Melody Gardot & Philippe Powell announce new album "Entre Eux Deux"

Melody Gardot’s sixth studio album is both bigger and smaller, in different ways. “Entre eux Deux” can be seen as a more minimalist collection, certainly, in that it’s the first time she’s recorded with only a piano for accompaniment instead of a full band. But the billing, at least, has expanded — it’s a duo record, with that piano played not by her, accomplished as she is, but by Philippe Powell, whom she calls “the Bill Evans of Brazil.” He’s un of the titular deux in every way, having also fully collaborated on the album as her co-writer as well as pianist, with the album coming out of an intensive two-week workshop in her Paris studio apartment, writing around the clock with a view of the Eiffel Tower for inspiration.

But you may find yourself checking and re-checking the credits to make sure most of the songs on “Entre eux Deux” really were written by these two. Many of them sound like forgotten trunk songs from the Great American Songbook... or the Great French Songbook, since half of them are in the language of the city where they were conceived. In fact, unlike Gardot’s previous album, 2020’s “Sunset in the Blue” — where most of the songs were original but she also threw in a few standards like “Moon River” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily” — this album eschews reaching back to the classics, at least in everything but ear-deceiving spirit.

“We tested the material out, and we had some New Yorkers and some cats from San Francisco and Paris in the room, and they said it sounded like standards,” affirms Gardot. “I just went, ‘Cool.’ Because I think we need more! I think there's a kind of a chain-formed policy, whether it's in Hollywood or art or literature or music, where we redo old things and look back and go, ‘Okay, let's do that again.’ And it's nice to have people who are working forward, with the same aestheticism, creating something new. So I'm happy if people think that they feel like standards. But mostly I’m hoping that they mean something to somebody, because otherwise there's no point in doing this at all.”

Gardot’s music often gets shunted into the category of jazz, which she’s perfectly happy to be in, or not to be in — that’s the listeners’ choice, not the lady’s. “I never really worried about genre; that, to me, was just consequence. They actually didn't even know where to put these records for a long time, but I just love music. That's the only thing that ever made sense to me, and coming from where I came from, I'm lucky to be able to do anything at all. If this is where the world said you ought to go, I take it as a great responsibility but also an amazing opportunity to do something beautiful — and to hold myself to a standard that maybe is a little bit too high,” she laughs.

“I know for a fact it's niche,” Gardot continues, “and I know that this kind of music is definitely not going to be bopping on the radio more than Bieber at the end of the day. But it's cool to have something that's out there as art for art's sake, and hope that somebody finds it and it does them a world of good, too. But no, I don't worry about genre — I worry about song. A long time ago a drummer said to me, ‘You know, if you got rid of the snare, the upright bass and the sax, your songs would be pop.’ And I went, ‘Yeah, but I like the snare and the upright bass.’”

Of course, she did ditch both those instruments this time, ironically, but not so that she could add electronic programming or samples. The idea of doing a solo-piano record that is not actually a real solo album appealed to her. “I had some friends who had encouraged me a long time ago to do one alone, because I think my first love is the piano, versus the guitar,” she says. “I’m more skilled at it, arguably. But I never really had the courage.” Bravery didn’t really figure into it, anyway, once she met Powell and was just inexorably drawn to engage him in a full-scale collaboration.

There is some musical backstory that led her to this point. In 2005, when she was living in her native Philadelphia in a freezing apartment, Gardot was, in all her poverty, being courted by a succession of jazz labels that had heard about her becoming a phenomenon on the local scene. Part of the romancing that was being done by these gentleman-caller labels involved them sending her stacks of records from their storied catalogs, and these sent her on a multi-cultural jazz journey. She loved Stan Getz’s “The Girl From Ipanema: The Bossa Nova Years,” and proceeded from there to a serious love affair with an album by Brazil’s most legendary jazz guitarist, Baden Powell — the father of her future collaborator, Philippe Powell.

The senior Powell had moved from Brazil to Paris when he was about 25, and stayed for about 25 years — a period that included the birth of Baden, who, though retaining Brazilian citizenship, has stuck around the city of love since. “I can’t put words on what exactly it is, but there is a love story between the Brazilian and the French,” says Philippe, who certainly counts as a spiritual love child of the two territories.

