Search - Caroline Moreau :: Paris Is Burning

Chantoozy with mission statement

P. Bryant | Nottingham, England | 11/12/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Caroline is a chantoozy with a mission statement - to revive the lost art of the French café or cabaret chanson, that intense, wordy, dramatic, passionate style which we on this side of the Channel never came close to, and never really tried either, it's just a bit trop flamboyant for us. It's not pop music. And it's not folk music either, musette or no musette. In this incarnation it's played by a small but impressive cabal of international musicians, which by some magic Caroline managed to round up : there's Oleg Ponomarev (ex-Loyko, currently one third of Koshka) from Habarovsk, Russia on frantic double-stopping violin and baritone guitar; Nigel Clark (from the Scottish Guitar Quartet, see review elsewhere) on guitar-of-all-trades, filling in every corner; Dermot Dunne ("Ireland's leading classical accordionist") on classical accordion - these are on the record, and at gigs you now get Dermot's pal Ariel Hernandez from Buenos Aires (but who now lives in Dublin) filling in for Mr Clark. My goodness, how very cosmopolitan - I bet they all met one rainy evening in the bar in the Ormond Hotel, over a couple of pints of the landlord's best.

This is splendid stuff for any Jacques Brel fans out there, like me for instance. It's true this style of chanson is for some the stuff of caricature (waltzes, accordions, Gitanes, bread, dreadful love affairs, Picasso and Bracques) but so, of course, is traditional English folk singing, and we all know how great that can be. Caroline is a wonderful singer, she has complete authority over these songs, and I have already made a space on my shelf for her next one.

Disambiguation: I think the title is a reference to Rene Clair's 1966 large-scale drama of the Resistance "Paris brule-t'il?" rather than Jennie Livingston's widely-praised 1990 documentary of black and Latino gay New York balls which is also called "Paris is Burning".

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