Songs of seven sisters
The women of Madrigaïa return with sophomore album
John Kendle

Madrigaïa is a French-Canadian world-music vocal ensemble from St. Boniface made up of seven young women ranging in age from 32 to 22.

The group has been together for six years and had its current lineup for nearly three. Its members have become, as they say, “like sisters.”

Thus Madrigaïa’s second album is happily called Pléaides, after the seven daughters of Atlas who were metamorphosed into the stars by Zeus. The seven sisters even have a home in the night sky, the Pléaides star cluster, just above and to the right of Orion.

Certainly Annick Brémault, Sarah Dugas, Ariane Jean, Marie-Claude McDonald, Dominique Reynolds, Brigitte Sabourin and Andrina Turenne have no qualms about “reaching for the stars.”

Pléaides is a mature, accomplished effort, an album that takes Madrigaïa even further than its 2002 effort, Viva Voce, which won a Canadian Independent Music Award for best world music recording.

In the three years since that album, Madrigaïa has added Reynolds to its lineup, lost Brémault for a while (she taught English in Japan) and toured the globe — visiting France and, most recently, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in 2004.

The result of all this activity, travel and togetherness is an energy evident in the group’s live performances, as well as an even greater understanding of the musical traditions and genres which inform the music of Pléaides.

The album’s liner notes credit writers and arrangers from Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, France and Poland, while the percussion of accompanists Christian Dugas and Daniel Roy fuses elements of Middle Eastern, African, Caribbean and South American beats.

“The group has really gelled together in the last couple of years,” McDonald says. “Ever since we went to South America last March, there’s been an energy and a coming together that has been growing ever since.

“Musically, the vocal arrangements are very collective, and more and more so as we move forward as a group.”

Reynolds adds that Madrigaïa’s material is drawn from a variety of sources, including right here at home, as Ariane Jean and Daniel Roy contributed material to the recording.

“Other stuff has happened kind of organically on the road, where people have shared with us,” she says. “The (material) comes from all over, really.”

When not rehearsing intensively for tours or performances, the women in Madrigaïa routinely get together weekly to sift through ideas, work on arrangements and just sing, really.

“But lately there’s been so much business to take care of that we’ll talk business for an hour and forget that we have to sing,” Reynolds laughs.

The past year has indeed been busy for the septet. The group began writing funding applications last summer, did pre-production with producers Don Benedictson and Benoit Morier in November, then began recording last January at Benedictson’s studio in Roseisle, Man., before moving into the city.

So intense was the work that the original release date of May 2005 was postponed when the group realized it would have to rush to finish the project.

“Because of the amount of time and effort and money we were putting it into this, we wanted it to be the best thing it could be, ” Reynolds says. “So we had to re-evaluate, did an about-face and pushed (the launch) to September. But even now we’re pushing things.”

In the end, though, Pléaides is that rarest of beasts — a vocal world-beat album that sounds crisp and fresh and loses none of the essence of live performance. One of the reasons may be the fact Benedictson and Morier chose to record the singers in groups of two and three, rather than bring all seven together around a microphone, as they did with Viva Voce.

Onstage, Pléaides will be presented as a near-theatrical production directed by Jean-Stéphane Roy, a rising star on the Montreal theatre scene who met Madrigaïa while working in St. Boniface at Le Cercle Molière.

“He said he dreamed he would work with us, that we would be part of his artistic life,” McDonald grins.

Roy has been working with the girls since December, even before they entered the recording studio together and made something new.

“We’ve been rehearsing over the past 10 months for this CD release, doing an intense week here and an intense week there,” Reynolds says. “I’m so proud of us — that we’re devoting that much of ourselves to this show.”