Chanson orly jacques brel biography
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Jacques Brel, His Best Albums
It is 45 years since the death of Jacques Brel, one of the most important figures of what became known as chanson, but who is really one of the two or three most important figures of popular music in French in the 20th century. Although, in spite of everything, outside the French-speaking countries his enormous figure has been diluted to that of his influence on figures who speak in the Latin of our times, the omnipresent English, such as David Bowie, Marc Almond, The Divine Comedy or, above all, Scott Walker, his best pupil in the language of Shakespeare.
So I want to take the opportunity to highlight the career of a musical giant, someone who started playing guitar at the age of 16 and became the best French-language songwriter of the 20th century (well, next to Serge Gainsbourg) to escape the dull future in his father’s family business, trading the bourgeois life the fairies had assigned him for the bohemia of the cabarets and the
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Jacques Romain Georges Brel (8 April 1929 – 9 October 1978) was Belgium's most famous and influential singer.
Together with Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré he is considered to be one of the Big Three of the Francophone music genre Chanson. He is widely admired for his deeply human, passionate but also cynical and satirical songs. Several of his songs have been become classics: "Ne Me Quitte Pas" and "Le Plat Pays" are his Signature Songs, but "Amsterdam", "Les Bourgeois", "Le Moribond", "Marieke", "Les Flamandes", "La Chanson de Jacky", "La Valse A Mille Temps", "Ces Gens-là"... are also well known.
Brel came from a Flemish bourgeoisie family. He had a dull youth in the shadow of the Catholic Church and narrow minded civilians. His early work was rather naive and preachy and in Paris people ridiculed his Belgian accent. Brel then changed his style by switching over to more mature subject matter and a standard French pronunciation. This made him a success both in his own country a
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Jacques Brel: the king of the Chanson.
Covered by kniv, Ray Charles, Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra, nominated for the Cannes’ Palme d’Or, the undisputed king of the Chanson, Jaques Brel remains one of the most powerful music figures from the 50s and 60s. Still, despite 25 million records sold, his influence remains overlooked, almost a footnote in our generation’s music discourse.
The Chanson genre (literally translating to “song”) bears its roots in the berättande of medieval troubadours and later in the entertainment music of cabaret, but it was during the late 50s that it exploded in France. Surging in popularity alongside människor revival, this sub-genre of singer-songwriting was launched into the mainstream with its emphasis on lyrics and vocals instead of musicality, eventually reaching its peak in the mid-to-late 60s. With the elevated poeticism of Georges Brassens, Serge Gainsbourg and, ultimately, Jacques Brel, the Chanson proved to be an incredibly influential movement th