Quebec musician René Lussier is back for this year's silver-anniversary edition of the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville. (Martin Morissette/Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville)When Michel Levasseur created Victoriaville’s Festival International de Musique Actuelle in 1983, some thought him a masochist. A four-day radical music festival, in the dead of winter, halfway between Montreal and Quebec City, in a town best known for its hockey-stick factory and Sir Wilfrid Laurier summer home – it seemed like a recipe for disaster.

“Lots of people told us many things: that we should go to Montreal, or just go somewhere else,” Levasseur observed recently, laughing at the memory. “There have been so many difficulties over the years, but then I always thought that was part of life. I’ve always considered this kind of cultural action as a social and political action, too. I see it as a way to change things, as a way to bring out new ideas, to confront people and to sometimes create controversy.”

On the eve of its 25th anniversary edition (which begins May 15), the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville – or simply “Victo” – is still a bracing summit in the creative-music wilderness. Yet Victo has made Quebec’s Bois-Francs region, for at least a few days every year, a worldwide calling card for forward-thinking music.

Victo doesn’t just blur musical boundaries, it flattens them entirely. That’s the key to musique actuelle. The expression is a Quebec creation and a catch-all for the avant-garde — be it jazz, European improv, sludge metal or Asian techno.

“I think it’s one of the most important festivals of this kind of music, particularly in North America. But I think it holds its own in the world,” observes American pianist Marilyn Crispell, herself a Victoriaville favourite since the late ’80s. “‘Uncompromising’ is just the word that keeps coming to mind. Michel really wants to present a certain type of music, and he doesn’t want to water it down with anything else, to present other things to make the music he wants more palatable to people – he just puts it out there.”

While Victo isn’t alone, its peers are few – the Nickelsdorf festival in Austria comes to mind, as does Mulhouse in France. New York City’s Vision Festival sometimes comes close, and in Canada there are like-minded pockets within the Vancouver International Jazz Festival and the smaller, late-summer jazz festival in Guelph, Ont.

New York avant-garde musician John Zorn is a headliner at this month's festival. (Martin Morissette/Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville)But Victoriaville’s size – it’s a town of 40,000 – and the festival’s diehard concertgoers, give this now springtime gathering its unique character. Musicians, fans and critics stay at the same hotel (there’s just one nearby), eat at the same restaurants (apart from the fast-food chains, there are only a handful) and, no matter where they’re coming from, make at least part of the journey by land (Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport is nearly 200 kilometres away). The crowds – and musicians – wander together between the three venues: a hockey rink, a movie theatre and a CEGEP, all brilliantly recast for the event. With its huge black curtains, cosy seating and newly commissioned art installations, the Colisée, for one, barely resembles a Quebec junior-hockey rink.

This year’s event, from May 15 to 19, is expected to draw close to 7,000, equalling the festival’s record set in 2001. With a $650,000 budget, Victo has become the Bois-Francs region’s largest annual event.

Ken Pickering, artistic director for the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society in Vancouver, has been to Victo 11 times since the late ’80s, and remembers a prominent Chicago journalist describing it this way: “We’re, like, the critics, but the special thing about Victo is that everybody there’s a critic. After a show, everyone’s hanging out and there’s all this amazing conversation; everyone’s discussing the music at an extremely high level.”

Levasseur is calling the silver anniversary “a classic program.” Nearly the entire spectrum of Victo artists are here, from the old avant-garde masters (saxophonist Joe McPhee, guitarists Elliot Sharp and Fred Frith) to a Quebec mainstay (saxophonist Jean Derome). Among the headliners this year are New Yorker John Zorn (for two nights), longtime Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and the experimental noise of KTL (on its North American debut) and OM. Only two strands from the Victo playlist are missing, Levasseur says: the musicians associated with Sonic Youth and Montreal’s English avant-rock scene (bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor).

Of course, at Victo, it’s all really just musique actuelle – translated roughly as “current music.” Or, as Levasseur explains, “a living music” where “the level of newness and creativity in it is the highest possible.” Improvisation is usually key; Victo’s core constituency has always been the avant-jazz crowd. Yet even after all these years, Levasseur admits he still has problems providing a precise definition.

“We didn’t want to do a jazz festival,” he remembers. “We didn’t want to do a contemporary classical music festival or a rock festival. So we thought of using this word. I don’t think we knew exactly what it meant but we knew that by using it we could open up the barriers to so many kinds of influences. . . . Looking back, I sometimes feel it’s been our biggest error, because it never was exactly like people thought it would be.”

In those early days, Levasseur, 55, wasn’t an expert in the avant-garde. He’d always been a music lover, but he didn’t play. He grew up listening to the popular poet-songwriters of Quebec (Gilles Vigneault, Félix Leclerc) and France (Charles Aznavour). As a university student in Quebec City, Levasseur studied forestry, but he shared a flat with Jean Beauchesne, now programming director of Quebec City’s summer festival, who introduced him to world music, jazz and the ECM record label. A seminal moment, Levasseur remembers, was seeing Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at Expo 67. Levasseur didn’t explore avant-jazz, however, until he moved to Europe (he spent seven years in Scotland doing an assortment of jobs), where he heard England’s pioneering improvisers, guitarist Derek Bailey and saxophonist Evan Parker, for the first time.

When he was in his late 20s, Levasseur returned to Quebec and rediscovered his hometown, Victoriaville. He worked as a server in a bar, and started bringing in his old jazz cassettes every week. Soon, he was producing shows, hooking up with a Montreal production company to co-ordinate concerts. Not long after that, he helped form a production company, Plateform. Their first show was by guitarist Fred Frith and cellist Tom Cora – unbridled improv that few in the Bois-Francs had ever heard before.

With the promise of provincial funding, Plateform decided to mount a festival. “When it started, it was just basically some activity for us to be living in our area and have some cultural animation here,” Levasseur says. Victoriaville didn’t have a cultural centre; “no fixed space,” Levasseur remembers, to mount concerts. “It was a pretty shaky thing all the time.”

Cecil Taylor is among the artists whose work has been released on the Victo label. (Martin Morissette/Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville)Quebec guitarist René Lussier, a Victo regular who appears again this month (with turntablist Martin Tétreault and Japanese multi-instrumentalist Otomo Yoshihide), remembers vividly the inaugural event, where he performed with the quartet Prima Matéria. It was early December. Concerts were in the showroom of a former car dealership. “It was really strange,” Lussier says. “The whole showroom was used. They put up black curtains. They did the tables, to make it look like a small club. At the bar you had Tom Cora serving beer!”

To Lussier, Victo allowed his cohort a forum for their work, and a tag that helped people pin down their eclectic art. “Suddenly in the record store you could find your own album,” he says, “under ‘actuelle’ music.” Indeed, by the late ’80s, Levasseur had even started his own label, Victo, designed as a take-home bag and promotional tool for the festival and its artists. Many of the FIMAV’s key figures – such as pianist Cecil Taylor or saxophonist Anthony Braxton – have appeared on the Victo label.

It’s all part of a lifelong artistic venture, for Levasseur, and for the aficionados who make the trek year after year.

“The more success we’ve had as a festival, the more narrow, the more closely to avant-garde music it became,” says Levasseur. “We didn’t use the success of the festival to widen its popularity, but to always get more into the subject.”

The Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville runs May 15-19.

Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer.