Brigitte Fontaine

Brigitte Fontaine, a vocalist from France, crafted an expanding catalog of wildly unconventional and stylistically varied art-pop throughout the 1970s, attracting considerable admiration inside her native country while remaining largely unknown to listeners abroad. At the outset she operated as a quirky yet approachable pop artist who delivered tuneful, elaborately orchestrated songs in the spirit of a more audacious counterpart to Françoise Hardy during the shift from the late 1960s into the early 1970s. Her debut album enlisted the services of arranger Jean Claude Vannier, who had previously supplied arrangements for Serge Gainsbourg. Later releases steered her into jazz-inflected territory and then onward into more demanding avenues of avant-gardism and art song. The resulting discs stood out for their admirable breadth and unmistakable inconsistency. Across them she drew on African tribal rhythms, jarring progressive jazz, graceful folk-derived melodies, demanding a cappella passages that stretched the voice to its limits, recited poetry, and reverent classical settings, all executed at times with heedless, chemically enhanced abandon. Certain projects paired her with Areski, a male songwriter and singer of lesser distinction whose coarse delivery sat awkwardly beside Fontaine’s sweet and seasoned timbre. She resumed recording activity in the 1990s just as her earlier catalog began to attract a devoted following among English-speaking listeners.