‘I’M NOT AS SECURE AS I SEEM TO BE’
Globe and Mail
Dec 6 2008
Canada
Superstar French chansonnier Charles Aznavour is 84 and, no, he is
not resting on his laurels after selling 100-million or so records
thus far in his career. His new album lands this week, Robert
Everett-Green writes
His latest concerts are billed as farewell shows, but don’t say
the word "retirement" to Charles Aznavour. "Slow down" and "stop"
are probably also best avoided in the company of the energetic,
natty performer I met in Toronto recently, six months after his
84th birthday.
"I always say that retirement is the first step towards death,"
he said. "I love to be busy. I hate to do nothing."
It pains him to recall that a French journalist, six years ago,
misunderstood his decision to stop touring (as opposed to doing a
handful of concerts from time to time) as a signal that the soulful
prince of French chanson was calling it quits. Au contraire, mon
vieux. At the moment, Aznavour is preparing to launch a double-disc,
two-language album of duets (Duos, on EMI), has just finished a series
of concerts in Germany and has another planned for Canada in the new
year. He’s also still got the itch that has produced 800 songs over
the past 60-odd years. "I’m writing every day," he said. "I wrote
this morning. I woke up at 6, and I finished one song. Every day,
I have to sit at my desk and work. It’s a sickness. …
"When I write, it’s always fantastic, the song I’m writing is
beautiful. The day after, very often I I think: Something is
missing. And suddenly everything is missing, and I throw the song
away. I tear up more songs than I keep."
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songs he has kept, and those he has performed by others, have shown
up on recordings that have sold more than 100 million copies around
the world, including one million in Canada. He has also appeared in
more than 60 films, from Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player
to Atom Egoyan’s Ararat. He’s sometimes called the French Sinatra,
which is okay as far as it goes, but Sinatra was not a songwriter.
Or a playwright: Another of Aznavour’s current projects is a one-woman
show, for which he has written a script and 14 new songs. It will be
like an off-Broadway show, he said. His daughter Katia is producing,
and the star will be Clementine Celarie, an actress he did a film
with once (Les Annees campagne, a 1992 coming-of-age movie), though he
still hasn’t heard her sing. He doesn’t need to, he said. He has faith.
At the beginning of his career, faith was practically all he had,
along with a large helping of self-doubt. He famously summed up his
shortcomings in 1950: "my voice, my height, my gestures, my lack of
culture and education, my frankness and my lack of personality."
It’s hard to imagine, now, how his voice could have been a problem, so
central is that smooth yet husky timbre to the sound of chanson over
the past half-century. Aznavour succeeded by learning how to embody
the sharply drawn characters and often nostalgic moods he created in
his songs. He revived the personable, music-hall style of traditional
chanson, sometimes bringing it into contact with such non-traditional
subjects as homosexuality (in Comme ils disent) and street violence
(in Le temps des loups). French popular music has gone through drastic
changes since his first songwriting success 64 years ago (with a hit
called J’ai bu), but Aznavour’s kind of music has survived, and has
benefited from the same revivalist trend that has boosted old-style
crooners such as Tony Bennett and new-style chansonniers.
"I’m not as secure as I seem to be," Aznavour said. "After so many
years in this business, I became secure in what I’m doing. Before that,
I was very timid, and sometimes I still am. I sometimes need people to
explain to me whether it’s good or not good … In any kind of art,
if you’re totally secure, something is missing. We can’t be really
secure, we need the response of the public. Security is not good for
talent. The doubt is very important."
His songs have been covered by everyone from Maurice Chevalier to
Elvis Costello. His Duos album features duets with Placido Domingo,
Elton John, Celine Dion, Bryan Ferry, Sting, Paul Anka, Liza Minnelli
and several others, in some cases revisiting on the English-language
disc the same song performed on the French disc.
"Elton wanted only to sing in French, but we convinced him that English
is a good language too," Aznavour said. He has recorded and performed
in several languages (though never in Armenian, the language of his
parents), but recently decided that, "I don’t want to sing much in
foreign languages any more. I want to sing in French. It’s because
even in London, there are all these people who say, ‘Why don’t you
sing in French?’ "
The French half of Duos includes one duet with Edith Piaf, who gave
him a major career boost in the early forties, and with whom he worked
and travelled and made his first tour to Canada. But he’s in no rush
to see La Vie en Rose, the acclaimed film biography that won Marion
Cotillard an Oscar.
"All my family saw it and loved it, but I didn’t want to see it,
because they left out something very important, which is that Edith
Piaf had an enormous sense of humour. I don’t say that it’s not
good. But they went the easy way, they showed only the sadness and
the drama. In the preview, you see a big syringe," he said, miming
the act of stabbing a needle into his arm. "In almost 20 years in
the entourage of Piaf, I never saw that once. Not once."
He’s not keen on a lot of what’s called la nouvelle chanson francaise,
hearing too much of the old in the supposedly new. He’s more interested
in "slam" poets such as Grand Corps Malade (Fabien Marsaud, who
declaims his verses over music that’s gentler and more organic
than most rap backing tracks) and francophone rappers such as Kery
James. "These young people write French like I haven’t heard for a long
time." He’s always drawn to good lyrics, in part because that’s the
way he thinks and writes: the lyrics first, and only then the music.
He also likes the francophone Canadian singers Lynda Lemay ("she writes
beautifully") and Diane Dufresne. "She has a great personality, and
she’s doing things onstage that I’ve never seen from anyone else,"
he said of Dufresne. "She had a few songs by Kurt Weill, in which
she gave the maximum. I’ve never heard Kurt Weill sung like that,
not even by Lotte Lenya."
Last summer, after a performance in Quebec City, Aznavour was named
an honorary Officer of the Order of Canada. He has a lot of fans
in Quebec and the rest of the country, and a son in Montreal who is
about to become a citizen. He believes we Canadians are much stronger
for having two cultures. He even thinks that our most famous pop star
might not have got where she is without her bicultural background.
"Celine," he said. "How did she become the biggest francophone star
in the world? I think it’s because she has digested two cultures."
Aznavour said he is a stubborn man, and his career is proof. For
his next concerts, he is going to concentrate on the B-sides in his
catalogue, which he believes hardly anyone has given their due.
"Edith Piaf had a song she sang for 20 years, to the indifference of
the public," he said. "After 20 years, it became a success – onstage,
not on record. You can have an enormous success with a song onstage,
and not sell one record of that song. I have many like that, and I’m
very proud of them. The most important song in my show now is a song
I wrote 40 years ago. I sang it for 40 years, because I’m stubborn,
and now it’s a success."
Charles Aznavour’s Duos album comes out on Tuesday. He sings at
Ottawa’s National Arts Centre on April 19, Montreal’s Place des Arts
April 21-23 and Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall on April 26.