Chill’em All
Champion
2004: Saboteur SAB009
Here’s a nice example of how items in my musical library (well, all of my libraries, for that matter) sometimes overlap unexpectedly. I fell for the track “Two Hoboes” when I heard it one day on Paris’s eternally-surprising Radio Nova (101.5), with its note-simple but odd and supremely infectious riff graced by the gorgeous icing of that husky alto vocal. When I received the copy of the CD I’d immediately ordered, I quickly noticed that the vocalist on it was “Betty Bonifassi,” who could be none other than the same “Béatrice Bonifassi” featured on those scrumptious vocal stylings on the Triplets of Belleville soundtrack!
Bonifassi appears on only three tracks, but they’re three of the best here. The other I’d put in that category is “Tavern,” which is a knockout-grooving and somewhat hilarious DJ sampling creating a musical story-arc with very little base material. I’m intrigued by the note in the CD’s credits that the English lyrics are all from Negro Songs of Protest; that information adds a certain level of interest to any hearing of those songs, and perhaps it even offsets the wincing caused by Bonifassi not quite getting up to the key’s true pitch on much of “No Heaven” (on which she otherwise provides a hurricane-intensity vocal eventually).
Comments © 2009 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.