La Récréation & Les Arques

I've already mentioned my meal at La Récréation, a charming restaurant set in a former schoolhouse in the tiny hamlet of Les Arques, and probably my favorite among a group of very memorable meals. The food was marvelous, as would be expected, and we were outside on their patio on a lovely, flawless late May day in the south of France ... in other words: heaven.

The service was also noteworthy. From my seat at our round table I was perhaps the only person able to observe some of the behind-the-scenes choreography that brought the food to our group. Far from where we were seated I spotted a server with a tray of food for us, and he lingered a bit before approaching our table, which I thought a little odd, until I saw what he was up to: he was waiting for his colleague, who had his own tray for us.

Only when both were "in place" would the servers approach our group as a pair, striding briskly and taking opposite sides of the table, wordlessly (but with big smiles!) placing the appropriate dish in front of the appropriate person. They did this with absolutely no flourish at all, nearly invisibly, as if to call no attention to themselves but instead to encourage our focus on the plate and the drama to be found there....

After dinner, Les Arques was a sweet little place to take a walk. Back in the Thirties the Russian artist Ossip Zadkine bought a summer home there; today it's a museum devoted to his work. We couldn't get in (remind me why Mondays are the universal day off in the museum trade?) but we could admire some of his sculpture around the house and the church, along with the brightly-shuttered house itself and some of the nearby buildings....









Across the street from La Récréation, someone seemed to think the only way to compete with Zadkine was to paint their shutters a manically cheerful, nearly hallucinogenic blue, and I salute them!

Le Château de Bonaguil

As our two-car caravan wound its way through rural southwestern France, always just a little behind schedule for the next gig, or meal, or other meal, or wine-tasting, or meal (some gigs too...), and with our lead-footed leader Gretchen setting a formidable pace that suggested she’d either “gone native” or was contemplating a slot in the upcoming Le Mans, us white-knuckled passengers, faces stuck to the windows, would spot through the blur some momentary glimpse of ... well: fairy tale stuff. Fanciful and possibly unreal. So that you’d say to the guy next to you, “Did you see that?,” just to make sure your brain wasn’t spinning daydreams and mirages and cloud formations (and the Cahors wine you had during lunch) into pretty things to look at out the window.

After a few days, when it became clear that every impossibly pretty thing we saw while tooling around in the south of France was indeed an Actual Tangible Part of Objective Reality, we stopped asking each other “Did you see that?” — until the final day of the tour, as we were heading toward the Château de Bonaguil near Fumel.

This was another one of those rural, backroad, single-little-lane-with-two-way-traffic jaunts through forests and hills and wine country, with the occasional sudden stop to literally let the chicken cross the road. I think it was Matt, sitting in the coveted front seat Passenger-of-Honor-and-Lord-of-the-Legroom spot in the van (“so this is the front seat,” he said as he belted himself in for his one and only moment of glory), who first spotted something out the window even more magical and unreal than the 417 previous magical and unreal somethings, and said, “Man! Did you see that?!”

Yeah, I caught a momentary glimpse of it off in the distance before it was obscured by trees: it looked like a castle. Not a REAL castle, of course: it actually appeared to be a watercolor portrait of the perfect storybook castle. You could tell it wasn’t real because of the colors: tans and browns and grays and oranges in proportions that were just a wee bit over the top — too whimsical to be real. Hell of a nice portrait, however.

Of course, it turns out that the Bonaguil Castle was real after all. And is a place where anyone suddenly becomes a genius photographer: you can pretty much just randomly point your camera in any direction on the castle grounds and snap a beautiful, calendar-ready shot.

Up close you can see that the castle is in beautiful ruins, and I wondered just what battle was lost that led to its present condition. I found out later it was the French Revolution: it was plundered and busted up and destined to be entirely destroyed, before former servants of the place stepped in to keep intact what they could.

Here are some of my genius shots of Bonaguil:

Le canard dans tous ses états

Red wine and olive oil form the basis for most versions of the "Mediterranean diet." Locals in Quercy and the Lot Valley, in the heart of southwest France, point out that there's a third key component for healthy eating and long life: duck fat. It's entirely possible, even likely, that a meal without foie gras will kill you.

(As it turns out, duck is not the only specialty of the region's cuisine -- walnuts are another. So walnuts are also probably vital to life as we know it.)

