How refreshing then to anticipate a concert on Friday March 7 in Civray’s fine municipal theatre of straight-up songs performed by straight-up good musicians – Emmanuel Pariselle on squeezeboxes and whistle and Didier Oliver on violin and bagpipes. Both these guys have travelled extensively and worked with the very best Celtic and Cajun musoes. When they say ‘world music’, they mean more than a lick of hip-hop and a snort of reggae. They mean fiery jigs and old laments sung in almost-lost Bordeaux dialects. When they say ‘pub folk’, they don’t mean the constipated Elizabethan knock-offs of the Witches – they mean that stuff we got a whiff of down in Titanic’s steerage, all bodhran and sweat.

But the dice roll and sometimes come up snake eyes.

Poor Pariselle has been stricken with a sciatic malady (he’ll go under the knife this week) and hobbles becrutched onstage, grace à morphine. He’s not going to able to do the whole concert. Accordions are heavy and playing them is strenuous.

But off they go and the music is forthright, muscular, and played with an open honesty that disguises its complication. If there is a sin, it is over-repetition – but this isn’t sophisticated baroque in the sense that its audience is presumed to be bored rigid after hearing two consecutive verses and a chorus; this is flesh-and-bones in the folk tradition. Pariselle’s (own-built, it must be added – he has a wide reputation as a builder of instruments) accordion has a surprisingly strong bottom end and some of his sonorous bass notes rock the theatre. But Oliver’s delicate and articulate pipework is a joy – he plays the Italian and French bagpipes, both smaller and less shrill than the Scottish, and with gracenotes reminiscent more of the Spillaine’s performances on the Irish pipes. His violin work soars effortlessly – his bowing is largato, strokes long on the horsehair – but his left hand is incisive and (devoutly to be wished) in spot-on tune.

When the two of them sing the sad harmonies of a sud-ouest French wedding march, someone a few seats away from me is heard to sob. How much greater an accolade than clapping.

But the heavy squeezebox takes its toll, and Pariselle retires. However, Julian Biget, a young guitarist heard on Pariselle’s ‘Fi de l’eau’ CD, takes his place and treats us to an exposition of interior chord and triad work on his electroacoustic Martin not often seen outside classical guitar circles. His stripped-down guitar and close-mouthed singing of a Cajun rework of ‘Lily of the West’ (Creole girl on Lake Pontchartrain – that’s New Orleans) raises a tsunami of applause.

A surprise guest is Pariselle’s wife Miriam, also a talented accordionist – although not quite in her husband’s league. Nor is her singing voice really strong or sure enough to tackle the haunting Belgian love song she attempts (she told me later that she couldn’t hear the monitors properly).

However, with Pariselle safely back onstage and all four musicians cycling briskly through the hornpipes ‘Humours of Tullycrine’ and ‘Mickey Callaghan’s Pipe’, all’s well that ends pretty well, with a strong call for an encore. It’s a shame that such a fine musical occasion had to end with Pariselle lying in the dark on the backstage dressing-room floor, waiting for the pain to ease.

by Dave Blake