The high spot of my week is always listening to the podcast of SVERIGES RADIO’S best programme. RENDEZ.VOUS WITH KRISTJAN SAAG.
Not only does he play wonderful music, Kristjan also provides some fascinating background information about the artists. Today I learnt that Astrud Gilberto’s father, Fritz Weinert, was a German immigrant and language teacher who taught German and English. So it was perhaps not such a great surprise that his daughter was able to sing so well in so many different languages.
Kristjan played tracks with her singing very convincingly in French, Italian and Japanese.
The Girl from Ipanema goes to a Japanese beach…. And enchants us all.
Now I’d like to know from you about your favourite polyglot singers. All those cunning linguists from the glamorous world of pop.
I’d also like to know about your favourite polynot singers. Those poor souls who really should not have attempted to sing in a foreign language but made a brave stab at it. They have my most heartfelt support.
Here’s Astrud singing very convincingly in Japanese.
Polynot!! Mr Ferry tops the list with his wonderful “jammay” in Song For Europe.
Bitter-Sweet was more convincing: but then he had two delightful language coaches…
That Bryan was always a rather jammy sort of cove @retropath2.
Going back to the early 60s, there were many aspiring artists such as the Beatles, dusty Springfield etc who recorded their songs in other languages.
This MOJO article provides an interesting overview.
https://pocketmags.com/us/mojo-magazine/mar-23/articles/who-sang-in-other-languages?srsltid=AfmBOorKnRWpdhmykI4M4E1TmK9RxjhTTeGv8zIL7bAbvdYQ8FhxAZuk#exitplusarticle
THE STONES
ABBA
SANDIE SHAW
The article mentions a few Europeans singers…
The likes of Charles Aznavour, Demis Roussos and Nana Mouskouri were all heavyweight polyglots, the latter also singing in Welsh, Hebrew and MandarinChinese.
Astrud made this interesting comment about her popularity….
In an interview included in the liner notes for a reissue of “Getz/Gilberto” in 1996, Ms. Gilberto marveled at the impact her first recording had in the United States. “Americans are generally not very curious about the styles of other countries,” she said. “But our music was Brazilian music in a modern form.”
She added that she thought the timing also had something to do with the song’s breakthrough, just after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“People needed some romance,” she said, “something dreamy for distraction.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/arts/music/astrud-gilberto-dead.html
Of course, the Fabulosas recorded German versions of She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand, and the Searchers did French and German versions of some of their early hits. The Hollies recorded in Italian, as did the Yardbirds. Petula Clark recorded in several languages, including this 60s classic…
And The Beach Boys
The polyglot brothers that are or were is/was the Three Mustaphas Three, 3M3 who have sung in English, Swahili, Hindi, French, Japanese, and Greek and probably others I can’t remember.
But here is RT with French, Frith and Kaiser in Okinawan.
What bliss.
Richard Thompson and friends singing a Japanese drinking song!
That is quite irresistible @hubert.rawlinson.
I’m sure it would go down a bomb at parties.
This wikipedia list of polyglot artists makes for an interesting read..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multilingual_bands_and_artists
There are many names that I”ve never heard, but several that I do know that have impressive language skills…
Kraftwerk (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Russian)
Mediæval Bæbes (Modern English, Latin, Middle English, French, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Cadenet, Scottish English, German, Manx Gaelic, Spanish, Welsh, Bavarian, Provençal, Irish Gaelic, Cornish)
Kiri Te Kanawa (English, Māori, Latin, Italian, French, German)
Nana Mouskouri (Greek, French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Welsh, Mandarin Chinese, Corsican)
Sissel Kyrkjebø (English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Irish, Italian, French, Russian, Icelandic, Faroese, German, Neapolitan, Māori, Japanese, and Latin)4
Enya (Irish Gaelic, English, Welsh, Latin, Spanish, Japanese, Sindarin, Quenya, Loxian)
The Queen of Bollywood has impressive language skills…
Asha Bhosle (Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Malayalam, English)
Kraftwerk don’t have too many lyrics though
Very true @dai.
It’s a bit rich that they should boast about how polyglot they are when there at most 20 words to translate in each song.
But I do suspect that when the robots revolt and take over all our civilisation, the Dudes from Dusseldorf will still be Top of the Robo-Pops.
