The Private Canon: "Sur la place"

This post is part of a series.

Most of my favorite composers are French; songwriters less so. I’ve written before about the uneven brilliance of Serge Gainsbourg and the sleepy beauty of Juliette Greco, and one of my more popular posts here was one in which I shared my own lyrics for “If We Only Have Love.”

I guess it’s not surprising, then, that what I think as my favorite Jacques Brel song is actually my favorite recording of a song by him, as best as I can tell an outtake from his great N° 5 album of 1961 (a.k.a. Marieke), on which the orchestrations of François Rauber underpin his strummy, gritty chansons with peerless taste: beds of strings for sweet ballads, crackling percussion for bolero-style declamations, a full arsenal of twinkling café orchestra colors for both classic chansons and sneering parodies, even a Brubeckian beatnik backdrop (for the lively “Clara”). In the case of “Sur la place,” a simple minor-key guitar waltz about a girl dancing in a sad town square on a hot day that closed his 1954 live debut album on a wistful note, Rauber came up with a gorgeously reharmonized orchestration worthy of Nelson Riddle (but oddly and criminally, this recording doesn't seem to have surfaced publicly until 25 years after Brel's death, on a CD boxed set). It starts with the whine of an ondes martenot, a sort of organ-theremin, and swells to a full wind-heavy orchestration before receding again. This rise and fall is not uncommon for Brel but in this case it never turns into the full garment-rending Brel snarl or stop/start tempo that spells “drama” in so many of his songs; his vocal is restrained, even impassive, and all the more powerful for it.

As with many songs I love, I can hone in on the harmony that really hooks me here. In this case it’s the two opening chords. In the original they’re a simple A-minor and D-minor progression. But here they start in a sort of A-flat; this is how I hear the opening, with the top line of the ondes martenot and the bass (or harp) below:

Then the opening melody starts over the same chord. But check out the second chord (the weird time-signature shift is also in Brel’s original), a sort of modal A:

With the flute shimmering like heat off the pavement, and the triple-meter pulse suggesting the dancing girl’s insistence in the face of the town’s fatal indifference, it’s all just unspeakably evocative. And then the ondes martenot returns, playing a part that resembles the opening but is different:

It ends in its home key yet still sounds unresolved, in a way that reminds me of the end of Peggy Lee's similarly exotic "Sans Souci." It's as if the song has evaporated in the heat, leaving a ghostly afterimage. I can think of few songs that haunt me more.