AS ALWAYS, AZNAVOUR IS A SINGER OF ETERNAL CHARM
SIMONA CHIOSE
Globe and Mail
April 28 2009
Canada
Charles Aznavour at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto on Sunday
If Freedom 85 is the new catchphrase of the broke boomer generation,
the new poster boy for working forever should be Charles Aznavour.
Only a month away from 90 minus five, Aznavour seemed more Edouard
Saroyan (the character he famously played in Francois Truffaut’s
Shoot the Piano Player) than Tony Bennett in his latest outing
in Toronto. Spry, pirouetting, humorous and with his voice barely
diminished by the years, Aznavour ran through an interesting collection
of his better-known songs and his monster hits for an audience that
nodded and clapped in recognition, at the beginning of each, after
only a few notes.
Some of that adulation came not only from Aznavour’s largely
francophone boomerish fans but from a new under-35 contingent
that have perhaps recognized in Aznavour one of the original
songwriting storytellers. If in the eighties and nineties, he was
seen by the youngsters of the time as a relic of the French variete
spectacle, 20 years later, their children have skipped their parents’
self-consciousness. Yes, Aznavour might be kindred to long-departed
practitioners of the genre like Yves Montand, but he’s got Oregon
singer-songwriter M. Ward’s eye for the specific details that make
up human life.
Few lines capture as much about a time, a place and its particular
exclusions as the opening words of Comme ils disent – written in 1972
in the voice of a gay man. But when Aznavour sang "J’habite seul avec
maman/ Dans un tres vieil appartement," in that unique voice that
can simultaneously convey hope and sorrow, optimism and fatalism,
he could have been singing about exclusions any and everywhere.
Aznavour, himself the product of an immigrant childhood in Paris, where
his Armenian parents struggled to continue their artistic careers while
making a living, is of course a great chronicler of the outsider. (He
is also, incidentally, now Armenian ambassador to Switzerland.) The
song La boheme, frequently called out by the audience and eventually
sung during the last quarter of the show in a crescendo of hits,
is basically the lament of an outsider who’s made it for his former
life of deprivation. And Emmenez-moi, with its chorus of "Il m’est
semble que la misere serait moins penible en soleil," is a joyous ode
to the freedom of having nothing. Its advice to the recession-weary:
Ships always need hands on deck; hop on and head south, my friend.
The outsider is usually also the rebel, of course, and while it may
be difficult to project beyond the 100-million-albums-sold reality
of Aznavour, that success does not impair his ability to recreate
the dangerous charm of a Parisian gars. On J’ai bu, one of the first
hits he wrote, recorded by Georges Ulmer in 1947, he moved from an
alcoholic’s excuses to an embrace of the character’s addiction, each
verse hurtling both toward disaster and the ecstatic deliverance of
the bottle (Fine, whisky, gin/ Tous les alcools me son permis).
Among the band’s members was Katia Aznavour on backing vocals, one
of his six children, with whom he did a duet on Je voyage, a song
about a young man’s memories and a young woman’s thoughts of her
future. Paradoxically, it did not have quite the effect Aznavour might
have been anticipating. Of course, the man has a lifetime behind him,
but not only, as he told the audience, does he hope to make 120,
there is a happiness with life in his demeanour that he could not
excise from even the saddest melodies. After all, life has been lived,
and very well.
Time, one of the great chansonnier’s favoured themes, has not rendered
the one-time protege of Edith Piaf, more or less relevant. He is
neither a messenger from another era nor a prescient fortune teller
of our own dashed dreams. The years seem to have simply lifted him
up and carried him to the other shore of time where the singer and
his songs now exist eternally.