Charles Aznavour
Շառլ Ազնավուր ¶É˳íáñ ÊÙµ³·Çñ` èáµ»ñï سñ·³ñÛ³Ý îÝûñ»Ý` سñï³ ü³ñÙ³Ýáí³ Ð³Ù³Ï³ñ·ã³ÛÇÝ ·ñ³ß³ñáõÙ ¨ Ó¨³íáñáõÙ òáÕÇÝ» гñáõÃÛáõÝÛ³Ý (è¸, ØáëÏí³) Computer typing and design Coxine Harutunyan (Moscow) ÂÕóÏÇó` ²ñïÛáÙ ¶¨áñ·Û³Ý ( ÐÐ, ºñ¨³Ý) Reporter Artyom Gevorgyan (Yerevan) ²Ùë³·ñÇ Ññ³ï³ñ³ÏáõÃÛáõÝÁ Çñ³Ï³Ý³óíáõÙ ¿ Ñáí³Ý³íáñ ϳ½Ù³Ï»ñåáõÃÛáõÝÝ»ñÇ ýÇݳÝë³Ï³Ý ³ç³ÏóáõÃÛ³Ùµ:
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour Charles Aznavour A keystone in the modern chanson genre, French cabaret singer and songwriter Charles Aznavourentertained the world for close to 75 years. In the early '50s, he often opened for Edith Piaf, and composed several songs for her, thus beginning a solid reputation as both a gifted writer and a unique song stylist. Aznavour had a special talent for writing and singing from unusual points of view, creating personal and compassionate character studies that expanded the emotional range of the typical pop ballad. He also acted in dozens of films, most famously Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player. Aznavourcontinued to perform and record music until just before his death in 2018. His status as the quintessential French popular culture icon was something of an irony for a man who identified himself most closely with his Armenian heritage. Born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian, his French roots derived from the fact that his family fled the threat of massacre by the Turks -- his father was a singer and sometime restauranteur, while his mother was an actress and part-time seamstress. His father's singing, done in a notably impassioned style, heavily influenced Aznavour's approach to singing as a boy. Although he had a voracious appetite for music, he also had a serious impediment growing up, in the form of a paralyzed vocal cord that gave his voice a raspy quality. He channeled some of his energy into theater, making both his stage and screen debuts at age nine, in 1933, in the theater piece Un Bon Petite Diable and in the film La Guerre des Gosses. As an adolescent, he danced in nightclubs and sold newspapers, as well as touring with theatrical companies, and he wrote a nightclub act in partnership with Pierre Roche -- Aznavour wrote the lyrics to their songs and it was through that material that he began his singing career. Early on, he learned to overcome his fears about his vocal limitations, in part with help from singing legend Edith Piaf, for whom he worked as a chauffeur, among other capacities; with her help, he developed a style that suited his capabilities and played to his
Charles Aznavour strengths and also continued writing songs in earnest, some of which were performed by Piaf. His success came very slowly, however. Aznavour at first found some difficulty being accepted as a composer in France or anywhere else. His compositions, although considered tame by any modern standard, were regarded as too risquĂŠ for French radio and were banned from the airwaves for a decade or more, from the late '40s through the end of the 1950s; American publishers seemed equally reticent about them, as he discovered on a visit to New York in 1948. That trip did yield his first performing engagement in the city, however, at the Cafe Society Downtown in Greenwich Village. For the next decade, Aznavour made his living as a performer in second-tier clubs and middle- or bottom -of-the-bill berths on three continents. His mix of daringly original and frank love songs, coupled with a limited but very expressive singing style, left audiences somewhat bewildered at first. His breakthrough came in 1956, during a vaudeville engagement in Casablanca, where the audience reaction was so positive that Aznavour was moved to headliner status. After this, it became easier for the singer to find better engagements in France; by 1958 he even had a recording contract. He made his screen debut that same year in a dramatic role, playing an epileptic in George Franju's La Tete Contre les Muirs. He also composed music for Alex Joff's Du Rififi Chez les Femmes in 1958; from there, he moved on to bigger roles in better movies, including Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus and Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player. The latter movie turned Aznavour into a screen star in France and opened the way for his breakthrough in America. He sang at Carnegie Hall in the early '60s and followed this up in 1965 with a one-man show, The World of Charles Aznavour, at the Ambassador Hotel in New York, which drew rave notices from audiences and critics alike. By that time, the once-struggling singer had secured his first American LP release with the similarly titled album The World of Charles Aznavour on Reprise Records, the label founded and
Charles Aznavour
run by Frank Sinatra. Aznavour would be the last to compare himself with those whom he regarded as truly gifted vocalists, such as Sinatra and Mel TormĂŠ, preferring to think of himself as a composer who also happened to sing. His style of performing was compared variously to Maurice Chevalier and Sinatra and remained enduringly popular for decades. Almost all of Aznavour's songs dealt with love and its permutations, running the gamut from upbeat, joyous pieces such as "Apres l'Amour" and "J'Ai Perdu la Tete" to the dark-hued "J'en Deduis Que Je t'Aime" and "Bon Anniversaire." A teetotaler and a racing car enthusiast, Aznavour was married three times and had six children. He died on October 1, 2018 at the age of 94.