Super Furry Animals – Songs recorded in Welsh and English
Gwenno Saunders sings in Welsh, Cornish and now English.
That’s a timely reminder for me. I need to listen to her most recent album again. It’s brilliant stuff, but I somehow forgot about it.
Hanoi Rocks – Finnish (except the drummer), sung in English.
Now this just may be the way they were exposed to music, learnt it, and played it.
After all, the market for a Finnish speaking band is probably quite small (one would suggest only in Finland)
I’m so lazy, je suis si paresseux, ich bin so faul. I’m just going to paste a quote from wiki from the Google search page:
“Manu Chao is a French-Spanish musician. He sings in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Arabic, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Greek, and occasionally in other languages”
He does slip between languages so easily.
Manu does indeed slip effortlessly between different languages. Often in the same song! Excellent example @salwarpe.
Brought up in Paris, relocated to Barcelona, very widely travelled, …he’s magnificently polyglot and multi-cultural.
There are many parts of the world where it is perfectly normal to be at very least bi-lingual: India, Catalonia, Quebec, Finland, Wales, Ireland, Sardinia, Switzerland…
Our discussion got me wondering hot many languages an opera singer is expected to master.
REDDIT gave me some answers.
CONTRIBUTOR DGBD commented
Most professional opera singers will have French, Italian, German, and English. Often, they will be very strong in one or two of those languages (often the mother tongue and a strong second language), but will be able to sing in all four well. Russian, Spanish, and Czech also factor in, but to a lesser degree.
In the current popular repertoire, Italian and German are the most common, followed by French. Of your list, Spanish would be the least popular, although there are people who specialize in Spanish operas.
I’d say that outside of a country that speaks the language, it is much more likely than not that the singer is NOT a native speaker. In Germany, you’ll find a lot of Germans singing in German, but in America, it’s a hodge-podge of nationalities.
Not really, although different styles are associated with different languages. People might specialize in Wagner (German) or Bel Canto (Italian), but there are many composers who wrote in multiple languages (Rossini wrote in French and Italian, for example), so language isn’t everything.
Singers go through a lot of diction training, and are usually expected to be able to fluently speak at least one of their second languages. If all else fails, there is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which assigns each sound a specific character. If you can write out everything in IPA, you’ll know exactly how to sing it, even if you have no idea what it means. I once sang in a production of Eugene Onegin where the chorus and many of the soloists were singing from a score with the text in IPA rather than the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. We had coaching in the language, but sometimes it’s easier to break everything down in your own terms than to learn a new alphabet and language!
Very helpful.
Also, if you sing in a choir, even at an amateur level, you will probably expected to sing in a variety of different languages and sometime you will have no idea what you are singing about.
And even with a smaller language like Welsh, Czech, Icelandic, Greek, Basque or Hungarian there might be some native speakers in the audience who will be critical of poor pronunciation.
Two tongues are better than one!
Yerba Buena – Bilingual Girl
TWO TONGUES ARE BETTER THA N ONE!
That sounds rather rude. I suspect that this New York Venezuelan and Cuban combo had been smoking some yerba buenissima.
The name Yerba Buena rung vague bells for me, @Alias.
I googled and discovered that they had played on the Ballroom Stage at Roskilde in 2004.
En av de mäktigaste konserterna på hela festivalen erbjöd Yerba Buena, som är en grupp med färgstarka personligheter och såväl kvinnor som män. Med sitt Urban afro-latin sound bjöd det New York-baserade musikkollektivet på en ljudsprakande konsert, som integrerade publiken in i musiken med dans och sång. De spelade en blandning av salsa, hip hop, reggae, funk och rumba.
One of the most powerful concerts of the entire festival was offered by Yerba Buena, a group with colorful personalities and both women and men. With their Urban Afro-Latin sound, the New York-based music collective offered a sound-splitting concert, which integrated the audience into the music with dance and singing. They played a mix of salsa, hip hop, reggae, funk and rumba.
https://www.fria.nu/artikel/2094
I was at the festival and that was my favourite stage.
They certainly look like a lot of fun.
This morning, I googled the word polyglot and arrived at this rather splendid Basque Culture site
https://basqueculture.eus/en/stories/music/polyglot-and-unfettered
I suspect that @salwarpe will find it interesting. Here’s some catchy electropop ung in one of Europe’s oldest and most idiosyncratic languages.
