more musique

[waider]

The Jack L show I went to see on Thursday last featured said Jack performing the songs of Jacques Brel, a Belgian crooner who died some 25 years ago. The songs have been translated from their original French to English; some poking around on the web suggests that there are good and bad versions of the lyrics, the bad ones being technically accurate but losing the spirit of the original song in the translation. My current favourite song, which I am attempting to learn - without the benefit of a backing band featuring a double bass and an accordian - is Jacky, the good translated lyrics for which feature on someone's vanity domain.

Comments

[nothings.livejournal.com]

Heh, a friend of mine online included a version of this (with the good translation) on a mix tape that they sent to somebody else, not me, and then had to make it available for download for the rest of us after we kept hearing how cool it was.

...searching for the webpage...

Ah yes, the recording I heard was by Scott Walker.

[waider.livejournal.com]

The credit on the vanity domain I linked to suggests that it's not actually Walker's translation, but someone before him; on the other hand, some other thing I read suggested that Walker did, in fact, translate that version, and somewhere else I seem to recall picking up that Scott Walker's real name isn't Scott Walker so maybe it's credited in his real name.

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

There have at times been big Brel boys here in Montreal, not surprisingly. One or two singers locally have pretty much made a career of doing Brel tunes in boîtes. But my most vivid memory is of seeing a musical theatre guy called Maxim Mazumdar, now long dead of AIDS, do Brel tunes in English, and of a mutual male friend of mine and loosestrife's weeping like a baby at some of the numbers.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Jack L's acapella performance of Seasons in the Sun almost brought out a few tears, to be honest. The music for the show was an absolute riot. The double bass player was one of those guys who knows his instrument so well that he's rarely looking down to see where his fingers are, and he wasn't exactly sticking to simple playing either. The lyrics I linked to (Jacky) come with a wonderful bassline which is but a few notes removed from the Cure's Lovecats, there was another song that sounded like it was being performed by The Mission, and My Death was sung as a tango. The accordian in Jacky is positively uplifting, though.

I'm vaguely curious about how these compare with the original, since the Mission-soundalike came across as way too modern for Brel's period.