Charles Aznavour
The legendary chansonnier died in his house at the age of 94. On the night of October 1, the famous French chansonnier Charles Aznavour passed away. The singer died in his home in the south of France. He was 94 years old. We have gathered a few facts about the Legend. 1. Real name – Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian. His
parents emigrated from Armenia in 1922 to France, where the future singer was born two years later. For convenience, he became known as Charles. 2. Aznavour attended school for only two years – from 9 years old he had already sang in a cafe and even managed to feed his family during the occupation of Paris by the Germans, while his father volunteered to fight at the front. 3. Edith Piaf became Aznavour’s “God Mother” – she noticed a duet in which Aznavour sang with Pierre Roche, and took them on tour in 1946. From this moment began a professional career of chanson-
4.
5. 6. 7.
nier. In 1950, Aznavour began to sing independently. Then he finally changed his name, “losing” the ending from the name Aznavourian. His first big concert failed and critics advised him to change his profession. Five years later, he first appeared in a movie. And as a film actor, he was taken after Truffaut’s film “Shoot the Piano Player”. To his fortieth anniversary, the world famous chansonnier was the author of 1000 songs. After the earthquake in Armenia in 1988, he created the Aznavour and Armenia Aid Fund, which he managed until now. And in 2008 he received the citizenship of Armenia.
Charles Aznavour 8 In 76 years, Charles Aznavour was appointed Minister of Culture of France. 9. Since 1977, Aznavour has lived in Switzerland, in a villa over the lake, because there are the smallest taxes. Even before Gerard Depardieu he said: “Stop singing for tax administration�, after he gave more than 70 percent of taxes. 10. Charles Aznavour has six children from three wives, with the last Swede Ulla Thorsell they were together for 47 years.
Charles Aznavour Charles Aznavour: 'I wanted to break every taboo' Critics said he was too ugly, too short and had a terrible voice. Fifty-one albums later, Charles Aznavour is a living legend. The 91-year-old French crooner talks Edith Piaf, Kim Kardashian and plastic surgery
Charles Aznavour, one of the greatest singer-songwriters France has ever known, sits in a velvet armchair a few days before his 91st birthday, discussing the whiff of ladies’ armpits. A song on his new album, in which he declares, “I love the smell of your underarms,” worried his Swedish wife of 50 years, but Aznavour knows his audience. If he’s the most successful French crooner in the world – a lyricist who defined the country’s popular culture for decades – it’s precisely because his songs have always been risky. When Aznavour began writing in the 1940s, sex was something that happened with the light off. It was OK for women singers to howl over their broken hearts, but men didn’t sing about their own emotional despair – and later their dodgy prostates. Aznavour shone a spotlight on masculinity and libido, singing about depression, sex, prejudice and rape. His hits ranged from the 1970s story of a gay transvestite in What Makes a Man, to the oncebanned ballad of muggy, post-coital exhaustion, Après l’Amour, and the controversial You’ve Let Yourself Go – the plea of a man whose wife has grown dowdy and fat (“I gaze at you in sheer despair and see your mother standing there”).
