Advent calendar: December 14—Claudine Longet, “Snow”
Advent calendar: December 14—Claudine Longet, “Snow”
Claudine Longet, “Snow” (1967)
from ¡Something Festive!
A&M SP 19003
¡Something Festive! (love the inverted exclamation marks) contains the expected A&M MOR xmas stuff: marimba music, a Bacharach number, the Tijuana Brass—plus this. (Well, this plus a Liza Minnelli number that is truly beyond category.) For a while in the late 1960s—and before the later unpleasantness—Claudine Longet was a sort of anti–Serge Gainsbourg, infusing everything she sang with a breathy innocence. It shouldn’t have worked: her voice is so small it’s barely there at all, and as Mrs. Andy Williams she could well have been doomed to terminal blandness. But she had a hipper producer in Tommy LiPuma, and she (or LiPuma) had hipper taste. I don’t know if Andy would have covered a Randy Newman song, as Longet does here, in 1967. And maybe you can get away with anything when you have a French accent. (Fountains of Wayne side project Ivy updates the gambit.)
