Styles: Vocal
Time: 43:30
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Size: 104,7 MB
Art: Front
(3:32) 1. This foolish heart could love you
(4:31) 2. What of your eyes
(4:49) 3. Plus fort que nous
(3:53) 4. À la Tour Eiffel
(4:34) 5. Fleurs du dimanche
(4:35) 6. Samba em prelúdio (un jour sans toi)
(4:45) 7. Perhaps you'll wonder why
(2:10) 8. Recitativo (instrumental)
(5:52) 9. Ode to every man
(4:45) 10. Darling fare thee well
Melody Gardot’s sixth studio album is both bigger and smaller, in different ways. “Entre eux Deux” can be seen as a more minimalist collection, certainly, in that it’s the first time she’s recorded with only a piano for accompaniment instead of a full band. But the billing, at least, has expanded it’s a duo record, with that piano played not by her, accomplished as she is, but by Philippe Powell, whom she calls “the Bill Evans of Brazil.” He’s un of the titular deux in every way, having also fully collaborated on the album as her co-writer as well as pianist, with the album coming out of an intensive two-week workshop in her Paris studio apartment, writing around the clock with a view of the Eiffel Tower for inspiration.
But you may find yourself checking and re-checking the credits to make sure most of the songs on “Entre eux Deux” really were written by these two. Many of them sound like forgotten trunk songs from the Great American Songbook… or the Great French Songbook, since half of them are in the language of the city where they were conceived. In fact, unlike Gardot’s previous album, 2020’s “Sunset in the Blue” where most of the songs were original but she also threw in a few standards like “Moon River” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily” this album eschews reaching back to the classics, at least in everything but ear-deceiving spirit.
“We tested the material out, and we had some New Yorkers and some cats from San Francisco and Paris in the room, and they said it sounded like standards,” affirms Gardot. “I just went, ‘Cool.’ Because I think we need more! I think there's a kind of a chain-formed policy, whether it's in Hollywood or art or literature or music, where we redo old things and look back and go, ‘Okay, let's do that again.’ And it's nice to have people who are working forward, with the same aestheticism, creating something new. So I'm happy if people think that they feel like standards. But mostly I’m hoping that they mean something to somebody, because otherwise there's no point in doing this at all.”
Gardot’s music often gets shunted into the category of jazz, which she’s perfectly happy to be in, or not to be in that’s the listeners’ choice, not the lady’s. “I never really worried about genre; that, to me, was just consequence. They actually didn't even know where to put these records for a long time, but I just love music. That's the only thing that ever made sense to me, and coming from where I came from, I'm lucky to be able to do anything at all. If this is where the world said you ought to go, I take it as a great responsibility but also an amazing opportunity to do something beautiful and to hold myself to a standard that maybe is a little bit too high,” she laughs.
“I know for a fact it's niche,” Gardot continues, “and I know that this kind of music is definitely not going to be bopping on the radio more than Bieber at the end of the day. But it's cool to have something that's out there as art for art's sake, and hope that somebody finds it and it does them a world of good, too. But no, I don't worry about genre I worry about song. A long time ago a drummer said to me, ‘You know, if you got rid of the snare, the upright bass and the sax, your songs would be pop.’ And I went, ‘Yeah, but I like the snare and the upright bass.’”
Of course, she did ditch both those instruments this time, ironically, but not so that she could add electronic programming or samples. The idea of doing a solo-piano record that is not actually a real solo album appealed to her. “I had some friends who had encouraged me a long time ago to do one alone, because I think my first love is the piano, versus the guitar,” she says. “I’m more skilled at it, arguably. But I never really had the courage.” Bravery didn’t really figure into it, anyway, once she met Powell and was just inexorably drawn to engage him in a full-scale collaboration.
There is some musical backstory that led her to this point. In 2005, when she was living in her native Philadelphia in a freezing apartment, Gardot was, in all her poverty, being courted by a succession of jazz labels that had heard about her becoming a phenomenon on the local scene. Part of the romancing that was being done by these gentleman-caller labels involved them sending her stacks of records from their storied catalogs, and these sent her on a multi-cultural jazz journey. She loved Stan Getz’s “The Girl From Ipanema: The Bossa Nova Years,” and proceeded from there to a serious love affair with an album by Brazil’s most legendary jazz guitarist, Baden Powell the father of her future collaborator, Philippe Powell.
The senior Powell had moved from Brazil to Paris when he was about 25, and stayed for about 25 years a period that included the birth of Baden, who, though retaining Brazilian citizenship, has stuck around the city of love since. “I can’t put words on what exactly it is, but there is a love story between the Brazilian and the French,” says Philippe, who certainly counts as a spiritual love child of the two territories.
By the mid-2010s, Gardot, whom Baden says is “very famous in Paris,” was traveling in the circles where she was bound to meet the son of one of her heroes. But she’s quick to establish that he does not ride on any coattails, and it doesn’t hurt that he picked a different instrument to excel on than the one he might’ve seemed destined for. “Even though he's the son, you don't really feel his father,” says Gardot. “He's his own entity. He's unbelievable. As a piano player, it's pretty funky to have the idea to give up your instrument for somebody else. But I’ve got to say, I wouldn't have done it for anyone but him. There's a lot of great musicians, but not a lot of people who know the art of the duo.”
Speaking of duos, their collaborating really felt like kismet when they started collaborating and she urged him to think of what she calls “one of my favorite records of all time,” “Tony Bennett and Bill Evans.” It was around that point that Gardot sheepishly learned that there was more of an Evans connection than she could have guessed: Powell had studied under a teacher who was very close to that late jazz great at Paris’ Bill Evans Academy so that ticked off some unexpected bingo boxes. http://www.frontview-magazine.be/en/news/melody-gardot-philippe-powell-announce-new-album-entre-eux-deux
Entre eux deux
