Jean Pierre Rasle Interviewed

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FOCUS ON Jean-Pierre Rasle

Jean-Pierre Rasle of The Cock and Bull Band talks to Simon Owen

Folk Revivals in England and France
Simon Owen: How do you come to be living in England?
Jean-Pierre Rasle: I first came to England as an assistant, I was working in a school in Staffordshire.
I was still studying then and I attended a course on folk life and customs which was run by the E.F.D.S.S. at Keele University, and from that I actually got the material for my French M.A. which was on the social aspects of folk music in England.
I didn’t realise at the time that the connection would run through, but that was my starting point. Then I forgot about it and went back to France. I was playing the seventies’ English ‘folk’ songs, I wasn’t playing French music at all then, partly because I didn’t even realise that I knew any.
Having finished my studies in France I came back to England to teach in 1973 and settled here for good.
Simon Owen: Is the way people grow up with folk music in France the same as it is here?
J-P.R. Not really. I realised when I came back to France in the seventies that there was a new folk movement beginning, but I was only vaguely aware of it. I am from Berry where there has always been a regional revival; but I didn’t think of it as folk music: it was my grandad’s music. I learnt bourrées from him, and for me they weren’t ‘folk’ music. It’s only many years after that I realised ‘I know that tune, I used to play it on the harmonica when I was seven!’
S.O. Do you find that that puts the music in a very much stronger cultural position?
J-P.R. Yes, and also because the original revival, instead of being a national one, like the E.F.D.S.S., was on a regional level. Moreover it was done while the tradition was still very much part of the community. My home town, Sancerre, is still a stronghold of Berry dance music and the local enthusiasts started collecting and reviving it in the early 1900’s. They just went down to the fields and got it from the farmers who had their own revival group there and then in the village — so it wasn’t a movement from Paris, or wherever.
S.O. So did you find the attitudes to traditional music over here very much different from those you had experienced in France?
J-P.R. Totally, there was nothing like folk clubs in France. This was a revelation to me, to be able to play so many times in front of an audience of people who wanted to hear the music.

S.O. Are folk clubs a sign that the tradition is wavering — the need to have a club to keep the thing going?
J-P.R. I’m not sure really. I wouldn’t say that the French tradition is particularly thriving; even if it was more alive there it was still very much on the fringe. It was actually frowned upon by the generation before me. After the Second World War it just wasn’t talked about, partly because it had been used by the French Government of Occupation … travail, famille, patrie!
The first traditional musician I met was Monsieur Ruols who made my pipes. He was a typical example because he played the pipes, the cabrette, before the Second World War and he probably started making them then. But he stopped altogether during the War partly because the Pétain Government didn’t allow dances since you were supposed to mourn France having been defeated.
The stigma attached to the folk-song that had been used for nationalistic purposes carried on into the fifties, and it was not until our generation started to ask where the instruments came from and how they were made that he started to make them again. So he had something like twenty-five years when he did very little.

S.O. Is there still a large number of very old instruments around?
J-P.R. Yes … there are loads of them about, which is partly why I think of France as the richest country for the number of types of different kinds of bagpipes. There are twelve to twenty different types, I suppose, and some of them within a very narrow geographical area — particularly the central part.

Workman-like Music
J-P.R. So I came to French music in a pretty roundabout sort of way. I was playing English folk music in France before I played French music and it was when I came back to France to do military service that I met M. Ruols and people who were playing this French folk music properly. Before that I dabbled in Irish music and Breton music. But I found that those musics didn’t gel with me — a matter of culture maybe — I just found that there were far more similarities between the southern English folk music and French, than between French and Breton, or between English and Irish. I felt an affinity with that sort of workman-like type of music — it was less flashy.
S.O. Are the techniques involved in southern English and French musics very similar, or is the similarity in the structures of the tunes more important for you?
J-P.R. I think the structures of the tunes are more important; there was a heavy early Victorian influence on both, which you can feel in the polkas, waltzes, mazurkas. With all these you can play a French one and an English one and their structure is sometimes very similar, although the style of playing is different. Often with The Cock and Bull Band we mix the two and don’t tell people which one is which and they don’t notice.
S.O. Do you find that more unites the two cultures than divides them?
J-P.R. Yes, definitely.