Charles Aznavour He is unrepentant. “It’s a kind of sickness I have, talking about things you’re not supposed to talk about. I started with homosexuality and I wanted to break every taboo.” The armpit line comes in a new ballad about a blind lover’s sense of smell. “When I wrote a song about the deaf [Quiet Love], I learned sign-language to perform it on stage. On this album, I wanted to describe what it was like for someone nonsighted.” He pauses. “I still don’t know how I’m going to perform it …” In his shows, he takes on various personas with dramatic gestures that resemble a mime act. He’s an actor who sings rather than a Frank Sinatra-style singer who acts. Aznavour is still composing and performing, he’s written around 1,200 songs and sold more than 100m records in his 70-year career. France worships him as the last living legend of a golden era. Like many popular singers who came to represent the very essence of France – such as Georges Moustaki and, to a certain extent, Edith Piaf herself – Aznavour is shaped by his foreign roots. Born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian in Paris to an actor-father and singer-mother who had fled the Armenian genocide, he left school and became a child actor at the age of nine. He survived the German occupation of Paris singing in cabarets, while his parents hid fellow Armenians, Jews, Russians and Communists in their apartment and his father joined the resistance.
Charles Aznavour Piaf pestered him to have a nose job. Afterwards he presented himself for inspection. 'I preferred you before,' she said
But Aznavour’s path to success was long and torturous. French critics dismissed him as repulsively ugly, too short, with a terrible voice and dubious song titles. It wasn’t until the end of the 50s, a decade after Piaf had taken him on as her songwriter, flatmate and all-round bag-carrier that he finally began to make it. In 1960, he played the shy and haunted piano-player in François Truffaut’s classic New Wave film, Shoot the Piano Player (he went on to act in over 60 films). But his global singing fame was cemented in the 70s with a triumphant crossover into the US and UK – something he puts down to the excellent translation of his lyrics into English. (The bittersweet British No 1, She, is hardly known in France). Britain was seduced by this scrawny Frenchman crooning about painful crushes in a 10-ton accent. “I often say: ‘France is for lyrics, England is for music’,” he muses. Nowadays, Aznavour is a “dinosaur” – his word – who trades on agelessness. His 51st studio album is out in the UK now and he is working on his 52nd. He loves being sampled by adoring French rappers. He relishes the irony that at 30 he was considered ugly, but past 90 he is now seen as dashing. What it’s like being 91? “I wouldn’t have a clue,” he says, wide-eyed. “I don’t feel 91. I’ve always thought a person must never lose the gaze of a child.” At 5-foot-3, he holds his tiny frame perpetually taut (keeping his shoulders straight is one his secrets of eternal youth). But he’s brutally honest about performing on stage. “I hide nothing from the audience,” he says. He tells them he has an Auto-cue because his memory is fading, and says his mouth ulcers make it hard to sing. He relies on hearing aids. But he loathes what he calls the showbusiness “cult of youth”.
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour “More and more men are changing themselves, having surgery, and you can see it on TV, because their dyed-black hair turns blue under the lights,” he says. “I had a problem with my nose, I got it done. I made some white hair that was falling out grow back. But I left my wrinkles where they are. And I look younger than the others because I have never retouched nature’s work.” In fact, it was Edith Piaf cabaret superstar and queen of chanson française, who forced Aznavour to have a nose job 50 years ago. She pestered him for months to fix what she deemed his too-large hooter. He eventually went under the knife, and presented himself for inspection. “I preferred you before,” she said. There’s a song about Piaf on the new album. It is the first time he has written about her, though they lived together – platonically – for eight years. “We were like cousins. We had this extraordinary complicity. I never had a love affair with her – that’s what saved us.” Why did Piaf, the star, latch on to him, an unknown nine years her junior? “I brought her my youth, my madness, she loved my whole jazzy side.”
Charles Aznavour I can’t say anything about [Kim Kardashian], because I would anger half the Armenians. His other main role today is as one of the world’s most famous Armenians. He has finally taken dual Armenian citizenship, is Armenian ambassador to Switzerland and travelled with the French president François Hollande to mark the centenary of the Armenian genocide this year. But France still defines his identity. “I’ve always felt totally French. That really vexed the Armenians in Armenia, but now they’re used to it.” He politely declines to say what he thinks about his challenger as pop culture’s international symbol of the Armenian diaspora: Kim Kardashian. He’s never met her. Does he watch her reality show? “I can’t say anything about it, because I would anger half the Armenians.” He laughs nervously. “I suppose Armenians are quite prudish and don’t like too much nudity …”
Charles Aznavour A few years ago, he caused shockwaves in France by saying he’d paid backhanders to figures on all sides of the political spectrum after being told he was facing a tax inspection, presumed to have been in the 1970s. A later tax investigation found no irregularity. Decades ago, he left France to live just over the border in Switzerland. “I was never a tax exile,” he is at pains to point out. “I didn’t have a penny when I left.” The phrase Aznavour probably hates the most is “farewell tour”. He swears he has never uttered the words, and vows to keep performing until he dies. “You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served,” he once crooned. But with audiences still dishing up a never-ending pot of it, he’s happy to stick around.
