Montreal International Jazz Festival | The heart warmed by the friends of Jean-Marc Vallée

A tribute to Jean-Marc-Vallée? It is rather a tribute to the music that his friends had imagined with Mixtapepresented Thursday evening at the opening of the 44^e edition of the Montreal International Jazz Festival.

It is Jean-Marc Vallée’s voice that we first hear in the loudspeakers, because it will be him, even in his absence, who will play the role of master of ceremonies. “Music makes you want to love, to dream, to do something, to step on the accelerator,” he says, before explaining that he wanted, from one film to the next, to offer a playlist to moviegoers.

The director had barely finished speaking when Joseph Marchand burst into a very Floydian guitar solo, carried by very Great Gig in the Sky. Jean-Marc Vallée was a child of rock and this evening would not only be a celebration of the filmmaker’s legacy, but above all an ode to the transformative power of this music of indocility and distortion, which has invested so many young people, like this was his case, of the conviction that the world belongs to them.

Beyries would be the first invited on stage, for two songs, including Harvest Moonabout which Jean-Marc Vallée has already said that if it had to be music, it would be the choirs which, at the 51^e second, illuminate this Neil Young classic. We understand it and the voice of the one who co-signed (with Alex Vallée) the artistic direction of the show also invited us to nestle there.

Although a musical career will not be in the cards for Alex Vallée, the son of the tribute, following his interpretation ofI’m Losing You of John Lennon, the intimate images of Jean-Marc Vallée rocking his son, still a baby, will have given this moment the necessary tenderness so that the emotion quietly surfaces, then never leaves us again.

Images like this, of Jean-Marc Vallée with family or on a trip, would reappear throughout the evening, as if to remind us that the loss of a major artist is first and foremost, for those close to him, the loss of a being without whom he Existence, momentarily, seems as absurd as a life without music.

In the cinema of our heads

The first big stir of the show will belong to Pierre-Philippe Côté, alias Pilou, thanks to a stripped-down version of the redeemer River by Leon Bridges, which featured on the series’ soundtrack Big Little Lies. “We could spend hours talking about the song. Cold Little Heart » by Michael Kiwanuka, we then heard Jean-Marc Vallée exclaim, and the same could be said of the masterful rereading of River by Pilou.

In directing, Marc-André Grondin had taken the gamble of only sparingly evoking his friend’s cinema, a judicious decision insofar as even if some of these songs will forever remain associated with certain great moments of the seventh art, they belong first and foremost to our own cinema, to the cinema of our hearts and our most precious memories.

This could not be more true of the music of Alexandra Stréliski, to the sound of which so many Quebecers, so many people all over the world, experienced the pivotal scenes – love, birth, death – of the film of their lives.

As she sat down at her instrument, the pianist recalled sharing a fattoush salad with the director on their first date, before playing Earlier et departure. It was very beautiful and it was too short, like when the credits appear without us being ready for the view to end.

Then, because Vallée knew better than anyone how to make songs say new things that we thought we knew in every detail, the Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal sang, with the help of Stréliski, the most improbable reinterpretation of Creep by Radiohead. The quintessential anthem of adolescent self-loathing could hardly have been more beautifully disturbing.

Thank you music

Patrick Watson, for his part, revealed, before The Great Escapethat during his last conversation with Jean-Marc Vallée, they had promised to write a musical comedy together, a happiness of which fate deprived us by taking away the director on December 25, 2021 at the age of 58.

Then Elisapie kissed with all her usual grace the obligatory Crazy by Patsy Cline, and it was also a bit of Michel Côté that we were thinking about while everyone’s heads were nodding. Beyries offered Valléetaken from his most recent album Fire in the lilacsin which she cries for a friend “never around again, never here again, heading for the clouds”, which can only be described as a lie, because on Thursday Jean-Marc Vallée was there, everywhere.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Elisapie was already back with The old manson adaptation en Inuktitut de Wish You Were Herebecause many of us regret that this crazy diamond that was the creator of Flora Cafe and of Dallas Buyers Club stopped shining.

A tribute to Jean-Marc-Vallée? It’s more of a tribute to the music that his friends had imagined, time to warm their hearts and warm ours too. Saying thank you to music is perhaps, ultimately, just a more modest, and less tacky, way of saying thank you to life.