42 Chanter 43

S.O. So it doesn’t involve too much of a different way of thinking to play a set of English tunes and then a set of French tunes? J-P.R. I tended to be attracted by French tunes which had not got a very strong French stamp on them. We didn’t play very many bourrées because they’re specific to central France and can’t be used for anything else. But polkas, mazurkas, etc. can be shifted and used very successfully for English dances.

Instruments and Styles S.O. So I suppose the deeper you get in to the music itself, the more you find out about the instruments that are appropriate for it. J-P.R. Yes, I dabbled with the violin because I learnt it when I was a child, and then because I’d done a bit of Irish music, I played the tin whistle and eventually I came across that maker (M. Ruols) who made my first instrument. It took me a long while before I began to concentrate on pipes because it was a difficult instrument to take up and at the time nobody was around to teach me how to do it. The situation is very different now with the Bagpipe Society, but there was nothing like that then. If you didn’t play Irish or Northumbrian music there was nobody to teach you how to play pipes, except if you went into remote areas of central France. S.O. So you are largely self-taught? J-P.R. Yes, completely. The only thing I had to go by was an hour’s worth of cassettes from M. Ruols that I picked up when I went to see him a year after I’d had my pipes! S.O. But your style remains very much as it would have been in whatever the heyday of the tradition was? J-P.R. Yes, partly because he was the only one I had ever heard. I automatically copied his style — but I have absorbed many other influences since, and I wouldn’t say that my present style is particularly representative of the traditions at present, and neither are the instruments I use.

Cabrettes J-P.R. Originally the cabrette that I started with was droneless. S.O. So it had a dummy drone parallel to the chanter? J-P.R. Yes, except that I asked M. Ruols to bore it and reed it which was something that he didn’t really know how to do. I wasn’t the first one who’d asked him, but he’d never been successful, so it had to be mostly redone by my other maker, John Addison. S.O. So what prompted you to expand your collection? J-P.R. What happened was that originally I had two different chanters for the same bag. I had a D/G large one with a side drone that never worked at all, and a little one which was in A/D with a side drone which did work. I discovered later that the larger versions of cabrette usually have a dummy side drone because of interference with the vibrations. So you have to have the system of north-central France, of Berry, Nivernais, and Bourbonnais where the side drone and the chanter are parallel, but feeding separately into the bag. S.O. If both reeds poke up into the same chamber then they interfere with each other? J-P.R. Yes, if the chamber is the bag, that’s alright because the vibrations get lost. If the chamber is the same as the musette de cour’s with one feeding from the other then it doesn’t work. We tried and tried to make it work for me, but in the end John Addison built me that hybrid Bourbonnais to use my other larger cabrette chanter and drone — and it turned out to look very much like the cornemuse Bourbonnaise, but with bellows.

From Half-longs to Electronic Pipes S.O. And from those instruments you went on to half-longs? J-P.R. Yes. I was very aware that I was attempting to play English dance music on a French instrument. So I shopped around to find an English instrument that would possibly match the English dance tunes better. At the time, the only instrument that was remotely similar was a version of the border pipes. That was the only instrument available, so I started to use it. S.O. At which point do your electronic pipes come into the picture? J-P.R. This was during a hiccup in my career when I worked with The Albion Band. When I joined with another two members of The Cork and Bull Band, The Albion Band became much less electric and much more like a working dance band. As the band changed and went back to its electric style, I found myself slightly redundant playing acoustic instruments which couldn’t be tampered with very much, and I came across a weird contraption made in Scotland — the electronic pipes. So I used them for a while with The Albion Band, but there were lots of faults in the construction of the instrument that made it very difficult to use, partly because it had a Scottish tuning, so if you played it with fixed pitch instruments you were out of tune a lot of the time. Nevertheless, it was interesting because you could actually ‘bend’ the tune. I didn’t use it as an ersatz of Scottish pipes, but more as a synthesizer with bagpipe fingering. S.O. Did you find that traditionalists thought you were some sort of iconoclast? J-P.R. No, particularly because the instrument was actually sold to Scottish pipers, usually the older ones who couldn’t blow any more. . . . But it did raise a few eyebrows!

