Mort Shuman embodies, more than anybody else, the rock world’s fascination with the music of Jacques Brel. Having cut his teeth in the 1950s as Doc Pomus’ Brill Building writing partner–and after conceiving such milestones as The Drifter’s “This Magic Moment,” Dion and the Belmont’s “A Teenager in Love,” and Elvis Presley’s “Suspicion,” “Little Sister,” and “Viva Las Vegas”–Shuman set his sights on translating Brel for the English-speaking world. 

Prior to the runaway success of Shuman’s 1968 Greenwich Village revue, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living Paris, Brel was best known to U.S. listeners mainly via the Kingston Trio’s version of the Rod McKuen-translated “le Moribond,” or “Seasons in the Sun” (which would hit #1 for Terry Jacks in 1974). Shuman’s Brel translations were uniformly more accurate and richer in depth than McKuen’s, and his English lyrics to bohemian torch epics like “Jackie” and “If You Go Away” would become, in Scott Walker’s definitive interpretations, standards of the genre. 

In 1969, just as Walker’s Brel renditions were hitting the charts, Shuman released My Death, a genre-defying head trip of organ- and harpsichord-heavy cabaret pop. Cheesy in the extreme, yet winningly audacious and at times stunningly beautiful, My Death is the apotheosis of an unsung breed: existential kitsch. 

The set begins with Shuman, playing either a British med-school lecturer or a creep with a cervical fetish, reading over a stodgy update on Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus”: “The size and shape of the uterus must be determined by a bimanual examination,” he begins, and graphic procedural details ensue. The music here sets the tone for many of the album’s less-compelling numbers–faceless updates of baroque motifs, like Lalo Schifrin’s 1966 Dissection LP, but without the chops–and the lyrics herald the album’s unifying Stages-of-Man theme. 

When not vamping on the 18th century, My Death is all over the map with kooky abandon. “Mon Enfance,” a “Sea of Love”-style take on the Jacques Brel chestnut, neatly weds Shuman’s Brill Building sensibility to the beautiful hallucinogenic lyrics; “To Katie” is a rumination on childhood innocence set to clattering drums, hectic xylophones and free-form violin; and “Wait a Minute” is wispy, horn-inflected MOR pop, with a throwaway Aznavour feel. On “A Children’s Crusade 1939,” Shuman sets Brecht to a plodding Bach prelude; a few tracks later, he’s eliding Peter Sarstedt Euro-schlock with Pink Floyd, the Righteous Brothers and the first Family LP on “Mademoiselle.” Ironically, the title track–a cover of Brel’s “Ma Mort”–is perhaps the least interesting of the bunch: although the music is fine, Shuman’s delivery is puzzlingly sub-par, and as the LP’s intended showstopper the song is ultimately anticlimactic, a victim of the album’s necessarily predictable womb-to-tomb conceit.

Defining moment

“She Ain’t Nothin’ But a Little Child, Oh My”

A real eye-opener from the man behind the Drifter’s greatest hits. Over a lusciously warm, insanely catchy electric piano, Shuman croons the spookiest girl tale this side of Lou Reed’s Berlin: “She tried to tie herself to life/but then she broke the cord/I went to see my baby/in the psychiatric ward.” A Rive Gauche version of the theme from “Taxi,” sung with ludicrous gusto by Mort (which of course means “death” en francais).