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Of all the strange records this French vanguard
pop
chanteuse ever recorded, this 1971 collaboration between the teams of
Brigitte Fontaine
and her songwriting partner
Areski
and
the Art Ensemble of Chicago
-- who were beginning to think about returning to the United States after a two-year stay -- is the strangest and easily most satisfying. While
Fontaine
's records could be beguiling with their innovation, they occasionally faltered by erring on the side of gimmickry and cuteness. Here,
the Art Ensemble
provide the perfect mysterious and ethereal backdrop for her vocal explorations. Featuring the entire
Art Ensemble
of that time period and including fellow
Chicago
AACM member
Leo Smith
on second trumpet,
stretched the very notion of what
had been and could be. With strangely charted arrangements and mixing (percussion was in the foreground and horns were muted in the background, squeezed until they sounded like snake-charming flutes), the ten tracks here defy any and all conventions and result in the most provocative popular recording of 1971 -- and that's saying something. For their part,
hadn't played music this straight since before leaving
, with long, drooping
ballad
lines contrasted with sharp Eastern figures and North African rhythmic figures built in. The finest example of how well this works, and how seductively weird it all is, is on the two-part
"Tanka."
Here,
Malachi Favors
' bass and
's percussion meet everything from bouzoukis to clarinets to muted trumpets to sopranino saxophones, courtesy of
Joseph Jarman
,
Roscoe Mitchell
Smith
, and
Lester Bowie
, who play in tandem, using striated harmonies and
modal
intervals in order to stretch the notion of time and space under
's vocals. The effect is eerie, chilling, and hauntingly beguiling, and sets the tone for an entire album that runs all over the stylistic map while not adhering to anything but its own strange muse. This is remarkable stuff from a very adventurous time when virtually anything was possible. ~ Thom Jurek