Margaret Atwood's "Rat Song." Jacques Brel and The New Criticism.

Indian Falls, Owen Sound, Ontario



Let's stay Canadian a bit longer. And in case anyone has fallen into the shakes from an absence of poetry, here is "Rat Song" by Canadian novelist, Margaret Atwood. I didn't know she also wrote poetry, and I kind of like her curious venture here. What do you think?

Rat Song by Margaret Atwood : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.



I'm not sure I'm finished with Jacques Brel, but I know I was long-winded in my Sunday review, so the above is my effort to be brief once again.

Let me add one more note on Brel in case I don't get back to it (your wishes will help me decide). At the risk of becoming obnoxious about The New Criticism, I must toss out something I came across while meandering through Jacques Brel commentary. In the Stratford Program Notes, Lois Kivesto, PhD, writes: “In 1969, Brel himself attended and exclaimed to Blau [who was responsible for the English version]: ‘You have really done it. You have separated me from the work. The songs have a life of their own. I really enjoyed them.’”

Maybe that's all my version of the New Criticism amounts to: both reader and writer recognize that the artist has birthed his baby--his work--into the world. Now he and we must see what and how it goes about being that which it is.

Studies of the author's life, region, period in history, culture, ethnicity, and so forth might be interesting or helpful, but they must not supplant the-baby-the-work as the primary subject. We can have a meaningful experience with a Brel song without knowing anything about Brel the man, or his love life, or Belgium, or the particulars of two World Wars. Conversely, we can know a lot about that background material, but without the song itself, it means little.

For those who have been on this ride with me before, I'll stop and thank you for your patience. But the quotation about Brel is, from my perspetive, just too good to pass up.



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Jacques Brel at Stratford, Ontario

Sean Pinchin does blues at the Boar's Head, Stratford.

The Stratford, Ontario 2010 production of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a hip cabaret of a musical and a roaring success. As usual with this play, there is no story, there are no songs bursting absurdly from women at the meat market or men at the docks or grandfathers sitting on the toilet. As it should be in all shows where music is the focus, Jacques Brel is one compelling song after another, freed from the syrup of some far-fetched narrative.

From aggressive, raw portraits like “Port of Amsterdam” to lighter, zippy tunes like “Madeliene” to touching ballads like “Timid Frieda,” Brel’s range is terrific. If you don't love each song, you will at least admit you're never bored as he fits often complex lyrics to unconventional, unpredictable music. One reviewer compares Brel to Bob Dylan—different kinds of songs, same kind of musical-poetic genius. I think too of Leonard Cohen as composer or Edith Piaf as chanteuse.

I cannot find YouTube samples that do the songs justice. If the music is OK there, the technology is bad, and vice versa. Brel, singing his own work, is also at YouTube, but I find him overly dramatic. "Composer" and "Singer" are not synonyms (said that damnable New Critic again).

So I’ll just mention that I’ve seen or heard four performances of the play, and Stratford’s four singers and four musicians are the best of the lot by far. From the jazzy, raucous and sometimes comic material to the most moving, melodic ballads, no one can touch the the Stratford group for purity of intent or accuracy of delivery.

In the upbeat comic schticks, the director, singers, and musicians know their bounds. Brel’s comedy has substance and purpose, and the burlesque moments must not obscure that. Still, if there were any toes that didn't tap at all or teeth that didn't grin, they belonged to a few cadavers someone snuck into the building.

You need at least a vague sense of this, so here is Tommy Wallach, a YouTube guy, doing his rollicking version of “Jackie.” Tommy loses control at the end, but you might find his enthusiasm contagious. If it's a bit too long, hang in there for one verse and be sure you hear the refrain:

YouTube - W. #14 - Tommy Wallach - Jackie by Jacques Brel (cover)

If I could be for only an hour
If I could be for an hour every day
If I could be for just one little hour
Cute, cute, cute in a stupid-ass way.

If you won't say that about yourself, I don't trust you.

In slower, more emotional songs like “Fanette,” “Sons of,” “Old Folks,” and “If We Only Have Love,” everything at Stratford is just right—tempo, pitch, mood, choreography, lighting, make-up. The band is especially impressive: one player for guitar and cello, one for violin and accordion, and one each for bass and piano.

From my personal favorite, “Timid Frieda,” here's one YouTube version to give you just a bit of the melody and mood:

YouTube - Ottavia - Les Timides (Brel cover)

Then consider these lines in English about a young woman, maybe the archetypal daughter at 18 or 22, just beginning life in the city. The final three lines in the quotation are a refrain.

Timid Frieda
Won't return now
To the home where
They do not need her,
But always feed her
Little lessons
And platitudes from cans.

She is free now
She will be now
On the street where
The beat's electric.

There she goes
With her valises
Held so tightly in her hands


No tongue stud, no thong, no brassy mouth (though she does try to "take her brave new Fuck You stand"). If this is not a daughter in her idealized vulnerability, maybe she's the first love of many a man, the one he takes home to meet his mama.

