing Winter. But where they really came to know one another was — colour no Canadian surprised — over hockey. Namely, the annual Juno Cup, a celebrity hockey game on the Juno Awards weekend pitting rockers against ex-NHLers to raise money for the music education charity MusiCounts. The mysterious symbiosis of puck and rock at work yet again.
“We’ve played a lot of music together,” explains Cuddy, “because when we do these Juno weekends we get a jamming suite and, after the game and the festivities, we just play all night. Kevin is one of those guys who can just pick up a guitar and, regardless of his state of mind, is mesmerizing. We also share a lot of similar music sensibilities even though he’s primarily French-speaking in his music, so it’s a very easy bridge to cross between the two of us. Being friends helps, too.”
“Jim’s a buddy, and he’s a fun guy and a party guy, too,” says Parent. “He looks all straight and that, but he’s fun. So it was interesting to build a bridge with a fellow Canadian. … You know, sometimes there’s Quebec and there’s Canada and there’s this gap that should not be there, especially not in music. And for me, I thought it was a nice idea to reach out to a guy like Jim.”
Associate conductor Leclerc — who has distinguished himself with orchestral arrangements for Simple Plan, Rufus Wainwright, Marie-Mai and David Usher, among other musical Montrealers — couldn’t agree more.
“It was an excellent idea,” enthuses Leclerc, who came up with the idea to reach out to the multiplatinum-selling Parent in the first place. “We approached Kevin because we thought he was a very interesting artist. I wanted to work with him because (of ) the way he writes, what he writes, the way he sings, the way he is. I told him that I would like him to share the stage with another artist, and he suggested Jim Cuddy.”
“Jim’s got this beautiful voice,” says Parent. “I’ve got this baritone thing going and he’s got the higher-pitched voice, and I think it’s going to make a nice mix.”
Leclerc doesn’t see these kinds of complex reimaginings of the work of pop and rock artists — which involve an average six to eight weeks of orchestral writing on his part — as a challenge so much as an invitation to exploration.
“Each artist is particular in their own way,” he explains. “I’m kind of fresh when I look at (the artist and the music) at first, before I start to write, and then I try to imagine what the best transposition of that work would be, but in a symphonic environment.
“There’s always a shock (for the artist) at first. It’s very surprising when you hear your own music that you wrote, that you recorded, and someone else comes in and says, ‘Hey, this is how I see it with an orchestra.’ ”
Parent is very much looking forward to experiencing that shock, as it were.
“I have no idea how it’s going to be onstage,” he says. “I’m so used to having musicians I can improvise with. I can’t turn around and say, ‘OK, give me three more bars here and, you know, let’s do it in G instead!’ I don’t work with charts and (the OSM) are really pro, finetuned. They’re like a school of fish, or swallows — one moves and they all move together. I’m just happy to be here, and these days we all need a bit of happiness.”