Nues Brigitte

Porté par le titre Palladium qui rencontre un vif succès, ce troisième album présente 11 chansons inédites qui racontent le féminin, l’amour. / Worn by the title of the Palladium, which meets a great success, this third album features 11 previously unreleased songs that tell the female, the love.

Was Brigitte Bardot a "good" singer, in the conventional sense? No. Was the material she sang in the 1960s especially deep or brilliant? No. But is this compilation of the cream of her 1963-1970 recordings a fun listen? Yes indeed. Although not the owner of conventional high-level vocal skills, Bardot invested her frivolous songs with a contagious sense of playful fun, and a refusal to take the music or herself too seriously. Certainly some of the tunes – and their breathy delivery – capitalize on her iconic sex kitten persona. But the guileless joy she projects is reminiscent of some of the early work by France Gall (one of the finest '60s French pop singers), though Bardot's voice is less girlish and more adult in tone. Like the better French pop of the 1960s, the tracks on this disc – an "extremely selective compilation," the liner notes state, of a '60s discography that strung together "fine pearls and cheap imitations, scintillating gems and tawdry kitsch" – have a likable giddiness that borrows from early-'60s girl group and twist rock & roll on the earlier sides, and bears a slight psychedelic influence on some of the later ones.

Brigitte Bardot The archetypal sex kitten, Brigitte Bardot was the first foreign-language star ever to attain a level of international success comparable to America's most popular homegrown talents. While the vast majority of her motion pictures failed to rank even remotely close to the best of her native France's prodigious New Wave-era output, they proved a major breakthrough in establishing a market for foreign films in English-speaking countries; indeed, for all of the acclaim deservedly heaped on the more gifted actors and directors of her day, perhaps no other factor was more crucial to the far-reaching success of world cinema than Bardot's sultry allure.

Love variations: The variant, and its corollary the variation, inseparable from the Middle Ages, have established themselves, particularly since Eloge de la variante (In praise of the variant) by Bernard Cerquiglini and the term of “mouvance” (mobility) inaugurated by Paul Zumthor, as genuine writing processes. Extending them to the musical field sounds quite obvious, and allows us furthermore to apprehend the modes of transmission and circulation of the medieval melodic repertoires.

Of all the strange records this French vanguard pop chanteuse ever recorded, this 1971 collaboration between the teams of Brigitte Fontaine and her songwriting partner Areski and the Art Ensemble of Chicago – who were beginning to think about returning to the United States after a two-year stay – is the strangest and easily most satisfying. While Fontaine's records could be beguiling with their innovation, they occasionally faltered by erring on the side of gimmickry and cuteness.