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CD
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BB 042CD
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Bureau B presents a selection of the finest French works from native German Mary Roos (born Rosemarie Schwab), recorded between 1972 and 1975 -- including 18 tracks on CD for this first time. In the early '70s, Mary Roos sang one French song after another, working with composers and lyricists like Michel Fugain, George Costa and Pierre Delanoe, under the guidance of top-flight producers. As one of the key figures in the light/easy listening scene, Mary Roos had her own section in record shops. The hotelier's daughter from Bingen on the Rhine was an ideal aesthetic ambassador for the genre, known as "Jet-Set-Musique" across the border in France -- discreet music with an infectious feel-good factor. TV star and music expert Götz Alsmann once suggested "Mary Roos deserves a medal as the German Dionne Warwick," and it was a fair comment to make. She is one of the best vocalists that Germany has ever produced, her big breakthrough coming in 1970 with the song "Arizona Man," penned by Giorgio Moroder. The album that followed led the manager of The Fifth Dimension to proclaim "she would go down great in America." Mary did indeed go west, but only as far as the next-door neighbors. While many a French chanteuse was heading to Germany to entertain an audience caught between sentimentality and party-pop, Mary Roos was heading in the opposite direction: Paris was to become the city of her triumphs. Blessed with a perfect ear, nobody could tell she wasn't French: "Each song was written out phonetically for me, I just had to read the cards." To this day, the French swear that Mary Roos sang without a trace of an accent, as her French sounded impeccable. In the same year, she performed a number of sell-out shows at the mecca of French entertainment, the Olympia in Paris, to loud applause. Shortly afterwards, she released her first album in the French language, the eponymous Mary Roos, followed a year later by the Direction L'Aventure LP. Passionate French love songs, flawlessly rendered. Housed in a digipack with a 20-page booklet with copious liner notes by Jan Feddersen and photographs.
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