By an odd coincidence, on my way home from the shops this afternoon, I happened to run into Inigo, one of our ex-neighbours who is always a joy to meet.
He’s a young lad in his early 20s, about the same age as our own son, whose family come from the Basque country, So he speaks Basque and Spanish, along with very fluent English and Swedish, And then he learnt Russian and spent a year studying engineering in Moscow.
He is a real cinephile and Kubrick and Eisenstein are his great idols, He is very disappointed that Bio Reflexen, where I am a volunteer, doesn’t screen BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN more often.
But he is always interested to hear what we are showing.
Anyway, Inigo sings in a choir, so I asked him which languages they usually sing in.
Surprisingly, there are a lot of works in Latin. But he commented that French, Italian, German and English are all pretty common.
No question about it. It’s a demanding life belonging to a modern choir.
As you tag me, KFD, I’d better reply. I probably would find Basque music of interest. My cousin married a Basque woman and has lived for some 20+ years in Donostia/San Sebastián. His children are trilingual+ (one more than my own), and he plays in local bands – so he’s probably very familiar with the artists named on the site you link to.
I hit the jackpot when I tagged you there @salwarpe.
I did so because of your wonderful curiosity for music from all over the world. I never expected you would have a cousin in San Sebastian with tri-lingual children. How has he coped with earning that extremely difficult language?
I wonder how aware he is of his home town’s very rich pop music heritage.
This seems like a good moment to mention the Donosti Sound from the 1990s, a gaggle of indie pop bands with a very distinctive sound and some very memorable songs.
This short clip, which has sub-titles in English is a very good introduction.
And here is one of my favourite Donosti songs – CON PERU EN LA PLAYA., With Peru on the beach, by Le Mans.
If you are confused, Peru is a popular boys name in the Basque Country, it’s a diminutive of Petrus.
I don’t know that he has learned Basque, though I may be wrong. I would imagine he is very aware of his town’s rich pop music heritage as his band is active in the local scene. Here’s a link to a video by his band – ‘Black Gamba’
https://www.reverbnation.com/artist/video/13642051
Here’s Martin Carthy singing in Basque in 1996. He sings the song “Nafarroa” with the Basque group Oskorri.
Carthy appears to be reading the lyrics off a piece of paper on the floor, but still does pretty well, I think (not that I understand Basque!). Anyway, the Basque crowd gives him a huge ovation after MC completes the first verse!
Excellent stuff, @duco01. Here’s a translation of the rather dramatic lyrics..
https://mainlynorfolk.info/martin.carthy/songs/nafarroa.html
More Thompson, this time in Arabic.
Question time.
I live in a bi-lingual family with a Swedish partner and two young adult kids who are used to hearing both Swedish and English.
How many of you Afterworders belong to a bi-lingual or even multi-lingual family?
And how many of you grew up in a family where several language were spoken?
I was thinking about my bilingual family here in Stockholm, where there’s always a discussion about which language we should use.
And then it struck me. With an English father and Welsh-speaking mother, I grew up in a bi-lingual family in Pinner.
The big difference being that our mother tongue was never spoken.
Back in the 1960s it was never even discussed that my brother and I should learn Welsh. What use was that?
He moved to New York and became very active in the Welsh Church of Manhattan.
I moved to Stockholm and became a big fan of Goldie Lookin’ Chain…
My daughter is bilingual like her mother, not really spoken at home but she went to a French school/pre-school right up to High School where she switched to English. A big advantage in Canada to speak both.
For me my mother was English and my dad Welsh, but he was not Welsh speaking and at school when given the chance between Welsh and German I opted for the latter. I speak it passably (getting worse) but that’s more due to many years in Switzerland even if Swiss-German is very close to its own language rather than a dialect. Some say the same about Canadian French but my French isn’t advanced enough to spot the differences
Thanks Dai for a very interesting comment..
These questions about language and identity eare never straightforward!
Hi KFD. I’ve already answered this question above. My suggestion, because it’s quite separate from (although adjacent to) your polyglot singers OP, would be to start a new post – you’ll attract more viewers that way.
Any excuse to post some Kate Bush…..
She also did a French version of “Infant Kiss”
An excellent contribution @Chrisf.
A lovely tune and something of a rarity. too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_t%27enfuis_pas
Unusual for Kate to write a song in French.