Musette de Cour and Musette Béchonnet S.O. You have acquired a few more pipes since then? J-P.R. I worked with those three sets for many years. Recently I started to look for a way of developing the range of material played on pipes and I came across that classical instrument, the musette de cour. I realised that there was a huge amount of wonderful music for this instrument which had been published in the 1700’s, so eventually I got hold of one.

S.O. Was it difficult to come by?
J-P.R. Yes, I think there are only about two or three makers, and it’s even more difficult to set up and to keep in tune, let alone play!
S.O. So your choice of instrument has been dictated by the types of music you wanted to play!
J-P.R. Very much so. I have tended to be untraditional in not sticking to one particular area, partly because the rest of my musical interests have led me to select instruments that are more and more versatile. That’s why I took up the musette de cour and the musette Béchonnet which is the most elaborate of the traditional French pipes – it is the one with the widest range and it’s nearly chromatic. On the musette Béchonnet you can perform a wider range of music than was originally intended for it, I suppose.
Each part of France has attempted to come to terms with the problem of the bass drone which is cumbersome and tends to stick out one way or another. So, one of the pipes from Auvergne, the cabrette limousine, has a three-part drone which reduces its length – and is held over the arm like the Northumbrian pipes. The cornemuse from Berry and Nivernais have the drone over the shoulder. The musette Béchonnet has a system not unlike the Breugel pipes with the bass drone tied to the neck of the bag and sticking forward. In this particular instrument the maker, Bernard Blanc, included a third, little drone, so when you clasp the instrument with your two hands you cup a side drone and there’s another little drone behind — this gives you three octaves, not unlike the border pipes in system.
This instrument overblows extremely easily to the next octave so it has at least an octave and a half plus the leading note. The bottom right-hand thumb is used to produce the flattened seventh (in the French system the flattened seventh is a tone below the key note which is the note with all the holes covered by the left hand down.)
S.O. Do many tunes make use of the overblowing facility?
J-P.R. Well, yes, . . . one of the strange things about the pipes from Berry is that around the end of the nineteenth century pipers tended to play, or at least attempt, military music, especially chromatic marches. To play these pieces was regarded as the height of achievement! Because we had conscription, every year the conscrits would be sent to the army and they would have a parade in the village with the pipers and hurdy-gurdy players leading them all through the village.
S.O. Is your home area a very strong hurdy-gurdy area?
J-P.R. Yes, Berry and Auvergne are two of the parts that have the hurdy-gurdy and pipes.
S.O. So very often pipes like yours would be used with the hurdy-gurdy?
J-P.R. Yes, but I think it’s probably a later development – a combination that comes from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

appel
J-P.R. Technically, I think I acquired the famous French system of playing known as rappel without realising it. In this system you never think of six fingers down as the key note, your left hand down has that function. The note a fourth below this key note is the note de rappel. This note constantly occurs in the music, and the pipers keep playing around it. This is one of the most interesting things about cabrette music. Apparently one of the reasons for its existence is that when they stopped boring the drone, because they started to play with the piano accordion and the drone was felt to clash with the changing harmonics, the piper would instinctively look for the missing drone note and by doing so he would play that note as if it were still there. In fact, if you listen to some of the recordings from the nineteen-twenties and thirties with Bouscatel you can actually hear a drone that isn’t there!

tuning and Ornamentation
S.O. Do you have much choice in fingering system, of closed, open, semi-closed?
J-P.R. Yes, in the sense that if you get hold of an old instrument it is always out of tune – at least as far as modern norms of intonation are concerned. I feel that a lot of the time the ornamentation that was used was really there to cover up the out of tune notes as much as anything else. So you end up with an extraordinary virtuoso like Bouscatel playing all those wonderful flurries of notes and if you listen carefully many of the notes are out of tune – to our ears.