I'll just say now that I have never ever EVER eaten as well as I did with my Blue Lake compatriots in the south of France. Ever. I've never experienced such a silky foie gras that just melted in my mouth like butter...

[Brief aside: For about 15 years I was a committed vegetarian. There are certain things I'd never eat even today, even as I've lapsed beyond all salvation: veal for instance. And human flesh. (Unless it was prepared in some ridiculously scrumptious way...)

However, even when I was a committed veg, I became uncommitted during my trips to France. I tried once, long ago, on a visit to Paris, to be true to the vegetarian principles I held at the time. It sucked. I had to forgo so many of the things I'd learned to love as a poor pre-vegetarian college kid bumming around the city. I could think of plenty of sound ethical reasons not to eat, for example, a croque-monsieur -- but when it came right down to it, I ate it. When I got back to Minneapolis, I was once again a committed vegetarian. I can't really explain it either, but I am large, I contain multitudes, yada yada.

I don't think you can really "get" some place unless you eat what the natives are eating. For me it's a big part of the cultural experience of a place, and unique cuisines are often for me some of the most memorable aspects of travel. I *know* that foie gras is ... wrong ... I also ate it and was *astonished* by it every single day I was in the Quercy...]

Gretchen had lined up some memorable restaurants for our tour:

La Terrasse, in Grezels: This was our first lunch of the tour, and am I really remembering correctly that it lasted nearly 4 hours? (In fact, after a lunch like that, can *anything* be remembered correctly?) We didn't order anything: lunch is a set menu; once you arrive, the wine and courses start appearing. It's a beautiful thing. The only decision we needed to make was whether the water was supposed to go in the big glass and the wine in the small glass, or vice-versa. It was a test we'd fail over and over again during the tour.

It was also my first duck of the trip, but oy-vey it wouldn't be my last -- in fact, if you're a duck, please make it a point to consider the entire Quercy region a no-fly zone. I'm serious about this. Just don't risk it. Fly somewhere else. You *will* be eaten, and you *will* be delicious.

Auberge l'Imhotep, in Albas: Fritz and Gretchen discovered this place entirely by accident; they walked in one day to check it out and jazz superstar James Carter was playing on the stereo. This is an extremely unlikely thing to hear as background music in the southwest of France. Now, Fritz and Gretchen have a hardcore personal history with James, as do I -- in fact, mine is even harder and corer -- and it turned out James was the owner's favorite. Jazz is the music he loves, and it's what plays in the background -- if clients don't like it, they can leave, he says. After a marvelous meal (duck was involved), we played a little informal concert: Tom and I grabbed our horns, Matt hauled over his bass, Tim swung with nothing but a snare drum, while Steve fingered air piano with Cecil Taylor intensity. In a warm and wine-cheered post-meal haze we played, between burps, All The Things You Are and Bye Bye Blackbird. (Looking back now, I realize we should have played All The Things You Ate and Bye Bye Duck...)

(A little more than a week later, in Paris, I mentioned to Deb what a weird name "Imhotep" was -- I mean, I wonder where the hell *that* came from, what a strange and not very French word -- and she said "You mean Imhotep the ancient Egyptian chancellor-priest?" I replied, "Well, yeah, of course there's THAT Imhotep, I mean, DUH!, but still, you know, it's a funny word." This is what life is like with Deb, who is all-knowing and all-powerful, except when it comes to current events...)

Restaurant Claude Marco, in Cahors: this was, I believe, the first meal where I actually took a picture of the plate set before me -- it was just that beautiful. Now, I'll admit that I felt a wee bit self-conscious snapping a photo of the entrée: we were in a lovely and fancy Michelin-starred establishment, and I realized there was a danger that taking a shot of the food on the plate might make me look like one of the Beverly Hillbillies marveling over the "Cee-ment Pond," but it was so dag-burn purdy that I just couldn't help myself.



La Récréation in Les Arques: this was probably my favorite meal of them all. It wasn't just the food, which was transcendent: my entrée, the titular canard served every which way, is the photo that begins this post. The service, the setting, and everything else was magical.

Hostellerie le Vert in Maroux: it was our last night in the Quercy, and I felt like I'd cut enough of a path of destruction through the resident duck population, so I ordered the beef, saignant. Glorious.

