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Album review
Return of Aznavour the jazzman
Autobiography and CD
Paris
28/12/2009 -
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A voix basse is not an account of some ancestor from the past: Aznavour is still working. He recently made another trip to the USA, where he got together with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra in the same LA studios that Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald recorded in. The album features a few guest stars whose names will be familiar to jazz lovers, like the singers Dianne Reeves and Rachelle Ferrell and the pianist Jacky Terrasson. Naturally, he includes some of his classic hits like La Bohème, Comme ils disent and Le jazz est revenu, but there are rarer ones too, some of them unknown to the general public, like Des amis des deux côtés and Je n’oublierai jamais.
With his fifties-style big band, Aznavour sings to a background of the smoothest swing imaginable, where unflaggingly energetic musicians spin out an elegant but easy jazz with him. Rarely has he had access to such ample material for playing around with time lags and sways in the music – an art at which he proved himself so adept as a young singer several decades ago. Rather like the mature Frank Sinatra, he needs astonishingly little to swing, with no need for flash and show. Released at the same time as this publication of an experienced artist’s words, the album demonstrates an art that only a true master of song can know.Viens fais-moi rêver
Charles Aznavour A voix basse (Don Quichotte / Le Seuil) 2009
Bertrand Dicale
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