Overview
The collective, L’Armée du Chalut brings together “singer-musicians-animators” who are a reference in the transmission of the art of the “on-board singer”: the Bretons, Bernard Subert, Gaël Rolland and Didier Quéval; the Bretons, Brigitte Kloareg, Sylvie Guiner and Lucie Guilcher; the Fécampois Pascal Servain; from the Vendée Maurice Artus: the Guadeloupean Césaire Berchel: as well as Emmanuel Pariselle, and Michel Colleu, the most Le Havre member of the Douarnenistes.
For this edition of the festival in 2026, “the Trawl Army” will be accompanied by Tom Lewis, a legend of British maritime music.
Briscards of traditional music, bells of festoù-noz, singers of songs to be hoisted, singers of salty songs of sailors but also speakers of moving lamentations about the misfortunes of life at sea, the singers share the repertoires in Breton and French that they have collected from the sailors of the time of the work sail but also from the workers of the canneries and boucans, with the sailors-fishermen of the post-war trawlers or those of the Navy or the “Mar Mar”. In Brittany, Normandy, Vendée, Guadeloupe… Songs that they publish in the documentary discs and the collections they co-reate.
Many participated in the renewal of the sailors’ songs of the 1980s by being at the heart of the first maritime festivals of Douarnenez, Paimpol and Brest, where some sang in renowned groups such as Cabestan. The collective will also give two special concerts “40 years of songs from the sea people” by inviting the great singer Tom Lewis, who will bring together on stage singers programmed at Dz 86, 88 and 92!