Jacques Brel

Jacques Brel – INTEGRAL Jacques Brel 1953-1962 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 03:12:01 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Musiques du monde, Europe, Chanson française
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover

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Jacques Brel – Quand on n’a que l’amour (1957/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 28:43 minutes | 655 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

This second album from Jacques Brel, released in 1957, includes two songs conducted by Michel Legrand. The title track, released as an advance single, reached number three on the French charts. The song has remained a popular cover song with versions having being recorded by Celine Dion, Patricia Kaas, Dalida and others.
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Jacques Brel – Olympia 1964 (Live) (1964/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 48:17 minutes | 1006 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Jacques Brel’s second live album, recorded over two nights in October 1964 at the famed Olympia Theatre in Paris and released in 1967. The album showcases Brel’s superb ability to communicate with a live audience and is listed in Robert Dimery’s 2005 book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
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Jacques Brel – Ne Me Quitte Pas – Nouveaux Enregistrements 1972 (1988/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 38:51 minutes | 872 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Le dernier renouvellement de contrat entre Jacques Brel et Barclay a eu lieu le 3 mars 1971 pour une durée de 33 ans. Le chanteur réenregistre alors plusieurs titres de l’époque Philipps, dans de nouveux arrangements. Ce disque, sorti en 1972, constitue donc une sorte de « best-of » des premières années de carrière du chanteur. S’il faut saluer le travail d’orchestration réalisé par François Rauber et si sur cet album quelques-uns des titres présentés son passés à la postérité (notamment le superbe « Ne me quitte pas »), malgré la voix déjà bien altérée par le tabac du chanteur, ces nouveaux enregistrements n’apportent pas grand chose. Excepté pour l’aspect documentaire donc, cet album n’est donc pas indispensable.
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Jacques Brel – Marieke (1961/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 45:58 minutes | 907 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Jacques Brel’s fifth album, released in 1961, contains the often-covered title love song which has been translated and recorded by a wide range of artists including Liza Minnelli and Judy Collins. On this album, Brel sings the lyrics both in French and Flemish, the other major language of his native Belgium, marking the only time in his career he combined French and Flemish on a song. Also included here is Le Moribond, a huge worldwide hit in English in 1974 for Terry Jacks under the title Seasons in the Sun.
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Jacques Brel – Les Bourgeois (1962/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 45:59 minutes | 971 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Jacques Brel’s sixth album, released in 1962, is a satiric and often critical look at upper class French society. Brel had long spoken out against the materialism of the bourgeois, a reaction to his own upper class family’s disapproval of his choice of career. The lyrics on this album, specifically the title track, left no doubt about his contempt for “les bourgeois.”
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Jacques Brel – Les Bonbons (1966/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 47:20 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

The seventh album from Jacques Brel, released in 1966, is a compilation of two earlier releases recorded in 1963 and 1964. As such, it’s almost a greatest hits package from the middle stages of Brel’s career. The title track Les Bonbons is a chuckle-worthy romp and one of the highlights of the set. Au Suivant, originally appearing on Brel’s 1964 self-titled album, is one of his classics and was a smash at the time of release.
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Jacques Brel – La Valse à Mille Temps (1959/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 30:34 minutes | 711 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Jacques Brel’s fourth album, released in 1959. A personal collection of classics, the cornerstone of the album is Brel’s composition Ne me quitte pas, known in English as the pop standard If You Go Away. The English version, with lyrics by Rod McKuen, has been covered dozens of times, by Shirley Bassey to Barbra Streisand, while translations of the song have been recorded in languages ranging from German to Greek, Polish to Portuguese.
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Jacques Brel – J’Arrive (1968/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 41:28 minutes | 961 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Jacques Brel’s 10th album J’Arrive came out in 1968 as Brel bid farewell to the concert stage and recording studio to concentrate on his acting career. The album was untitled originally and was nicknamed J’Arrive after the title of the lead song. This release includes two bonus songs that were not contained on the original album.
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Jacques Brel – Jacques Brel Et Ses Chansons (1954/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 37:02 minutes | 849 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Nine songs spread over ten inches of shellac, Jacques Brel’s debut album descended upon the French scene of the mid-’50s like an alien invasion. One moment, the chain-smoking Belgian singer/songwriter was a minor name struggling for survival around the Paris nightclubs, frequently playing his intense little songs at six different venues a night; the next, the gleeful “Il Peut Pleuvoir” and the contrarily sober “Sur la Place” were rewriting the very nature of the chanson. Where once was simple emoting, Brel implanted emotion. Where once was ribaldry, Brel inserted drollness. And where once local music was for squares and their parents, Brel was feted by teenaged rock & rollers. Jacques Brel et Ses Chansons, the album which ignited the iconoclasm, is ferociously confident. Although only one of the songs will be immediately familiar to a “rock” audience — Marc Almond covered “Le Diable (Ca Va)” (as “The Devil” on his Jacques album) — still there is an instantly recognizable compulsion to the performance. Brel’s mellifluous, half-smiling, half-snarling voice gallops across the landscape, paced all the way by the richly textured and deeply imaginative accompaniment of Andre Grassi and his orchestra; the snatch of French accordion which punctuates the dark delivery of “Il Nous Faut Regarder” is both hideously apposite and rudely ironic. It is not all doom and gloom, of course — indeed, Brel’s reputation for morbidity and misery is more the premise of his louder English acolytes than of his own work. “C’est Comme Ca” is insanely jovial, a veritable machine gun of leaping lyric and frolicking instrumentation; “Il Peut Pleuvoir” shares a similar outlook, while “Le Fou Du Roi” apparently stepped out of the court of Marie Antoinette, all sweetly chiming harpsichord and a sweetly lilting nursery rhyme rhythm. The ghost of Prokofiev’s “Troika” which hangs around the melody only adds to the experience. It is “Sur la Place” which dominates, however. Recorded at one of his first ever sessions with orchestra leader Francois Rauber, with whom Brel would continue to work for the remainder of his career, the song rides an arrangement which wouldn’t be out of place punctuating a gentle ghost story, while Brel’s talent for conjuring the spirits of nostalgia and sadness from the passing of time is revealed with a perceptiveness almost unbecoming in a mere 25-year-old. Even compared with all that he would go on to create, Jacques Brel et Ses Chansons is no formative, tentative debut offering. Brel sprang into the public consciousness fully formed, with all his gifts and offerings already on public display. All he needed now was for the public to turn and look. Upon release, the album sold a little over 2,000 copies.
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Jacques Brel – Jacques Brel Au Casino De Knokke 23 Juillet 1963 – Récital Et Entretien (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:16:06 minutes | 795 MB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Jacques Brel recorded this live album, released posthumously, at a celebrated show at the Knokke Casino in Flanders, Belgium in July 1963. Perhaps best known as the concert where Brel introduced the classic Mathilde, which wouldn’t appear on a studio album for another three years, the historic performance features many of Brel’s best known songs from the first half of his career. This edition includes a 42 minute interview with Brel, conducted in 1971.
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Jacques Brel – Ces Gens-Là (1966/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 49:39 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Chanson, Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Barclay

Jacques Brel’s eighth album, released in 1966, comprises two EPs originally from 1964. Ces gens-là includes some of Brel’s most well-known songs: Jef, Mathilde and La chanson de Jacky. Scott Walker scored a hit in 1967 with the English translation of the song which was retitled Jackie.
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