Michel Legrand Orchestra - Paris ~ album I Love Paris stereo 1961

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• published: 08 Aug 2013
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This track has already been posted a few times. They're from the original 1954 albumThis is a stereo 1961 take. Courtesy of a luxuriant musicality, a catalogue of nonpareil romantic songs and film scores. Michel Legrand's achievement as song composer and finest living arranger orchestrator is without equal among contemporaries. Legrand's songs are occasionally informed by a contemporary pop sensibility -- Breezy -- On my way to you -- Something new in my life. Others are moodily substantial ~ Between yesterday and tomorrow. There's the whimsy of Maybe someone dreamed us enveloping a winsome melody. But these are just jottings about an illustrious career beginning as Sinatra was moving into top gear in the early 50's rubbing shoulders with the greats of the music industry and winning the respect of peers. Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz commented favourably on Legrand's completeness as a musician. Getz and Legrand, both poetically inclined musicians recorded Legrand's Communications an early 1970s achievement to place alongside Getz' vaunted Focus album with Eddie Sauter( the finest orchestral jazz album). The Sauter Getz Legrand names constitute a triad in the orchestral jazz.story Legrand's musical schooling not just in jazz must have surprised the John Coltrane Miles Davis duo when he arrived in New York to complete his 1958 Legrand Jazz ~.for the finest jazz musicians of the era..It followed on the heels of a brief sojourn in Hollywood for the demotic boot of Frankie Laine's album Reunion in Rhythm.Though he has worked with the two greatest latterday trumpet eminences of jazz ~ Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie his musical instincts are nearer the irrepressible ebullience of Gillespie than the austere minimalism of Davis. His numerous movie scores comprise a varied musical canvas.From the periodstyled Three Musketeers through the dramatically ambitious music for Ice Station Zebra to numerous contemporary scores tinctured wherever possible with the lodestar of jazz and generally displayed on a musical canvas of primary colours. For some Legrand's calling card is the celebrated film musical ( sung through) Les Parapluies de Cherbourg but there is more to Legrand's talent . He has spread his musical energies in multiple directions some ( like Quincy Jones' post 1970s digressions) perhaps of dubious long term viability but all representing a need for total musical expression. Perhaps it's the Alan Marilyn Bergman lyrics but the Streisand film musical Yentl marks a gain on the less substantial world of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort whose fleet even inchoate songs( excepting the jazz standard You must believe in Spring) occasionally betray instrumental inclinations . However the elaborately spun Yentl melodies rich in expressive detail are among the most accomplished and satisfying in Legrand's oeuvre. His mercurial musical brilliance thwarts mundane expectations.As someone suggested post a Legrand concert "! it wasn't sufficiently nuanced. Understandable. Expecting a sedate" Umbrellas" constituency to keep their head above water when Legrand powers ahead with heavy duty jazz is a big ask. His teacher Nadia Boulanger stopped short of jazz but in a democratic world Monteverdi Legrand and jazz are a compatible fit. Since 1953's Once upon a summertime there has been a flow of melody in orchestral and song form. Among his song output are many with the sterling quality of a standard . . Legrand's career kicked off officially aged 22 with perhaps the first concept album dedicated to a city, I love Paris. It has not been bettered by any other tribute album and there have been oodles. It led to a series of orchestral albums moving him into an International circuit ~ albums that not only for inside trackers are still a benchmark for orchestral brilliance of which he is contemporary master. . His gift for vivifying a musical canvas ~ with deft solo woodwind ~ is notable but the elegant addition of strings is what swings it for some Legrand watchers His gifts range over the orchestra. Over the years the musicality has become richer but the seamless technique was in place from the start. His albums down the decades speak for the themselves. Legrand is an incessant musical quester . As an orchestrator his is the art of variation. No two arrangements are facsimiles Good fortune led Legrand and jazz singer Sarah Vaughan into the studio together for one of his and Sarah's finest albums. The albums catch exceeds 200 as do the film scores and the styles are surprisingly varied . In the 1970s Legrand dallied with electronics but this was no arid avant garde dalliance used instead on 20 songs of the 20the century to musical effect During the 20th century the symphony was supposedly under threat. but still lives. Luckily Legrand did not ditch the traditional orchestra.