By the mid-2010s, Gardot, whom Baden says is “very famous in Paris,” was traveling in the circles where she was bound to meet the son of one of her heroes. But she’s quick to establish that he does not ride on any coattails, and it doesn’t hurt that he picked a different instrument to excel on than the one he might’ve seemed destined for. “Even though he's the son, you don't really feel his father,” says Gardot. “He's his own entity. He's unbelievable. As a piano player, it's pretty funky to have the idea to give up your instrument for somebody else. But I’ve got to say, I wouldn't have done it for anyone but him. There's a lot of great musicians, but not a lot of people who know the art of the duo.”

Speaking of duos, their collaborating really felt like kismet when they started collaborating and she urged him to think of what she calls “one of my favorite records of all time,” “Tony Bennett and Bill Evans.” It was around that point that Gardot sheepishly learned that there was more of an Evans connection than she could have guessed: Powell had studied under a teacher who was very close to that late jazz great at Paris’ Bill Evans Academy — so that ticked off some unexpected bingo boxes.

MELODY GARDOT & PHILIPPE POWELL ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM "ENTRE EUX DEUX"

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Melody Gardot’s sixth studio album is both bigger and smaller, in different ways. “Entre eux Deux” can be seen as a more minimalist collection, certainly, in that it’s the first time she’s recorded with only a piano for accompaniment instead of a full band. But the billing, at least, has expanded — it’s a duo record, with that piano played not by her, accomplished as she is, but by Philippe Powell, whom she calls “the Bill Evans of Brazil.” He’s un of the titular deux in every way, having also fully collaborated on the album as her co-writer as well as pianist, with the album coming out of an intensive two-week workshop in her Paris studio apartment, writing around the clock with a view of the Eiffel Tower for inspiration.

But you may find yourself checking and re-checking the credits to make sure most of the songs on “Entre eux Deux” really were written by these two. Many of them sound like forgotten trunk songs from the Great American Songbook... or the Great French Songbook, since half of them are in the language of the city where they were conceived. In fact, unlike Gardot’s previous album, 2020’s “Sunset in the Blue” — where most of the songs were original but she also threw in a few standards like “Moon River” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily” — this album eschews reaching back to the classics, at least in everything but ear-deceiving spirit.

“We tested the material out, and we had some New Yorkers and some cats from San Francisco and Paris in the room, and they said it sounded like standards,” affirms Gardot. “I just went, ‘Cool.’ Because I think we need more! I think there's a kind of a chain-formed policy, whether it's in Hollywood or art or literature or music, where we redo old things and look back and go, ‘Okay, let's do that again.’ And it's nice to have people who are working forward, with the same aestheticism, creating something new. So I'm happy if people think that they feel like standards. But mostly I’m hoping that they mean something to somebody, because otherwise there's no point in doing this at all.”

Gardot’s music often gets shunted into the category of jazz, which she’s perfectly happy to be in, or not to be in — that’s the listeners’ choice, not the lady’s. “I never really worried about genre; that, to me, was just consequence. They actually didn't even know where to put these records for a long time, but I just love music. That's the only thing that ever made sense to me, and coming from where I came from, I'm lucky to be able to do anything at all. If this is where the world said you ought to go, I take it as a great responsibility but also an amazing opportunity to do something beautiful — and to hold myself to a standard that maybe is a little bit too high,” she laughs.

“I know for a fact it's niche,” Gardot continues, “and I know that this kind of music is definitely not going to be bopping on the radio more than Bieber at the end of the day. But it's cool to have something that's out there as art for art's sake, and hope that somebody finds it and it does them a world of good, too. But no, I don't worry about genre — I worry about song. A long time ago a drummer said to me, ‘You know, if you got rid of the snare, the upright bass and the sax, your songs would be pop.’ And I went, ‘Yeah, but I like the snare and the upright bass.’”

Of course, she did ditch both those instruments this time, ironically, but not so that she could add electronic programming or samples. The idea of doing a solo-piano record that is not actually a real solo album appealed to her. “I had some friends who had encouraged me a long time ago to do one alone, because I think my first love is the piano, versus the guitar,” she says. “I’m more skilled at it, arguably. But I never really had the courage.” Bravery didn’t really figure into it, anyway, once she met Powell and was just inexorably drawn to engage him in a full-scale collaboration.

