Culture

Claude Nougaro died on 4 March 2004. He was seventy four. For over fifty years, the stocky silhouette of this cantankerous "Little Bull", as he was known, lit up the stage, which he likened to a boxing ring. His warm voice with its gravelly accent liked to box with words, hit them with his favourite music: jazz, samba, African rhythms. In twenty albums and thousands of concerts, he "sang his life" as he himself described it, a life that was at times a bit chaotic.

Son of a baritone father his ("first blues singer") and a pianist mother, Claude Nougaro was born in Toulouse in 1929. He grew up in his grandparents’ home in the working-class district of Les Minimes, where "even the old dears like a good fight" (Toulouse). Steeped in the works of Jules Massenet, Giuseppe Verdi or Georges Bizet, he discovered Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet at a young age. As an adolescent, he was a passionate TSF listener (the radio station of the time) for the blues of Bessie Smith and the scintillating jazz of Glenn Miller. After having tried his hand at journalism, he moved to Paris where he met the poet Jacques Audiberti, to whom he was later to pay a warm tribute (Chanson pour le maçon).

After a first album that passed unnoticed, he recorded his first hits in and after 1962, with the jazz composer Michel Legrand: Une petite fille, Je suis sous, Le Jazz et la java and Cécile, ma fille, written for his first child. The great jazz standards then inspired him to write other titles: Sing sing song, based on a old Nat Adderley number, and the magnificent A bout de souffle (1965), inspired by Dave Brubeck’s Blue rondo à la turk, which he composed in his hospital bed after a serious car accident. Throughout his career he was accompanied by the greatest French and international jazz musicians (Maurice Vander, Eddy Louiss, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman...).

A few years later, he had another decisive encounter, this time with Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell. Setting his lyrics to the tune of Berimbau, Claude Nougaro wrote Bidonville, then Brésilien (1975) and his famous Tu verras (1978), a cover version of a song by Chico Buarque (O que Sera). In 1973, the "motsicien" or musician of words, as he styled himself, recorded the striking Locomotive d’or album with some African performers, and his spellbinding Amour sorcier. He then launched himself into a new venture: the writing of long epic poems (Plume d’ange, Victor) which he recited to music by Jean-Claude Vannier and Maurice Vander.

In the 1980s, Claude Nougaro went through a period in the doldrums. The final blow fell in 1986, when his record label, Barclay, terminated his contract on the grounds of "poor sales results". He then sold his Paris apartment and set off for the United States. There he recorded Nougayork, a genuine fusion of rock, funk and urban poetry. With this album, which won a gold disc in 1988, Nougaro won the hearts of a younger audience. Other records followed, more tinged with jazz, more intimate, until a heart problem kept him away from the stage.

To his last breath, "the man with soles of swing" was working on a new album, recorded on Blue Note, one of the most highly regarded labels in the history of jazz. A final return to his sources?