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Nothing Personal
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Aznavour's songs didn't escape the notice of France's biggest female star, the indomitable Edith Piaf. Like Aznavour, she was the product of a poor, rough-and-tumble Parisian childhood; she called herself his "sister of the pavement," responded viscerally to his iconoclastic, street-smart lyrics and made him a member of her entourage. It was the most important relationship of Aznavour's professional life. She brought him with her on tour in France and the United States -- he served both as an opening act and as a lighting man -- and encouraged him to break with Roche to pursue a solo career singing his own material. Though they were never lovers, Aznavour lived for years in Piaf's house, where he endured her caprices and diva's wrath, and spent endless hours discussing the art of the chansonnier. "I learned from her all you have to know in our profession," Aznavour has said. "She lived with her chansons."

In America, we associate that kind of dedication with our roots music. The grizzled bluesman, the folk troubadour, the gospel singer -- these are our archetypes of musical integrity, of music as spiritual practice. (For us, pop singers are a different story altogether: They're in show biz.) The French don't share our purist mythologies, and the chansonniers never recognized anything odd about the idea that their top-selling popular songs were aesthetically and philosophically sophisticated works of art. The classic French chanson is French pop music, par excellence; but it is also French soul music, French blues music and a form of French literature. Though it is melodically rich, the chanson is, musically, strangely style-less, a hodgepodge of music hall balladry, bits of American jazz, other European idioms. The chanson prizes lyrics above all, and the greatest of them feature meticulously crafted vernacular poetry. It's there in Piaf's limpid "La Vie en Rose," in Charles Trenet's dream-bright watercolor "La Mer," in Georges Brassens' "Chanson pour l'Auvergnat," in Ulmer's "Pigalle," rumbling through Jacques Brel's turbulent "Ne me Quitte pas": melancholy, urbanity, a peculiarly Gallic kind of cafe philosophy, all expressed with delicacy and eloquence.

To this distinguished tradition Aznavour brought the zeal of a true believer -- and a renegade sensibility. "I was a visionary," he has not immodestly recalled, "who believed that the chanson had to change, become more involved, stop ignoring the different social classes, be more personalized, and more personal too." There had always been plaintive chansons -- wistful evocations of lost love and the passage of time -- but Aznavour's songs were a darker shade of blue. (According to Jean Cocteau, "Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular.") In 1950, he gave the somber "Je Hais Les Dimanches" ("I Hate Sundays") to Juliette Greco, an aspiring chanteuse and a self-styled "existentialist" who kept company with Jean-Paul Sartre in the cafes of St. Germain-des-Pres. "Je Hais Les Dimanches" was a beautifully crafted thing, a triumph of taut French poetry utterly unlike chansons the public was used to hearing:

I hate Sundays
And the ones who change their shirts
And wear nice suits ...
The ones who sleep 20 hours
'Cause there's nothing to stop them ...
And the ones who make love
As they've nothing else to do
They will envy our happiness
As I envy their happiness
To have Sundays
To believe in Sundays
To like Sundays
When I hate Sundays

"Je Hais Les Dimanches" was a huge hit, launching Greco's career; its success prefigured the long-sought public acceptance that would be Aznavour's just a few years later, when he returned to Paris from a North African tour to find every important impresario in town clamoring to sign him for an engagement. His triumph was capped by an appearance in 1954 at the Olympia Music Hall, an occasion that he marked with the introduction of a new song, the anthem "Sur Ma Vie." After years in the commercial wilderness, Aznavour had arrived. Soon journalists were talking about the "Aznavourization" of France.

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