Music united folk lovers last night at the 14th annual Ottawa Grassroots Festival.
Eventgoers gathered at the First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa, a church in Carlingwood, for some Franco-Ontarian folk tunes.
Before the sun set at 7:30 p.m., Céleste Lévis took the stage. This was her first time playing at the festival in about eight or 10 years, she said.
The singer-songwriter was excited to be back and share her roots with the crowd.
“Thank you for making space for Francophone music,” Céleste said, stressing the importance of Francophone representation in English concerts.
“This is important for our culture’s survival.”
With her guitar in hand, Céleste brought a special guest on stage.
She opened the show with a duet of one of her songs, “Case Départ,” with her husband, Marc-Antoine Joly.
The song is from her 2021 album Si tu veux tout savoir and was originally a solo track.
She performed her first solo song of the set, “C’est Flou,” before confiding in the audience, “It’s been 17 years since my spinal surgery,” a procedure that cost her “[her] biggest dream.”
Céleste’s first love was basketball, but Chiari malformation took that away in the eighth grade; it’s a condition where the brain extends into the upper part of the spine, according to the Mayo Clinic. Céleste said the decompression surgery left her with a hole at the back of her skull, and she had to give up all sports.
“I kind of had to rediscover myself, see what I wanted to do in life,” said Céleste in an interview with Roots Music Canada. “That’s when I started learning the piano, started singing, and it all came together at that point.”
But before Céleste put all her eggs in one basket, she went to the University of Ottawa for advanced mathematics. In her second year, she wrote “Un peu,” a song she played last night.
Soon after, she took a leap of faith to compete in La Voix in 2015, one of Quebec’s biggest televised singing contests.
She put a pause on her degree, and in the end, Céleste chose rhythms over arithmetic.
“I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m going to get this chance again, even if it doesn’t [work out], I think I have to really live everything that’s happening to me right now,’ you know,” Céleste said in the interview.
Towards the end of the set, Marc-Antoine took over and sang “Cercle Vicieux,” a song he helped write in 2017.
He invited the audience to clap and kept them going for the whole song. “When you tell people to clap during songs, the ‘clap cop’ comes, and the clapping fades, or it stops,” Marc-Antoine said. The unified clapping turned into applause and bled right into Céleste’s next song “Dans tes yeux,” a single she released in 2025.
She said the song was partly inspired by another dream of hers; “As I grew older, I dreamed of a family of my own,” Céleste said, and her dream is coming true.
Céleste is expecting a new addition to the family sometime this summer. This performance is her last until she releases her fifth album on Sept. 24.
“If you can do the math, you know my break isn’t too long,” Céleste said.
To end her set, she performed “Je serai là,” but she had an ask from the audience. “You clapped for Marc, now you have to sing for me,” Céleste said. Throughout the song, Céleste had the audience sing a short melody, and the performance hall filled with a choir-like tone.
The crowd erupted with applause at the end of her set, and host Anne-Marie Brugger asked the couple for one last song.
Soon after she introduced last night’s headliners, Les Bilinguish Boys.
The three-man band from Grand Sudbury includes “The Jukebox,” Dayv Poulin, and “Le Smart,” Édouard Landry, said “The Playboy,” Stef Paquette.
Their first song began with Dayv and Stef on acoustic guitars while Édouard wielded both a mandolin and an electric guitar. Les Bilinguish Boys broke out in three-part harmony and sang until nightfall.
As the music died down, a photographer approached to take their photo. Intuitively, Les Bilinguish Boys stopped talking and struck a pose. “I’ve recently lost weight, and now I disappear behind the microphone, so I wanted to make sure the photographer could see me,” Stef said.
The audience erupted with laughter. Stef said their shows are all about creating moments just like that.
“We want to bring a smile to every face and ear,” he said in an interview with Roots Music Canada.
Dayv and Édouard bobbed up and down as they introduced an ancient French relic in their set, “Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.” The call-and-response song is over 300 years old, Stef said, and is well-known among Franco-Ontarians. Within the first few bars, the crowd was already singing along.
Les Bilinguish Boys changed the pace by inviting men and women to sing different parts and switching a few lyrics from French to Spanish and German.
This playful performance showed the boys’ easygoing nature. “We’re just a fluke band; we didn’t want to be a band,” Stef said, but what started as a one-off gig turned into a five-year standing three-man band.
In December of 2021, Stef got a call from the Lavigne Tavern, a bar 10 minutes west of Verner, asking him to play for their annual food drive.
“I normally don’t do bars,” said Stef, “I don’t know enough songs to do three 45-minute sets.”
Luckily, he knew people who did. Unrehearsed, Stef, Dayv and Édouard took to the tavern’s stage.
“We had so much fun because there was no pressure. It was intuitive,” said Stef. From then on, the boys promised to meet up once a year to play at the tavern. Three years went by, and the phone began to ring more and more for the live music trio.
Although they’re a live music band, Les Bilinguish Boys released their first EP in March. “I think just recording songs just doesn’t do it, like we do it live on stage,” Stef said in the interview.
Les Bilinguish Boys say new music is on the horizon, and they plan to release more recordings soon.