If you know nothing of the music in Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, you might want to go ahead and sample some more of the flawed YouTube performances. At least you'll see that it's not bluegrass.

In spite of YouTube's damaged goods, one or two clips might coax you into investing in the original CD (circa 1968) with Eric Blau, Mort Shuman, Elly Stone, Shawn Elliot, Alice Whitfield, and Wolfgang Knittel. I think they honor the music better than the 2006 CD directed by Gordon Greenberg and Eric Svejcar, which strikes me as severe. The voices are razor sharp—not kind or wounded, as they need to be in the ballads. Also, some of the instrumentation is intrusive—such as an overpowering bass or some self-consciously long stops: Look at me, look at me. The performers love themselves more than the music, and that's wrong.

But the Stratford, Ontario 2010 production got it right. Here are the artists’ names, for they were stupendous, and this thimbleful of blog recognition is all I can offer in return.

Director: Stafford Arima

Singers: Brent Carver, Robin Hutton (who was excellent as understudy for the ailing Jewelle Blackman), Mike Nadajewski, Nathalie Nadon.

Musicians: Laura Burton, Anna Atkinson, George Meanwell and Luc Michaud

For further information and some shamefully unflattering video of the rehearsals, you might go here:

http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/OnStage/productions.aspx?id=6046&prodid=31480



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Roseanne Cash's C.D., THE LIST

On October 11, I mentioned my inclination to like Roseanne Cash’s new C.D., The List, after her interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. Ms. Cash came across as a down-to-earth, likeable human, and I found it hard to imagine her as the product of such a star-studded life with her father or in her own career. Also, the few passages NPR selected from the songs on The List sounded great—both the song selection and the performances. I bought the C.D., and now that I’ve listened to it several times, that initial impression has been pretty much borne out.

To re-cap, in 1973, Johnny Cash made a list of what he considered 100 essential country songs and gave them to his daughter when she was 18. As Ms. Cash says in the liner notes, however, these are important American songs more than country music alone—for example, “500 Miles” and “Long Black Veil” from the folk tradition.

Ms. Cash’s rendering of those two, by the way, are among my favorites on the album. As she and Terry Gross agreed in the interview, she slows down “500 Miles” so much that there’s a sense of desperation in it. That’s an interpretation that’s valid and could have been lost to us in the wake of all the versions we might have heard by now, some of them pretty homogenized. Also, by “desperation,” I do not mean melodrama; this version has plenty of dignity and self-control, but it’s more earnest than the marshmellow-and-campfire overtones the title might have accrued over decades.

Ms. Cash’s “Long Black Veil” surpasses any version I’ve heard, except for Joan Baez’s, which was my introduction to the song. The simple guitar work (I think that’s her husband, John Leventhal) is perfect—impossible to miss, but not at all in competition with the vocals.

“Bury Me under the Weeping Willow” illustrates another tradition (bluegrass or mountain music) to which Ms. Cash is faithful. Her voice is just right for the song, and she seems to want to honor the tradition, rather than faking it with artificial bluegrass gestures or some jazzed up interpretation on a tune from the hills.

Maybe the nicest surprise for me is the first track, a piece I’d never heard before, “Miss the Mississippi and You.” It’s a bluesy, swing thing, and every note, every move seems right.

My mild reservations about the other songs boil down to two tendencies. First, there’s more modernization than I’d like—some wah-wah, other electric gadgetfying, including some of that growling machine that sounds like a cross between a dinosaur burp and a rhino fart. Shockingly, it appears for a few seconds in “Long Black Veil,” but in each listening I recover enough to soak up the song one more time.

These new-fangled electrics are only occasional intrusions. My second and larger concern is a tendency to slow things down too much, to turn slow songs into dirges—for example “Take These Chains from My Heart.” Or a fast song goes molasses, in the case of “I’m Movin’ On.”

And here’s a note, not a complaint. Surely people hear some of the quality of Patsy Cline in Roseanne Cash’s voice. As Ms. Cash herself noted in the NPR interview, that is a mixed blessing, for there is only one Patsy Cline. In fact, I wonder if the Cash/Leventhal tendency to slow things down too much is an effort to avoid sounding like a Patsy Cline clone. If so, the price is too high. Besides, Ms. Cash’s voice is plenty satisfying in its own right.

As if you need my instruction, please take my comments for what they’re worth. I am mostly unschooled in music, and there’s very little I’ve liked since about 1980. I plan now to look at other reviews of The List to see what people say when they know what they’re talking about.

On the other hand, I love things as various as: several pieces from Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well, some of Leonard Cohen’s work, a lot of Odetta and Joan Baez, some jazz, a lot of classical music, practically all of Patsy Cline, a lot of Linda Ronstadt, and a lot of the 1970s country stuff, particularly Willie Nelson singing and Kris Kristoferson writing.

In short, I’m not sure how stuck in the old days I am, but I surely won’t deny a dose of it. So it’s that guy who’s saying Roseanne Cash’s The List is very pleasing, much more often than not, and I hope it sells. This kind of music sweetens a commute and needs to survive.


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