Little Drop of Poison is the seventh album by Rebekka Bakken recorded with hr-Bigband from Frankfurt, Germany released on May 23, 2014 under Emarcy Records (Universal Music).
Rebekka Bakken is a Norwegian jazz singer, songwriter and music producer who is often associated with jazz music, although she herself refuses to characterise herself as a jazz musician. Her voice reaches over three octaves.
The hr-Bigband is the Big Band of Hessischer Rundfunk, the public broadcasting network of the German state of Hesse. Founded 1946 as Tanz- und Unterhaltungsorchester des Hessischen Rundfunks it was renamed to hr Big Band in 1972. Since 2005 it is written hr-Bigband. For international tours and CD releases it is also named Frankfurt Radio Bigband.
Frankfurt is a metropolis and the largest city of the German federal state of Hesse, and its 746,878 (2017) inhabitants make it the fifth-largest city of Germany after Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Cologne. On the River Main, it forms a continuous conurbation with the neighbouring city of Offenbach am Main, and its urban area has a population of 2.3 million. The city is at the centre of the larger Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region, which has a population of 5.5 million and is Germany's second-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr Region. Since the enlargement of the European Union in 2013, the geographic centre of the EU is about 40 km (25 mi) to the east of Frankfurt's central business district. Like France and Franconia, the city is named after the Franks. Frankfurt is the largest city in the Rhine Franconian dialect area.
In 2013 Bakken took on the songs of Tom Waits in a collaboration with the hr-Bigband and Jörg Achim Keller, "which perfectly suits the emotional range she can access in her craft." [1] This resulted in releasing the album in 2014 named after Tom Waits' song that was originally one of the songs of The End of Violence official soundtrack back in 1997.
Thomas Alan Waits is an American singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and actor. Waits' music is characterized by his distinctive deep, gravelly singing voice and lyrics focusing on the underside of U.S. society. During the 1970s, he worked primarily in jazz, but since the 1980s his music has reflected greater influence from blues, vaudeville, and experimental genres.
The End of Violence is a 1997 film by the German director Wim Wenders. The film's cast includes Bill Pullman, Andie MacDowell, Gabriel Byrne, Traci Lind, Rosalind Chao, and Loren Dean, among others. It also features a soundtrack marked with the signature sounds of Wenders regulars Jon Hassell, Ry Cooder, and Bono. The film was praised by a select few critics for its cinematography, but performed poorly in the box office. It was entered into the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.
Joachim Schreiner from the Frankfurter Neue Presse wrote: "Songs from all the creative phases of Tom Waits, genius orchestrated for the HR Big Band and animated by one of the most striking European women's voices: Who can resist? The premiere concerts were completely sold out as the nordic elf, Rebekka Bakken in February 2013 together with the jazz orchestra of the Hessian Rundfunks interpreted the songs of the garbage can man, Tom Waits." [2]
The Frankfurter Neue Presse (FNP) is a German daily newspaper, based in Frankfurt am Main and focused on local and regional topics.
