Jean Vasca's Midi, 1975

Time and again we've encountered this conundrum, the well-written even gorgeous music, somewhat marred by spoken words or poetry above it, distracting from the quality of the composition.

This French gentleman wrote both music and poetry for a long series of albums, beginning in the early sixties, continuing on into the 2000s, even releasing a CD a few years before passing away in 2016 at the age of 76. For those who are familiar with his older compatriot Leo Ferre (those dozen or so people outside of France that is, lol) the sound is almost the same except Jean uses a bit more contemporary instrumentation in comparison.  Based on his 2-CD collection which I listened to, Midi stands above all the rest of his albums in terms of the quality of the musical composition, not surprising, given it came out in 1975 when there was so much interest in progressive music.

Moi je suis de la nuit:

The title track:

I find it somewhat distracting that instead of purely speaking or purely singing he kind of does both, imitating a melody with words, as it were, without actually singing in tune, even though there does seem to be a composed melody in there somewhere. On the other hand for those who understand French, the poetry is quite beautiful and imaginative, full of jarring metaphor.