1001 Est Cremazie

1001 Est Crémazie is less a school project than a small social miracle: an orchestra imagined, assembled and set loose by a flock of middle‑schoolers in 1975 who wanted to play music that sounded like the world rushing in around them. Jazz, rock, groove and pure adolescent bravado collided on the stage of Collège André‑Grasset for a show they dubbed “Rocking Grass,” a one‑off concert so overloaded with bodies and anticipation that the auditorium couldn’t contain it. People lined the corridors and spilled out to the main entrance as the band, anchored by teachers and animated by students, channelled the uninhibited energy of their time. Under the stunned gaze of several hundred spectators, something clicked: this wasn’t just an extracurricular; it was the sound of a generation in Montreal feeling the aftershocks of the Quiet Revolution and finding its own electric grammar.

From the embers of that night, Jean‑Yves Quesnel - then a socio‑cultural animator on campus, later a history teacher - saw an opening. If the orchestra could fill a hall, why not let it resonate beyond the walls? He rallied a few likeminded colleagues and, together with allies at Collège Édouard‑Montpetit, shepherded the ensemble from stage to studio. “Rocking Grass” became “Phono Grass” as the group occupied the college’s recording facilities, transforming a one‑time event into a long‑playing document of their collective moment. The sessions were as mischievous as they were motivated: Quesnel recalls hiding a recorder inside Benoît Sarrazin’s piano without telling him, capturing the future musicologist and professional pianist in full flight and only confessing after the fact. It is that mix of prankishness and purpose that runs through the grooves of 1001 Est Crémazie.

For Quesnel, the album “reflects the spirit of an era, the birth of modern Quebec, a renewed vitality” - the echoes of a Quiet Revolution that was “still rumbling and trying to be heard.” You can feel that in the way the record shrugs off rigid categories. Brass sections, rhythm players and budding improvisers dive into a repertoire that is part big‑band ambition, part after‑school experiment, part community workshop. The music doesn’t hide its rough edges: it wears amateur enthusiasm proudly, but uses that looseness as licence to ignore strict genre boundaries. This is a document of a school system in the midst of being decompartmentalized, of the newly formed Cégeps giving students space to think, play and organize on their own terms. Almost half of the participants would go on to professional lives in music or related fields, and you can hear why - the album hums with the sense that anything might be possible.

Amid the freewheeling set‑list, two originals stand out as emblems of that spirit: “Le roi muffé” and the widely celebrated “Bright moments.” The latter, propelled by an unusual pairing of piano and congas, became a quiet standard of its own, later resurfacing on the Canadian Racer compilation and earning a second life in DJ sets and hip‑hop productions. Producers and crate‑diggers were quick to recognize the latent funk in its percussive drum and conga breaks, folding those grooves into new, dance‑floor‑ready skeletons decades after the fact. It is precisely this ability to travel - from school auditorium to jazz reference compilation to sampled loop in a club - that underlines how far beyond “student band” status 1001 Est Crémazie really reaches.

Originally pressed in a tiny run of 500 copies, the album disappeared into the private ecosystems of alumni, teachers and a handful of curious collectors. Over time, those copies became coveted trophies among the most obsessive diggers of Canadian jazz‑funk and regional psych, a word‑of‑mouth secret passed like a rumour. Now, fifty years and several upside‑down lives later, 1001 Est Crémazie returns with a fresh mastering and a second chance at public life. For Quesnel, the reissue is as much about people as it is about sound: “May you get all the pleasure out of this long game that they had recording it!” he remarks, before breaking off to join a dinner surrounded by former colleagues and students. That image - friends around a table, bonds nurtured and aged like fine wine - is the perfect coda to this record: a testament to the power of music to turn a fleeting school project into a lifelong community, and a once‑local LP into a time‑capsule of modern Quebec’s awakening.