There is some musical backstory that led her to this point. In 2005, when she was living in her native Philadelphia in a freezing apartment, Gardot was, in all her poverty, being courted by a succession of jazz labels that had heard about her becoming a phenomenon on the local scene. Part of the romancing that was being done by these gentleman-caller labels involved them sending her stacks of records from their storied catalogs, and these sent her on a multi-cultural jazz journey. She loved Stan Getz’s “The Girl From Ipanema: The Bossa Nova Years,” and proceeded from there to a serious love affair with an album by Brazil’s most legendary jazz guitarist, Baden Powell — the father of her future collaborator, Philippe Powell.

The senior Powell had moved from Brazil to Paris when he was about 25, and stayed for about 25 years — a period that included the birth of Baden, who, though retaining Brazilian citizenship, has stuck around the city of love since. “I can’t put words on what exactly it is, but there is a love story between the Brazilian and the French,” says Philippe, who certainly counts as a spiritual love child of the two territories.

By the mid-2010s, Gardot, whom Baden says is “very famous in Paris,” was traveling in the circles where she was bound to meet the son of one of her heroes. But she’s quick to establish that he does not ride on any coattails, and it doesn’t hurt that he picked a different instrument to excel on than the one he might’ve seemed destined for. “Even though he's the son, you don't really feel his father,” says Gardot. “He's his own entity. He's unbelievable. As a piano player, it's pretty funky to have the idea to give up your instrument for somebody else. But I’ve got to say, I wouldn't have done it for anyone but him. There's a lot of great musicians, but not a lot of people who know the art of the duo.”

Speaking of duos, their collaborating really felt like kismet when they started collaborating and she urged him to think of what she calls “one of my favorite records of all time,” “Tony Bennett and Bill Evans.” It was around that point that Gardot sheepishly learned that there was more of an Evans connection than she could have guessed: Powell had studied under a teacher who was very close to that late jazz great at Paris’ Bill Evans Academy — so that ticked off some unexpected bingo boxes.

Gardot invited Powell to co-write a song for her previous album. Then, stuck in Paris — as one would hope to be — during COVID, she had to do some remote promotional appearances for that 2020 record and, unable to connect with her U.S. band, invited Powell to participate in the spots. “As we did the promo, I could see he was just really gifted, so I pulled him aside and said, ‘Man, what you doing right now?’”

That she wanted him as a writer as well as player hit the spot, since Powell says, “I'm a jazz piano player, so I really like to follow — but I feel mainly like a composer.” But he still had little idea of just how intensive their collaboration would be. “I thought it would be very modern in terms of, ‘Okay, I'm doing some demos and I'll send them to you and you listen.’ This is not the way it happened. When I sent the first demo and I had no answer, I thought she didn't like it. After I tried to call her, she finally called me while she was driving in Spain and said, ‘Honey, you know, I'm not very into technology. So if you send me something, I don't know where it is. Here's my deal: Come to my place. We'll spend some time together and we're going to write music together.’ And this is the way my father used to write music with his partners — it's the non-conventional but old-school way of writing in the sense that we live together for a while and come up with the batch of songs.”

It worked, with them endeavoring to write at least a song a day for two weeks, even if their normal schedules didn’t exactly coalesce. “I was pumped up on energy really late in the night and early in the morning,” Gardot says. “He probably wanted to go to bed, and I'm like, ‘No, we’ve gotta write a song.’ It was like kids, man.”

Gardot has described the album as being like a dance. How does she mean that? “I guess what I mean is that nice moment you can imagine in any dance where the gentleman will let the woman kind of go with it and then he brings her back. There's some space. We just didn't step on each other's toes.” But as Powell further describes it, at one point, there was literal dancing involved. He recalls: “At one point, she got off her stool and she came to me and she took me to dance — because she didn't want to tell me what to do or drive me by saying, ‘Play here. Don't play.’ She said, ‘Let me just take you and dance, and you're going to feel how I would like you to do this playing.’”

There are moments of light and levity on the album, like “A La Tour Eiffel.” “Having this really lovely studio apartment that gave a view to the Eiffel Tower made me look at that thing every day and go, ‘I really want to write a song about it.’ And I looked back and nobody had done that since, like, 1943, and I went, ‘That's weird. Why?’” Voila: niche filled. Being a night person, as previously established, Gardot also came up with the idea for another light-hearted song in French, “Fleurs Du Dimanche,” which is based in “kind of a joke, like, ‘Send me flowers whenever you want, but not Sunday morning, because I'm asleep.’ It's just funny in a very Eartha Kitt way.”

But “Entre eux Deux” devotes plenty of time to deeper and darker territory, exploring a different kind of dance — the one between romanticism and despair. With lyrical phrases like “my merciless sadness” and “the dry and dying desert, the century of hurt,” it’s clear Gardot has learned her lessons well from the classic songbooks about how to capture those aching moments when an all-consuming love has slipped or seems about to slip out of grasp, or just the tentativeness of looking into a lover’s eyes and not knowing how to read them. How does she access these more powerful and not always cheerful emotions, in a working environment?

“That’s unfortunately a bit from where I'm operating,” she laughs. “That, you can't fake.” She certainly wasn’t manufacturing anything for the closing number of the new album, and its most emotional, ‘Darling Fare Thee Well.” “That was a tough one to get through. So we'll see when we get to hit the road whether I can do it without breaking down on stage.” She has other songs in her repertoire that have caused that depth of emotion in shows. It's embarrassing to break down on stage. If people see you do it more than once, it shows up on YouTube and they're like, ‘Ah, she does it every time!’”

She talks about the writing of “This Foolish Heart,” a new song that’s “kind of like round two of ‘Baby, I'm a Fool,’” a signature song that goes back to her second album. Of this heartrending sort-of sequel, Gardot says, “I'm kind of mystified by that one — and the fact that it came within a two-block walk to the store.’ The words that I use in song, I don't often use in daily life. You know, in ‘This Foolish Heart,’ I say, ‘Should your hand fall ever sweetly into the precipice of mine’ — and I was walking down the street to go to a pharmacy and listening to Philippe's piano on headphones and just wrote that down. It made sense at the time.” (Powell corroborates that he gave her the music, and she and the dog returned from her visit to the drug store with a nearly complete piece of perfectly fitting poetry.)

How does she access those feelings in a happy working situation? “I can get in touch with them,” she says. “I think I'm a deeply romantic person. Part of whatever happened when I was 19 made me believe that there was something bigger than all of us.” She’s referring to the accident that changed her life when she was still a teenager, leaving her temporarily paralyzed, sensitive to light and sound, and needing to relearn basic functions — with a newfound genius for music coming out of the therapy she did to recover. “You have to take everything into account at that point, when you're faced with the nucleus of self. A lot of aestheticism doesn't really apply anymore.”

Having had the chance to observe Gardot up close, Powell has some thoughts about her state of mind, as it feeds into her daily life and especially her lyrics. “The amazing thing about happiness is that it's a fundamental state of mind,” Powell says. “Melody is maybe happier than me, in the sense that I'm not too happy and not too sad — I’m kind of very stoic. She inspires me. Even in sad moments, she's very deep because of this happiness that she has overall. She can open the doors on sadness or melancholy or heartbreaking things because she can go in those rooms that most of us are very afraid to go. Doing ‘Fare Thee Well,’ we did a few takes before we could do a whole version without her crying. But while we were writing and recording, she would take my hand and say, ‘Look, let's go in this room. We're going to see some scenes.’”

Gardot applies that same determination to her craft and her career that she does in opening an emotional door for a song. “The thing that stands out to me,” she says, “is that life is about having a great story, and you should be courageous and willing to take risks and willing to question, when necessary, what your motives are, where you're coming from, and eventually a little bit where you're going. Because we are all kind of sat in these sailboats, hoping that the wind's going to take us where we need, but that doesn't mean we don't need to go use the jib and say, ‘Uh-uh, I need to go west now.’” She laughs. “And love’s a bit like that. I think it's the final destination.”

Tracklist

1. This Foolish Heart Could Love You

2. What Of Your Eyes

3. Plus Fort Que Nous

é4. À La Tour Eiffel

5. Fleurs Du Dimanche

6. Samba Em Prelúdio (Un Jour Sans Toi)

7. Perhaps You'll Wonder Why

8. Recitativo - Instrumental

9. Ode To Every Man

10. Darling Fare Thee Well