17 Fois Cécile Cassard Seventeen Times Cecile Cassard (2002)

Belle initiative de réunir dans un livre-disque de deux CD, la quintessence du travail d'Alex Beaupain pour les films de son ami Christophe Honoré. La fusion est tellement totale entre les images de celui-ci et la musique de celui-là que le fruit d'une telle complicité se devait d'être regroupé pour en faciliter l'accès à l'auditeur ravi de l'aubaine. BO permet de constater combien les chansons d'Alex Beaupain sont figuratives et arrivent à elles seules à projeter sur la toile d'un inconscient ébahi les ambiances captées par la caméra de Christophe Honoré.

Famed for his Debussy playing, the pianist Philippe Cassard brings his acute ear for instrumental color to these deceptively simple miniatures. Like Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words requires a master pianist’s touch, and Cassard is fully up to the challenge. He plays with an accompanist’s sensitivity (he works regularly with the soprano Natalie Dessay) and brushes in the melodies with real skill. His control of line is effortless, and the music simply flows on the wings of song.

In this music, all is dialogue, mingled avowals and passions, on the threshold of the opera house. All Mozart’s forms are nurtured by the same source, that of vocal melody. “I like an aria to be as precisely tailored to a singer as a well-cut suit,” he declared when he composed an aria. And what an aria this one is. The keyboard enters into dialogue with the soloist.

Pianist/vocalist Patricia Barber is the Alanis Morissette of the jazz world. Her serpentine, poetic songs teeter between deftly witty and awkwardly Latinate. Each album is more ambitious than the last, taking her deeper into avant-garde territory both lyrically and instrumentally. Verse is no exception…

Ten years is a long time, especially in pop music, but waiting ten years to deliver an album is a clear sign that you're not all that interested in the pop game anyway. Such is the case with Peter Gabriel, who delivered Up in 2002, a decade after Us and four years after he announced its title. Perhaps appropriately, Up sounds like an album that was ten years in the making, revealing not just its pleasures but its intent very, very slowly. This is not an accessible record, nor is it easy to warm up to, which means that many may dismiss it upon a single listen or two, never giving it the time it demands in order to be understood (it does not help matters that the one attempt at a single is the ham-fisted, wrong-headed trash-TV "satire" "The Barry Williams Show," which feels utterly forced and out of place here, as if Geffen was pleading for anything resembling a single to add to the album).

Mélusine features a mix of five originals and interpretations of nine songs, dating as far back as the twelfth century, mostly sung in French along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyol.