Brel Songs

The customary Broadway original cast album is a single-record affair, usually with an outline of the story, showing where the songs fit in, on the back cover. All the more surprising then that Columbia should now go all out to devote two boxed records to a current off-Broadway entertainment called "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris."

This proposition is based on the assumption that the works of Brel, a French songwriter-performer who works both with and without collaborators but who always supplies the words, are unusual and interesting enough to withstand a sea change, in this case translations by Mort Shuman, one of the performers, and Eric Blau, a longtime champion of Brel. I'm not so sure it works.

Though Brel is perhaps a bit more outspoken, even a bit more searching in little studies of love and life among the old and young, his songs are all pretty much the passionate, overly dramatic (by our standards and considering their musical forms) Frenchy-type ballads we've long been exposed to. In the hands of such contemporary writer-composers as Aznavour and Becaud, they have some potency and, in the case of a genuine artist such as the late Piaf, a true life of their own.

Brel himself puts them across effectively, as witness Vanguard's recent "The Formidable Jacques Brel," but the four performers here, able and willing as they are, don't quite succeed in convincing the listener of the importance of their material. They are, for the record, Elly Stone, Alice Whitfield, Shawn Elliott and Shuman.

Recording Debut

Ah, well, as Noel Coward once said in a song, "There's always something fishy about the French."

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