After this night, Deb and I would be in Paris. We never had a meal that could match *anything* I'd eaten at these places. But still we ate very well...

A little-known fact about Matt Heredia

As I've mentioned in a previous post, Matt was added to the tour very late in the game, and as a consequence did not undergo the extensive vetting process that Blue Lake typically puts its touring faculty through: the cheek swabbing and complete genetic history; the bracing and increasingly specific body cavity searches; the spelling test.

As a result, Matt brought along some unexpected "baggage" that none of us knew about until the tour was well underway. Matt called it "the troubles": he'd say "I'm sorry guys, but I can feel 'the troubles' coming again." The initial onset was slow, but when Matt was fully in their throes he'd become violent, foaming at the mouth and lashing out at anyone (or anything) near, all the while ranting incoherently. A true Ugly American.



Fritz and Gretchen had a special chamber constructed, with bars on the windows, where we'd put Matt whenever the troubles hit him. He'd stay locked in there, no danger to himself or to others, until the troubles subsided. We each had to take turns cleaning the chamber after one of his episodes (Matt was too weak by then to do it himself) -- an extremely unpleasant task, and really the only unappealing part of the tour, as far as I was concerned.

Fritz Stansell Broke My Camera

I bought this camera right before the trip, a Canon PowerShot SD780, and it's chock full of features I haven't explored and will probably never use. One of the most interesting things it does is that it somehow "reads" people's faces, and if their eyes are closed, it won't take the picture.

This is for real. I tested it by asking subjects to close their eyes while I snapped the picture -- when they did so, I'd push the button, and ... NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN!

Now, folks respond to this in 2 ways: some folks say "Wow, that's really cool!"; others say "Man, that's kind of creepy." (There is actually a third response I've heard: "Wow, that's really cool -- but don't you think it's kind of creepy?")

I can't really show you this feature in action, since by definition if one's eyes are closed it won't take the picture, and no picture equals no documentation. So I can only tell you about it and hope for the best.

Also, unfortunately, once you start talking about this, people start, you know, *thinking* about their eyes as you're taking the shot, resulting in photos like this:



Or like the following, where Deb and Tim look like okay-but-not-entirely-lifelike models from the Puy l'Évèque Wax Museum:



It also results in a photograph's subject, once armed with this information, having veto power over your photographing them. In the following gig photo from the Hotel Henry soirée (more on that later), when Tim saw I was trying to get a shot of him playing he shut his eyes and put me out of business! Only when he opened his eyes could I get the shot:



I was explaining this cool and somewhat creepy feature to Fritz and Gretchen at the Restaurant Claude Marco in Cahors, and Fritz immediately squeezed his eyes shut and said "Prove it!" I point the camera at him and ... it takes the shot!



WTF!?

Okay, okay, I said, let's try this again, it must've been the ... the ... what? I have no idea -- but I can assure you, if you shut your eyes, um, properly, it won't take the shot. Or shouldn't. Unless you're cheating somehow.

Fritz unambiguously shuts his eyes, I squeeze the shutter and ... have this lovely portrait as a result:



I finally found an explanation in the manual for what was going on -- there's an asterisk in the section describing Canon's Face Detection Technology (tm), and in small print at the bottom of the page it reads, and I quote: "*Does not work with Fritz Stansell."

Saint-Cirq Lapopie, Part 2

Tom's camera had some sort of exotic newfangled memory card that wasn't stocked in local shops, along with a lavish 512K of memory -- so Tom took one shot and then had no more actual use of his camera.

From that moment, for anyone unlucky enough to be holding an actually functional camera near him, Tom would -- like a frustrated out-of-work movie director watching some neophyte make a hash out of a film script he loved -- point out the shots you should and would be taking if you had his photographic eye. Here he shows Steve the shot he's missing:



Steve, on the other hand, was an "early adopter" into digital camera technology, and as a result had a camera that was able to shoot one pixel (but of such a vivid color!) every 3 seconds or so. His camera was of sufficiently early vintage that it didn't record video, but it DID record audio!! -- and if he'd been recording himself while shooting, here's what it would have sounded like, as he'd point his camera at some fleeting moment of pure French beauty and then waited an interminable period of time while his camera emotionally prepared itself to actually take the shot:

"[click] DAMN! C'mon. C'MON! DAMN!"