from Fillip the Toad to Cock and Bull
S.O. When you settled in this country did you make a conscious decision to play in bands, or did it just happen?
J-P.R. I settled in Stony Stratford and there was a very lively folk scene there with lots of people playing with each other – forming and disbanding groups. I first joined a band which we called Fillip the Toad – apparently the name of an old medieval game. Even in those early days I had fairly strong ideas on arrangements and the sort of music I wanted to play. For example, as early as that we used to play the series of Gervaise branles which surfaced ten years later on the Shuffle Off album. I had arranged it at the time and just forgot about it and later we used it with The Albion Dance Band.
S.O. Did you get a good reception for the French music in those early days, since there couldn’t have been much of it around then?
J-P.R. I felt very wary of playing French material, partly because I didn’t like the idea of its novelty value. In The Cock and Bull Band we always played less French music than bands like Blowzabella and certainly Roshi. If anything we played it down. As a folk club band called Hemlock we used to do some French songs, but even then it formed only a very small proportion of our repertoire.

Chanter

S.O. And Hemlock led on to Cock and Bull . . . ?
J-P.R. Hemlock was a folk club band specialising in English and French music and songs. Then somebody suggested that we have a go at doing dance music, and nearly overnight we turned into a dance band and called ourselves The Hemlock Cock and Bull Band.
S.O. Where does the name Cock and Bull come from?
J-P.R. There are two pubs in Stony Stratford next door to each other, in fact they are connected by an arch. One pub is called The Cock and the other The Bull. They used to say that a story would travel from one pub to the other and in the process its meaning would get lost or confused - hence the saying about ‘cock and bull’ stories.
S.O. Has there been much variation in the line-up of the Cock and Bull Band?
J-P.R. No. We started with a line-up that has remained fairly similar to what it was recently except that we used euphonium before Paul Martin joined on acoustic bass.

The Albion Experiment
S.O. Did you carry on working with The Cock and Bull Band while you worked with The Albion Band?
J-P.R. Yes, we kept the two groups going in parallel. We just played less in The Cock and Bull Band while we carried out what somebody called ’the Albion experiment’. Most people said it wasn’t a very good idea - they couldn’t imagine a more unlikely combination than three members of The Cock and Bull Band and The Albion Band, but it showed me how not to do things - how not to play music! At one stage it all got very blurred. On Shuffle Off most of the material was written by Dave Whetstone and most of the traditional content was brought along by me. Much of it was like the usual Cock and Bull sound with a little electric thrown in. When our next Cock and Bull album came along we had to be influenced because in some ways we wanted a second L.P. to be what we would have wished Shuffle Off to have been if we’d had the control over it.

Some Wonderful, Unexpected Combinations
S.O. Do you find that you want to be in control or are you quite happy to . . . ?
J-P.R. No, I’ve always preferred to share with somebody else rather than take the lead. It’s taken me years before I considered being a solo performer. Partly because most of the tunes we did for dancing didn’t fit on the pipes, so I automatically became the person who did the harmonics. It’s only recently that I’ve started to select tunes purely for the pipes - with the right range, and this is when I started to work with Peter Stacey.
S.O. . . . which brings us up to date . . .
J-P.R. Yes - a sort of further development. We had that meeting at Newbury Festival, an improvised piper’s session, it sounded very interesting, something that hadn’t quite been done in that form.

S.O. The climate now is probably more amenable to it. People are more accustomed to hearing drone instruments.
J-P.R. That’s right. It’s lost a bit of its novelty value and people are taking it more seriously. We’ve discovered some wonderful, unexpected combinations of Spanish gaitas and cabrette, pipe and tabor and cornemuse, half-longs and sax
S.O. Any ideas as to where you are going next?
J-P.R. I’ve always tried to develop the sort of music that you can play on pipes - so there’s still a lot of room for experimenting, for improvising. Within the new line-up of Cock and Bull we now have Peter Lockwood playing synthesizer and sax, giving us a new way of handling pipe music.
S.O. Things are consolidating a bit now in the bagpipe world with the Society being formed.
J.P.R. Definitely. I think we’re moving in the right direction. People who start the pipes now are very lucky compared with ten or fifteen years ago. There are players who can teach each other and there’s a lot of sharing of ideas and techniques . . . that’s very promising.

The interview, which took place on September 16, 1986, was transcribed and edited by Peter Stacey.