Description
Pop Legends: Juliette Gréco — French Legends from the 40's and 50's (Audio CD)
Brand new! Factory packaged! As pictured! Buy with confidence!
Product Details:
- Product Type: Audio CD
- Brand / Label: Pop Legends / IMC Music Ltd.
- Artist: Juliette Gréco
- Release Year: 2003 (original recordings: 1949–1952)
- Genre: French Chanson
- Style: Cabaret, Existentialist Chanson, Rive Gauche
- Catalog Number: PL 101625
- UPC / Barcode: 8712177044573
- Condition: New / Factory Sealed
Product Features
- Format: CD
- Discs: 1
- Total tracks: 14
- Recordings: Original studio recordings, 1949–1952
- Licensed from: Intermusic S.A.
- Manufactured in: Portugal
- Packaging: Standard jewel case, factory shrink-wrapped
Overview
Fourteen songs from the years when Juliette Gréco was still a discovery. Recorded between 1949 and 1952 — the Saint-Germain-des-Prés years, when she was a fixture of the Left Bank cafés and the muse of a generation of French intellectuals — these tracks catch her at the moment before she became an institution.
The collaborators alone tell the story. Kosma and Prévert. Aznavour and Véran. Brecht and Weill. Si tu t'imagines, the opening track, is one of the great French pop songs of the postwar era — Raymond Queneau's surrealist lyrics set to Kosma's melody, and Gréco's voice dry and unadorned, more spoken than sung. That quality — the way she inhabits a lyric without sentimentalizing it — runs through the whole disc.
Les feuilles mortes (track 8) is here too, the Kosma/Prévert chestnut better known in English as "Autumn Leaves," performed before it became a jazz standard. Hearing it in this context, in French, in its original arrangement, is a reminder of what the song actually is.
The Pop Legends series doesn't dress things up with remastering notes or bonus commentary — the recordings are what they are, transferred cleanly from the originals. For anyone coming to Gréco for the first time, this is an efficient and honest introduction. For collectors, it's a solid licensed compilation of the essential early years.
Interesting Facts
- Juliette Gréco (1927–2020) became the defining voice of existentialist Paris in the late 1940s, a regular at Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
- Si tu t'imagines (1949), with lyrics by Raymond Queneau, was one of her first major recordings and remains her most recognisable early track — a wry warning about the vanity of youth.
- Les feuilles mortes (track 8) was written in 1945 by Joseph Kosma with lyrics by Jacques Prévert; it became "Autumn Leaves" in English and one of the most recorded songs in history.
- Charles Aznavour co-wrote Je hais les dimanches (track 9), one of the few times the two giants of French popular song worked directly together in the early 1950s.
- Tracks 13 and 14 — La chanson de Barbara and La fiancée du pirate — are French adaptations of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht songs, reflecting the deep influence of German cabaret on the postwar Paris chanson scene.
- Gréco continued recording and performing until her farewell tour in 2019, a career spanning over seven decades.
Track Listing
- Si tu t'imagines (Kosma/Queneau) — 1949
- Rue des blancs manteaux (Kosma/Queneau/Desnos) — 1949
- La fourmi (Desnos/Kosma) — 1949
- Je suis comme je suis (Prévert/Kosma) — 1951
- Les enfants qui s'aiment (Prévert/Kosma) — 1951
- À la belle étoile (Prévert/Kosma) — 1951
- Sous le ciel de Paris (Dréjac/Giraud) — 1951
- Les feuilles mortes (Kosma/Prévert) — 1951
- Je hais les dimanches (Véran/Aznavour) — 1951
- Il y avait (Aznavour/Roche) — 1951
- Embrasse-moi (Prévert/Berg) — 1951
- Les dames de la poste (Blanche/Siniavine) — 1952
- La chanson de Barbara (Brecht/Weill) — 1952
- La fiancée du pirate (Brecht/Weill) — 1952
Publishers
Released by IMC Music Ltd., 2003. Issued under licence from Intermusic S.A. Artwork: Color Creation, The Netherlands. Made in Portugal.
Heard these songs before? A short note from you helps other chanson lovers find this disc.