Here's more from Saint-Cirq Lapopie:

Saint-Cirq Lapopie, Part 1

I read somewhere that Saint-Cirq Lapopie was voted most picturesque village in France. The bottom line here is that no matter where you live, Saint-Cirq Lapopie is prettier, and you're just going to have to deal with it.

(After the quintet visited, I told Deb that she should check it out. A couple of days later she had. I asked her about her take on the village, and she kind of sniffed that she wasn't really impressed, it was just a bunch of shops and whatnot. Later still, while we were in Paris, she starts showing me various items of clothing and jewelry and tchotchkes that she'd bought. "Where did you get that?" I'd ask as she'd pull out yet another pricey looking item, and invariably the answer was "Saint-Cirq Lapopie." It turns out that for Deb Saint-Cirq Lapopie *really was* nothing but a bunch of shops -- so I offer the following pictures as evidence of the kinds of things she might have seen if she'd been able to wrench herself from the stores...)






Gigantofreak Matt terrorized the tiny villagers.


Tim Froncek for Miracle Gro!

The Cats

(Left to right: me, Matt Heredia, Steve Talaga, Tim Froncek, Tom Stansell.)

The Blue Lake Faculty Jazz Quintet consists of folks who, for the most part, have taught at the camp at some time or other over the years. Some of these guys (Tom!) I've known for, oh, nearly 30 years; others (Matt!) were brand-spanking-new to me.

The rundown:

Tom is one of my best friends and favorite saxophonists. He played tenor for this tour, and he's got a beautiful sound, laid-back time feel, etc. (He must be a "natural," since he professes to almost never practicing -- though he plays with enough groups in Western Michigan to keep his reeds wet.) Tom's one of my favorite folks to play with -- we have contrasting styles (many's the time when I've played my butt off, only to have Tom follow me saying a whole 'nother thang and showing me what I wished I'd played...), but I think our approaches, while different, are complementary -- and I hope that just maybe I have occasionally inspired Tom half as much as he inspires me every time he plays.

Tim, the musical director of the quintet, is, quite simply, a world-class drummer who just happens to live in Western Michigan. I've worked with Tim over a couple of decades at the camp, and I'm fortunate to have some recordings of Tim playing my tunes at Blue Lake concerts, which I've used from time to time to introduce my material to new groups. Here's the thing: *every* drummer I've asked to listen to this or that track that's got Tim on it has come back to me: "Who IS that guy?"

I first met Steve a couple of years ago in Grand Rapids, when I was helping out Blue Lake by playing tenor in a symphonic band (yes, it was a really big band, but not the sort I usually play with... I tried to make sure to scoop less...). They'd arranged to have a jazz quintet play at an after-rehearsal party (hey, Tom was in that quintet too! -- in fact, come to think of it, it was three-fifths of this group...) and that's where I met Steve. Beautiful cat, and great player and composer -- I'm looking forward to posting some of his tunes (with his permission!) after we have our July get-together at Blue Lake...

Okay, Matt's story is flat out the coolest story of the tour. First, as I had noted in the previous post, I'd expected to meet the guys in Paris and that we'd all fly together to Toulouse, but that didn't happen. However, the only guy I didn't know in the group was the bassist, Tom Knific -- but I knew a fair bit about him, because I'd helped put together the promotional materials for the group, including assembling the photo montage that was used on the posters (sorry about that, Steve: the only photo they gave me of you was Really Dorky, but I did with it what I could...).



So I knew his bio, and knew pretty darn well what he looked like: it's a certain form of intimacy when you Photoshop a guy, scaling him and cropping him and generally messing with him. You get to know the guy.

(I mean, of course, in a totally superficial, not-really-knowing-the-guy-at-all kind of way. What I really mean is: you get to know the dude's head size, since you're making a montage of the cats and you need to scale everybody's head to be more or less the same size, lest one of the guys stands out as some sort of encephalitic freak. [No offense intended toward any actual encephalitic freaks reading this. Some of my best friends are encephalitic freaks...] [Just kidding, please get away from me.] So anyways, I'd really had to monkey with Tom K's head size, since he was also holding his bass and I wanted to get the proportions just right... Bottom line: I *really* knew what the dude's head looked like, even though I'd never met him...)

