There's No-one Quite Like Gréco

From Chanson to "Over The Rainbow"

Paris 

07/12/2006 - 

One of the most outstanding things about Juliette Gréco's career is that she has never opted for the most conventional songs or taken the easy option. The singer, who rose to fame on the Left Bank cabaret scene in the post-war years, is associated with 'chanson' but it is often forgotten that she also lent her voice to popular hits. Gréco's new album, Le Temps d'une chanson, bears witness to this, featuring covers of a number of songs the grande dame would love to have recorded herself including the Judy Garland classic Over The Rainbow. 

Listening to Gréco, the legendary 'chanson' diva, launch into renditions of Né quelque part, Volare and Over The Rainbow – popular hits heard on the radio literally thousands of times before – will come as something of a surprise to fans. For this is a woman who has built her reputation on associations with the likes of Sartre and Cocteau and poetic lyrics penned by the greatest songwriters of the day. The first day of Gréco's career was marked by an appearance at the opening of Le Boeuf sur le Toit under new management in June 1949. On this occasion, she had the audacity to perform three songs - Si tu t'imagines, Rue des Blancs-Manteaux and L'Eternel féminin –poems by Raymond Queneau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jules Laforgue set to music by Joseph Kosma.

Thus it is hard to imagine Gréco, arbiter of highbrow culture, lending her voice to more banal forms of 'variété' music or lightweight pop. Gréco has, in fact, not only experimented with 'variété' and pop in the course of her career, but managed to transcend both genres, turning commercial mainstream songs into a rarer kind of pearl. Take Un petit poisson, un petit oiseau, a song that Rivière and Bourgeois (renowned for penning vacant pop ditties for blonde sex bomb Brigitte Bardot) gave to Gréco in 1966. Once the world had heard the elegant brunette crooning "Mais comment s'y prendre quand on est dans l'eau?", it was impossible to imagine the words ever issuing from her blonde rival's mouth.

When Gréco's "almost complete" recorded works was released on 21 CDs  in 2003, astute ears would have picked up on two highly interesting recordings made the same year as Un petit poisson, un petit oiseau. The two songs in question were covers of Sheila's Folklore américain and Claude François's Le Jouet extraordinaire. Listening to Gréco's reworkings of both hits listeners were forced to realise that the songs themselves were not meaningless chart ditties, it was just the way they had been performed. When Gréco sings "Aussitôt je me vois déjà/Au fin fond de l'Arizona/Affublée d'un grand chapeau/Et grattant sur un vieux banjo/Woh ring ding ding" (I can suddenly see myself/In deepest Arizona/Wearing a great big hat/And strumming on an old banjo/Hey ting-a-ling!), she manages to bring a certain distinction to proceedings, showing up the vacuity of the original.

Gréco's musical universe has certainly evolved in the course of her career. Like all her carefree teen counterparts hanging out in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the postwar years, the grande dame of chanson grew up listening to poetic classics such as Prévert and Kosma's Les Feuilles mortes and thrilling to jazz in the Left Bank's basement clubs. In the several weeks that her famous love affair with Miles Davis lasted, Gréco introduced the young American trumpet star to the city's thriving artistic scene, dining with him at Sartre and Picasso's table. She hung out with poets and literary songwriters like Joseph Kosma before going on to build the most original repertoire of the day, taking material from up-and-coming young songwriters by the names of Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg, Guy Béart and Pierre Louki. And she made sure she always chose their most unusual, most difficult, most challenging songs – Brel's Ca va (le Diable), for instance, or Béart's La Complainte, a song Béart himself later confessed he never dared perform live as the song features the word "con" ("fucking stupid" )17 times in two minutes, a scandal too far when he originally penned it in 1957. Interestingly enough, Gréco waited until after Brel's death before singing Ne me quitte pas and has never sung Béart's most famous song, L'Eau vive.

Given Gréco's talent for transforming even the basest 'variété' metal into musical gold, one has to dig hard into her repertoire to find examples of unreservedly commercial chart material. Je prends les choses du bon côté, Gréco's 1955 duet with showbizz heart-throb Eddie Constantine is one of the more lightweight moments of her career when the diva's famously gravely vocals turned unexpectedly high, breathy and girly – a voice Gréco admits she adopts at home to mimic advertising commercials or songs from the radio.

Gréco has contributed various covers to tribute albums in the past, recording her own version of Francis Cabrel's L'Encre de tes yeux, Charles Aznavour's La Bohème and Michel Berger's Message personnel, all songs she has openly expressed her admiration for. On her new album, Le Temps d'une chanson, Gréco broadens her musical favourites to include radio hits and popular melodies from the past such as Judy Garland's 1939 Hollywood classic Over The Rainbow. Gréco proves she is just as passionate as anyone about popular successes, but as one listen to Le Temps d'une chanson proves she approaches them in her own inimitable way, marking lyrics and melodies out with a cunning rubato here and a half-sung, half-spoken phrase there. In short, Juliette manages to Gréco-ise everything she touches, even when she is skipping down the Yellow Brick Road.

Bertrand  Dicale

Translation : Julie  Street