Clemence Desrochers revisits Chez Bozo 67 years after opening
clemence desrochers returned to Chez Bozo on Thursday afternoon, 67 years after the Montréal boîte à chansons opened on 14 mai 1959. At 92, she stepped back into the Crescent Street room she helped create in 1959 and described it as still intimate and warm.
DesRochers said she had always been eager to come back, and the visit gave the room something a restoration plan cannot manufacture: a living link to the people who built it. Her own memory of the space was immediate. « Le grand escalier, je le montais en courant », she said, recalling the climb to the second-floor venue.
Chez Bozo and Quebec chanson
Chez Bozo was cofounded by DesRochers, Jean-Pierre Ferland, Claude Léveillée, Raymond Lévesque and Hervé Brousseau as a place for chanson d’ici at a time when there were few rooms built for that music. The location mattered too: the venue sat on the second floor of an old building on Crescent Street in downtown Montréal, making it a small, concentrated stage for a scene that was still finding its shape.
That origin story is part of why this return lands as more than nostalgia. DesRochers said of the project to restore the room, « Ils m’avaient parlé de ce projet, mais je n’ai jamais pensé qu’ils iraient si loin dans la réalisation », a line that captures both surprise and relief from someone who saw the place in its first life.
Alexandre Leclerc found the room
Alexandre Leclerc rediscovered the former Chez Bozo location recently, and he is working with Maxime Le Flaguais to restore it and present chanson shows there again. Their work brings the room out of memory and back into circulation, with the founding generation able to judge whether the rebuilt space still carries the right scale.
DesRochers’ own verdict was direct: the venue felt as intimate and warm as it had 67 years earlier. That is the real test for a historic performance space, not a plaque or a date on the wall, but whether the room still holds the kind of closeness that made it useful in the first place.
92 years and one return
DesRochers also said, « J’avais toujours hâte de venir. » Coming from one of the founders, that line turns a reopening into a handoff. The room is not being preserved as a relic; it is being prepared so chanson can be played in the same scale that once let its writers hear themselves clearly.
For Montréal readers who care about the city’s cultural memory, the important part is simple: a surviving founder has now seen the old place again, and the people rebuilding it know exactly whose standards they are trying to meet.