When I got to the Stansell's place in Vire-sur-Lot for our first get-together in France on the night of our arrival, there were the folks on the poster! But wow, Tom K really looked ... different. Younger. And really ... different. I just figured his head looks ... really different ... in photos.

Turns out, it wasn't Tom! The Real Tom Knific had a family emergency at the last possible moment, and as a result had to back out of the tour. Tim and Steve were suddenly faced with having to find a Fake Tom Knific in a day or two. To help clarify the situation: they had to find a replacement who...

1) Had to be a great player.

2) Had to be able to drop everything for a week on almost no notice...

3) Had to have a valid, ready-to-go passport.

Tim was left calling folks on the weekend before Tuesday's departure for France. Here's what you might have heard at Tim's house:

"Hey, man, how you doing? Uh-huh. Cool... Say, would you be available to leave Tuesday and spend a week in France?"

But you had to wonder: anyone who actually *could* leave like that -- would you really want them in the band?

Turns out, in the case of Matt, you would. Matt was studying at Julliard, but he took a pause for a while to fulfill his lifelong dream of working at a Subway franchise somewhere in the depths of Western Michigan. Although he slung a mean Chipotle Southwest Sauce (tm), he walked even meaner bass lines and swung his ass off. And his manager at Subway was tolerant of his taking a week off to tour the south of France with a jazz quintet. (I mean, the guy was the manager at a Subway: he'd heard 'em all...)

So: on a Sunday night Matt was asked if he could go, and on Tuesday he was IN FRANCE! Work hard at Subway and someday you too might get to ... oh never mind, it's not going to happen to you.

At any rate, these guys were great fellas to tour with and travel with and hang with, and I can sincerely say it was a pleasure and I wish I could see them and play with them more often!

Puy l'Évèque

Puy l'Évèque is an achingly pretty little medieval town in the Lot River valley of southwest France, a couple of hours north of Toulouse. When we arrived in Toulouse, we'd expected to meet Gretchen, who'd lead us in a rental car caravan to Puy l'Évèque and our destination there, the Hotel Henry.

Unfortunately, something went wrong. We knew there was a problem as we left Paris: the other members of the quintet were not on the plane, even though we were supposed to meet them at Charles De Gaulle and fly in together. Had their flight from Detroit been delayed? We figured Gretchen would fill us in on our arrival.

At the Toulouse airport, however, there was no sign of Gretchen. We had her paged, with no response. We had no phone number for her. We were on our own.

This should have been No Big Deal. Deb's a near-native French speaker; we'd both spent lots of time in Europe, and have gotten ourselves into and out of plenty of jams over the years as "sophisticated world travelers."

However, all we knew was the name of our hotel: Hotel Henry. I couldn't remember what town it was in! I'd so taken it for granted that Gretchen would hold our hands and lead the way that I'd done absolutely none of the kind of obsessive planning and plotting and fulminating I often do over stuff like this.

That, plus a very-last-minute decision to leave the laptop at home — I mean, jeez, we're spending 2 weeks in France: to hell with the internet! Why bother with the hassle of traveling with a computer that we'd be idiots to use when ... you know, France was all around us and stuff.

Unfortunately, all of my information on the Hotel Henry was on that laptop...

We went to the information desk at the airport, where our pitoyable predicament ("All we have is the name 'Hotel Henry,' but we're sure it's in France!") made us look exactly like the Moron Americans abroad that I used to tut-tutt at under my breath as I'd watch their clueless, would-be-hilarious-if-they-weren't-Representing-America antics in train stations and shops across Europe.

After a delightful interlude with the Information Lady, who saw us as the idiots we were, and who wanted to make sure we were aware that she was aware that we were fools, and who then, drunk with power, seemed poised to withhold the info on the hotel once she'd tracked it down, BECAUSE IT ONLY HAD TWO STARS!! — "I can imagine some friend might say 'Oh it's the best place,' but you can surely do better..." — anyways, I put her in a choke-hold and she sputtered out "Puy l'Évèque."

I won't recount the jet-lagged 3+ hour drive, the wrong turns, and the rest, because: IT WAS ABSOLUTELY WORTH IT! The place is flat-out gorgeous, Deb was smitten, I was relieved, and: here are some photos....