Saint Privat
Guitar, bass, drums played with brushes, and a woman singing in French in Vienna ... That was the working band Saint Privat kept in its early years, and it is what sits under this song ... a trio, the size of a kitchen ...
Saint Privat is two people in Vienna ... Klaus Waldeck, a producer, and Valérie Sajdik, a singer and actress, who began the project in 2004 to make the music of old Italian and French films that nobody had asked for ... Nino Rota's orchestras, bossa nova, chanson, the soundtrack to a Riviera that mostly exists on posters ... Waldeck has named the Romanian pianist Eugen Cicero as a touchstone ... Three records in twenty years ... Riviera, Superflu, and Après la Bohème ... This one is from Superflu, 2006 ... the title means superfluous, which is the kind of joke a Viennese producer makes about a record of French pop, and then makes the record anyway ...
One, two, three ... the title is a count-in, the words a bandleader says before the first bar, or what a child says before a jump ... In French it is also the count of a waltz ... Neither of them has said a word about this song in public, so the trio is the fact we have ... three players, brushes on the drums, and Sajdik's French over the top, made close rather than polished ...
A count-in is a promise that something is about to start ... the song keeps the promise for three minutes and then hands it back ...