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Region pulls singer-songwriter home

When your mother is an opera singer and your father is a gold miner, you're going to experience some differences in your upbringing.
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Singer-songwriter Madeline Tasquin is coming back to her Cariboo home region for a set of concerts. She’s been living the past nine years in the San Francisco area, honing her alternative jazz-folk sounds.

When your mother is an opera singer and your father is a gold miner, you're going to experience some differences in your upbringing.

The eclectic and technically proficient styles of music seem to be Madeline Tasquin's natural shrug in the direction of that mentally nomadic upbringing.

Another direction was north, for her. She spent her early childhood at Helen Dixon elementary school in Quesnel, and even when the family moved to the Lower Mainland to be closer to operatic opportunities for her mother, Tasquin kept close ties to the Cariboo region. She still has family located in this region and visits usually on an annual basis.

The ties must be tight because for the better part of a decade, those trips were made all the way from the San Francisco Bay area. She's been there ever since obtaining the degree in architecture she never pursued.

"As soon as I graduated, music reeled me right back in," said the singer-songwriter on the verge of yet another trip back to her magnetic north.

"It's my first tour with a full band playing my music, but I also get to be inspired by the area, I get to hang out for awhile there. We arrive on Wednesday for a show at The Occidental in Quesnel, then a show in Dunster on the 5th is our last gig in the area, with a bunch of stuff in between, so for me that is a long time in my home region."

She and her band (the Madeline Tasquin Trading Company is the name of the caravan) have concerts in McBride, Williams Lake, the ArtsWells Festival and her appearance in Prince George is

Aug. 4 at a house concert.

Travel is her constant companion. Although settled in the central Bay Area in between the main core of San Francisco and Oakland, she moves around a lot. The reason she got there in the first place was because she was snowboarding near Harrison Hotsprings, met an Australian on the mountain she fell in love with, moved Down Under for six years, then grabbed a student exchange opportunity to complete her architecture degree at the University of California-Berkeley and, once she got there, she couldn't detach.

As a musician she has been to France, Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic and more. She said she's got Montreal circled on her touring bucket list but fears (in that wide-eyed wonder kind of way) she'll latch onto it and be unable to leave, at least for awhile. Not that she's trying to leave her heart in San Francisco.

"I really fell in love with the diversity of the Bay Area," she said. "You can find any type of music on any day of the week, you have a lot of ways to spread your wings musically and be challenged as well. You have to be prolific to build an audience here and put yourself all-out there, it is demanding, but a very community-oriented place. There's lots of cross-pollination and collaboration among musicians and other styles of artists.

"Artists and musicians support each other and look out for each other here. But I am a country-born Fraser River girl and in a way I notice that about myself. That does have a role to play in how I think and what moves my heart and inspires my spirit."

Water is running through her mentalities right now. Perhaps it is living by one of the world's great oceanic bays, undrinkable in a drought stricken California gasping for a fountainhead.

Perhaps it is thinking about being home, where water, at the moment anyway, is abundant to the point of ridiculous, but under the threat of climate uncertainty.

These themes populate her latest album, due to land this fall and already incorporated into her live sets today.

"I wouldn't call myself an activist but I recognize that we are reaching a critical time when people are saying something about the state of our communities and our world and putting their foot down, and it is somewhat expressing the obvious that our water resources are not healthy because of human activity, we have control over that, and we need to do it," she said. "We need our oceans to be alive and people need to have access to that sustenance for drinking and for growing food and the needs we all have in our lives no matter where on the planet you live."

She could live anywhere on a significant portion of the earth's landmass and get along fluently. She is fully French-English bilingual, and she uses this in her music which, technically, is a third language without words.

"Most of my French immersion was in Quesnel," said Tasquin (which, of course, for those with francophone cognition, is pronounced Tas-KAIN with an almost silent 'n'). "I lost it for awhile there, but somewhere along the line I started listening to Edith Piaf and that was a door into French chanson that I've been exploring ever since. And singing in French has done wonderful things for my singing, because you have to hold and shape your mouth and use your throat differently."

She could also work just about anywhere, since her singing profession and her architecture education could both be put to use, although she has never applied her degree to making her living.

She is aware that Prince George, for instance, has only a fraction of the number of architects it once did.

"I think if I was to ever realize my dream of living by a river in a beautiful shack with another shack for my grand piano, I would definitely design my own place," she said. "I'm writing a jazz opera right now, so I'm thinking about set design and building part of that myself. It's an idea that's been incubating for some time and ideas finally started to leak out. In terms of architecture in my music, I use my degree all the time."

Her house concert is at 5508 Moriarty Place, the Rader residence.

Tickets are $20 for the 7 p.m. show, and there is an optional 5:30 pot-luck dinner so bring food to contribute if you wish to partake in that as well. Tasquin will also have music for sale. It is slated for a backyard performance, if the weather is agreeable, so also bring whatever blankets and lawnchairs you wish.

RSVP by email to rader@unbc.ca.