Laurent Naouri

Scofield: Now berceaux, and that is a type of music I think a lot of our listeners might not be familiar with. I think it is a lullaby, typically in triple meter, and it just so happens that gives us an excellent introduction to your brand new CD En sourdine, because it also contains a lovely berceaux, and you recorded this with the wonderful jazz guitarist Frederic Loiseau.

Naouri: Yes. My purpose, actually, in that recording, was to address intimacy in French songs. I’ve been singing all these songs the way they are written for nearly 30 years. Opera is not my natural first mode of singing. I started in jazz mostly. What I’m always wondering is that when I’m singing even to a small audience, even in a living room for, let’s say, 30 or 40 people, even if I’m singing very soft, the voice has to be projected in order to get to the ear, because there’s no amplification, and it’s impossible to do otherwise. And it’s great, it’s beautiful.

But then in some cases, there are really poems that are so intimate. It’s pillow talk. It’s something you do much easier with a mic than without a mic. There was this thing that I was trying to get to. Because I met Frederic, who’s a jazz guitarist, but who’s a Faure freak. He analyzed so many of the songs, and we started off like that, and actually we stripped the songs of its piano setting. But we kept the melody and the harmonies, and we decided to stage them more in a folk song way, and try to put the poem first and forward and in French.

In France, we don’t have the word “song” for that repertoire. We use “mélodie” for Fauré, for Berlioz. Song is more like the word “chanson”. It refers more to something of the 20th century, like folk songs, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, that kind of thing. When we speak of Fauré and Gounod, we always refer them as “mélodie”, which also looks like the English word “melody”.

In a way, I tried to bring these melodies from Fauré and Debussy closer to what in France we called songs. I know that many people who heard this recording, who were not familiar with the repertoire of Fauré, in a way got into it more easily, because it spoke to them more directly. I guess a lot of the audience lost the natural relation to the projected song voice, because of what they hear on the radio is so much of a singing voice song, and not classical music. What people are fed with is more of a voice that sings like it talks. That kind of colour is only possible because there are microphones. When you hear Frank Sinatra’s first recordings in 1930, he was a big Crosby fan, and at the time mic was pretty new, you could still hear he was sort of projecting the voice. When you hear [Singing], you can hear this thing around the voice, the more he learned how to use the mic, then in the 50s, he would take the same song, it would be [Singing], much less of that.

And that’s what people grew up with, and people lost the habit. For me, it’s natural to sing in both ways. I was happy to realize that many people who didn’t know much about this classical song repertoire open their ears to it. With that kind of work, that’s what we tried to do.

Scofield: Laurent, you do a marvellous impression of Frank Sinatra!

Naouri: Oh, well! [Laughter]

Scofield: This is going to be very intimate.

Naouri: I use what I know of one field in the other field, and vice versa. It constantly travels with me because if you do a nice romance in an opera, what’s wonderful is that even when he sings slows, it’s swinging. It has something that never stops moving on. And that you can use it in the opera language, because you tend to protect the voice and lose the lightness. Both are compatible. You just need not to forget one to get the other. I try to use what I know in every field in any way, that’s who I am. And I make the best I can with what I’ve experienced. But for me, it’s certainly not two separated worlds in my mind. It’s constantly traveling from one to the other.