Biography:Jean Carignan

Jean "Ti-Jean" Carignan (1916-1988). Born in Lévis, Québec, and died in Montréal.

From the liner notes of "Jean Carigan rend hommage a Joseph Allard" (Philo, 1976), "...as told to Gilles Losier [Ed.--his long time piano accompanist] and Mary Calder by Jean Carignan":

Jean Carignan was nine years old when he and Joseph Allard first met at a wedding where Jean was playing with his father. Allard listened attentively to Jean and asked him his name, but said nothing else. When Allard had left, someone asked Jean if he knew who the man was. On learning that the man was Joseph Allard, Jean asked where he lived and, shy about approaching him, the next morning found Jean seated on the sidewalk across from Allard's house in Ville St-Pierre. In the middle of the morning Allard came out and recognizing Jean invited him to come inside. This was to be the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Allard's death in 1947.

Jean often skipped school in order to spend time with his new friend and teacher. It was during this period that Jean Carignan absorbed virtually the entire repertoire of Joseph Allard, a repertoire comprising hundreds of traditional tunes and around sixty original compositions. It was in the same aural manner in which Allard, his father, and his grandfather, none of whom could read or write music, learned these many tunes, that Jean learned them.