The French!!!

Not so long ago, lung cancer took Alain Bashung -- kind of the French Tom Waits -- from our earthly picture. He was truly a great artist, but he didn't seem to have found a footing on American soil, where we only seem to embrace popular music from another culture if it comes from either Latin or African sources, "99 Luftbaloons" notwithstanding.

I have dear friends in France, who have turned me onto some really excellent music of their country. First, they told me about Charles Trenet, sort of the Bing Crosby of France, whose "La Mer" and "Boum" are among the most enduring pop songs of the first half of the 20th century. He lived to be 88, performing up almost to the day he died (in 2001).

The 1940's were formative years for Henri Salvador (1917-2008), whose music floored me when I first heard it. I heard him and immediately felt like he was familar somehow. Salvador was actually born in French Guyana, but apprently his family migrated to France when he was quite young. He started out as a self-taught guitarist, and got good enough to have backed his hero Django Reinhardt at some point in the forties. But Salvador also made his way as a vocalist, and by the early fifties had recorded a few sides (arranged by a young Quincy Jones). In 1956, he cut the first known French rock'n'roll songs, and they're awful. But his 1957 "Dans Mon Ile" was a kind of proto-bossa nova that inspired a formative Jobim. In 2005, the country of Brazil -- their cultural minster being the singer/songwriter Gilberto Gil -- awarded Salvador the Brazilian Order of Cultural Merit for his influence on Brazilian culture, so I'm pretty sure I'm not stretching things.

Salvador's jazz stuff from the fifties is impressive. He's very gentle, but there's a quiet, poigniant strength to him that could claim kinship with the Sinatra of In The Wee Small Hours. At the same time, he has a smoldering swinging sensibility that feels like a cross betweem Trenet and Jack Teagarden. He defies gravity. When I first heard him, I immedaitely thought of Caetano Veloso. As it turns out, Caetano claims him as an influence, and even namechecks him in the song "Reconvexo", where he asks "quem não sentiu o swing de Henri Salvador?" ("who hasn't felt the swing of Henri Salvador?").

From the sixties onward, Salvador was known to French audiences more as a TV personality and musical comedian (he made hit comedy records) -- he was a terrific comic -- than as a jazz singer, which is a damn shame. His version of "Petite Fluer" was as classic a record as a great many of Crosby's best, but Crosby was more skillful about keeping his profile as a jazz singer from being obscured by his movie stardom.

His 2002 album, Chamber Avec Vue (Room With A View) did much to point to his rightful place as a kind of godfather to bossa nova. It was the first Salvador record I heard (thank you Didier), and it whetted my appetite. But -- in those pre-You Tube days -- finding anything other than a few Scopitones wasn't easy, so what little I could get my hands on of him made for an uneven collection at best. The most satisfying thing I got was a 10" LP on Barclay, which I found at Dr Music in Fairhope, AL (thank you Wade), which included "Dans Mon Ile". I knew greatness when I heard it, so I kept scratching away.

Then last week, Didier sent me Salvador Jazze, a disc that compiles the best of his jazz stuff, and Kari (my girlfriend) and I spent a piece of New Year's Day driving around Tolouca Lake and NoHo, listening to it in awe. It was, for me, like finding a picture of a relative who you never knew you had, but whom you closely resemble.

It all reminds me of a conversation I had not so long ago with Teller (of Penn &), where he said that he prefers music that doesn't announce its own importance via, um, firepower. Rather, he prefers something you have to listen to closely, because then you become more personally involved in what you're hearing, and that's when the engagement becomes emotionally overwhelming, because you're up close and personal to the music you're hearing. We were discussing Bach's keyboard music when he made this assessment, but I think it works for any music whose strength comes of its intimacy, style be damned. And Teller's words came back to me as Kari and I went north on Cahuenga with Salvador as our soundtrack.

It's easy for singers who belt it out to get over. Volume rules. But the greatness of Salvador -- and Veloso, Gilberto, and Haggard, for that matter -- is the ability to make you lean in and then hold you with whispers.