Croissants, the Eiffel Tower, love and death, more death and love, Paris in the spring. The world of Piaf, Brel, Trenet and Aznavour. World famous singers covering ‘If You Go Away’, ‘Milord’, ‘Seasons in the Sun’, ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘If We Only Have Love’. Those who aren’t familiar with Barb Jungr and her prodigious repertoire, who only know her recordings of Cohen and Dylan, and her reputation as a jazz singer, may wonder why they should rush to see her the next time she sings Chanson?
Well it’s simple. Jungr brings a unique spin to the familiar and less familiar songs in this repertoire. Her impeccable taste gives us an evening which includes songs that are not strictly under the umbrella, but in style and content they are, as she humbly hopes that she can do justice to them. As always, her body language is as much part of the interpretation as her voice, organically motivated by the words and content.
Accompanied by her collaborator and arranger Jenny Carr, Jungr opened with ‘The Tender Hearts’, a Brel/Johnson song unfamiliar even to this afficionado, before giving us Elvis Costello’s ‘New Amsterdam’, a rumination of the many changes in a city the performer loves. Her description of a Financial Times-reading prostitute seated in the ground floor window of the apartment block where she is staying is almost a song. And then we get Brel/Cuccioli’s ‘Amsterdam’. I first came to Brel through the Broadway production Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, the Eric Blau and Mort Shuman translation that is frequently heard. There have been others, but Des De Moor’s translation goes right to the heart of the broken sailors frequenting the docksides, toothless, wizened, uncouth but still loving and dreaming. And Jungr inhabits their personas, her stance and voice full of yearning and despair.
Leonard Cohen’s ‘Le Partisan’ is preceded by a tale about Jungr’s father being liberated from a German work camp after the Second World War, and then we hear Léo Ferré’s ‘Quartier Latin’.
Jacques Brel spent the years before his early death sailing to the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific. His final album has two songs that were new to me in translation. ‘La cathédrale’ transforms a cathedral into a boat of dreams, the spire a mast, as it encounters England, Cornwall and oceans beyond. To this writer, who also sails, it is a poignant evocation of the freedom of the wind and the sea, exquisitely interpreted by Jungr in Robb Johnson’s translation, her voice honed to soft dreaminess. ‘Les Marquises’, about the islands, written by Brel while aware that his terminal cancer was slowly killing him followed, Jungr transporting us to the Pacific idyll where he chose to be buried.
‘Sunday Morning St Denis’ takes us back to Paris, and ‘Ne me quitte pas’ is here sung in quite a different translation to the one usually heard, by Des De Moor.
Two different songs around the theme of ‘No Regrets’ close the set, one familiar the other not, and for an encore Brel’s ‘Marieke’, an ode to the twin towns of his homeland Bruges and Ghent.
Barb Jungr is a warm and generous artist. Her passion for the material goes beyond performance as she shares her soul with the audience, whether it’s Chanson or Dylan or Cohen. Her upcoming evening of songs from the Beatles and Sting promises to be a treat. And more Chanson before too long. Please.