Jacques Brel

Although the public had already taken notice of him two years earlier with "Quand on n’a que l’amour", it was the 1959 album that definitively established Jacques Brel on the French music scene, along with the model of the musically sophisticated chansonnier, with caustic, poetic lyrics, still followed by many today.

After trying alliances with the most disparate arrangers, the artist found his perfect counterpart in François Rauber, a newly graduated orchestra conductor. The result is a parade of songs in which every instrument is measured out with meticulous care, always managing to highlight the melodic and interpretive richness of the voice.

"La valse à mille temps" is one of those songs that makes music lovers wish they'd been around for its release. With every listen, you wonder what it must have been like to experience such a shock live. Brel and Rauber's waltz starts slow and gradually accelerates. The arrangement and distribution of sounds are pure genius: one channel lets accordion and woodwinds pulse, in the other a piano embroiders lively but at a restrained volume, never overwhelming the rest. In the background, double bass, guitar and cymbals accompany with grace.

Brel delivers lyrics that are a hymn to youth and the joy of living, and as the tempo increases, so does his fervor, right up to the final catharsis, when the brass comes in and he unleashes an avalanche of words in the space of a few seconds.

A waltz in a thousand tempos, a waltz in a thousand tempos, a waltz has taken the time to wait twenty years, so that you might be twenty, so that I might be twenty […] A waltz in a thousand tempos offers lovers alone three hundred and thirty-three times the time to build a romance.

After numerous attempts already made in previous studio works, "Seul" once and for all confirms the dramatic crescendo among Brel's trademarks. Despite its size, the arrangement doesn't come across as excessive: classical guitar and flutes, cornet and trombones, strings and metallophones all find their own space and leave room for the rest. Rauber draws fully on his studies, and it's indeed impossible not to notice the affinities between this orchestration and those of classical composers who engaged with Spanish folklore, Ravel and Falla above all.

The lyrics grapple with one of the conditions the author feared most, loneliness, starting from the boredom of coupled life and arriving at the universal condition of being human. 

We are a million laughing, at the million across from us, but two million laughs don't stop us from finding ourselves alone in the mirror.

"La dame patronesse" is a sarcastic sketch that openly attacks the Catholic values Brel had been raised with, but which Parisian life had by then made intolerable to him. 

To be a good charity lady, ladies, always knit in goose-poop colour, this lets the Sunday mass immediately recognize your poor. One stitch knit, one stitch purl, one stitch for Saint Joseph, one stitch for Saint Thomas.

The background music, essentially a seventeenth-century-style sonata, heightens the song's satirical vein.

With no restraint left, Brel couldn't resist a caricature of his fellow countrymen. In "Les Flamandes" he describes the Belgians as people devoid of any ambition, living out a preordained, breathless existence (though it's clear enough that the Belgians are just a pretext, and the message applies to bourgeois people everywhere). 

The Flemish women dance without saying a word, the Flemish women aren't talkative, if they dance it's because they're twenty, and at twenty you must get engaged, get engaged so you can marry, and marry so you can have children.

Here too the mocking arrangement – a little marching tune straight out of a village fair – is tailor-made.

"Isabelle", a jazz number that at times evokes Glenn Miller's serenades, is the most delicate track of the bunch, a tender dedication to Jacques's second daughter, born the previous year. It's at least a little unsettling that the next track on the list is "La mort". With an absolute mastery of words by this point, he places a couple of well-chosen symbols and covers an impressive spectrum of meanings and moods with them. Jacques's death is an elusive entity that the artist repeatedly envisions in the guise of an old woman, a princess, Carabosse (the original evil fairy from "Sleeping Beauty"), the last leaves of the tree from which his coffin will be made. In this storm of images, however, Brel doesn't seem frightened; on the contrary, after each one he's careful to point out that time will flow more lightly, precisely because of his awareness of the end.

Death awaits me in your bright hands, which will close my eyes, the better to let time pass.

True to its visionary atmosphere, the song is anything but mournful: it rides instead on a lashing tango, cut through by the frantic figures of the horn section.

The album closes with “La colombe”, a text very close to Brel's heart concerning the then-burning issue of Algeria. Today it comes across as a touch rhetorical, but the result is still moving, thanks to the delivery, the insistent string ostinato reminiscent of much twentieth-century classical music, and the distant timpani strikes that make palpable the sense of looming threat war has always carried with it.

If every song on the tracklist is in its own way extraordinary, "No. 4" owes a particular debt to one of them, the fifth on side one. The harrowing "Ne me quitte pas", a final plea for a love already lost, is one of the most famous songs of all time. In French or in English, sung by Brel or by any of the many major international artists who have taken it on, it's practically impossible to have gone through life without hearing it at least once. It's not easy to understand why this song in particular, out of so many. It's poetic, but it's not Brel's only poetic song; it's heart-wrenching, but not his only heart-wrenching one; it's arranged divinely, but that too is nothing new. In fact, listened to closely, it even sounds a little forbidding, with its downcast tone and total absence of rhythmic drive. And yet it's precisely this exact combination of notes, sounds and words that has gone on undeterred for decades, touching the hearts of millions of people, regardless of commercial logic and of anyone who always needs a reason for everything.

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25/05/2014