Charles Aznavour Since you’re here… … we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever, but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian is editorially independent. So we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias. It isn’t influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our editor. No one steers our opinion. This means we can give a voice to the voiceless. It lets us challenge the powerful - and hold them to account. At a time when our honest, factual reporting is critical, it’s one of many things that set us apart. Our approach is different from others in the media. While others offer only fixed subscriptions, we give our readers the option to support us voluntarily. This is not meant as a short term solution; this approach is for now and for the future. By supporting The Guardian, you’re investing in the long term sustainability of our independent, investigative journalism. If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $1, you can support the Guardian – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour: '‘I'm a very special character’ Almost 70 years after Edith Piaf made him a global star, Charles Aznavour tells Jane Shilling why he’ll never feel old
‘I
can’t see, and I can’t hear,” says Charles Aznavour. With his diminutive figure engulfed in a squashy armchair, his face half-hidden by dark glasses, he seems tetchy and vulnerable. He gave a similar impression when he arrived on stage at the beginning of his sell-out concert last June at the Albert Hall. And now I come to think of it, he began that show – an amazing tour de force of seductive singing and nippy dance steps – with an almost identical line about not being able to see or hear.
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour As I sit down he takes off the dark glasses and a metamorphosis takes place. In an instant he turns from Charles Aznavour, the nonagenarian, into Charles Aznavour, the legendary entertainer. The dark hair is white now, but the knobbly features and snapping black eyes are unmistakably those of his younger self. At an age when anyone might be expected to take a rest from pushing the creative frontiers, Aznavour’s schedule is punishing. He has written more than 1,200 songs, sold more than 100 million records, appeared in more than 80 films and was voted Time magazine’s entertainer of the 20th century, edging out Elvis and Bob Dylan. But here he is in London, publicising his latest CD. This autumn he tours to the United States, Canada, Moscow, Geneva, Antwerp … “I’m not touring from one city to another,” says Aznavour, a shade apologetically, as though he felt he were slacking. “I do one city and I go home.” Home these days is Switzerland, where he lives with his Swedish-born wife of 47 years, Ulla. The new album opens with the ballad She, a UK hit in 1974, when it was the theme song for the television series Seven Faces of Woman, and again in 1999 when Elvis Costello sang it over the closing credits of the romcom Notting Hill. It also includes duets with a glittering line-up of collaborators – Sting, Liza Minnelli, Celine Dion, Elton John – and ends on a high note with Frank Sinatra in Young at Heart, the only song on the album not written by Aznavour.
Charles Aznavour “I love duetting with people,” says Aznavour. “When I work with someone like Liza Minnelli” – with whom he performs the duet Quiet Love – “we know each other very well, and between us there is no surprise anymore. We have the same taste in the songs we sing together: songs that are much more acting than singing. She does that beautifully.” The pair had an affair at the beginning of Minnelli’s career and, he says affectionately, “She learnt from me. She says that herself – or else I would have shut my mouth!” The running order of the CD – from the nostalgic Yesterday When I Was Young via the defiance of a struggling entertainer in It Will Be My Day, the ferocious You’ve Let Yourself Go, about an unsatisfactory wife, and the sparklingly amused account of ageing in the final duet with Sinatra – gives the compilation the sense of a musical autobiography. “When I wrote my first songs,” Aznavour says in his fluent, idiosyncratic English, “everyone mistook them and said, ‘Ah, you are telling your story.’ It was not true. But after years, I found that finally – without knowing it, without trying to – I had written my life.”
Charles Aznavour In retrospect the story of a long life can seem like a narrative fixed by fate. But the beginnings of Aznavour’s career were chancy in the extreme. His parents were Armenian: his father, Michael Aznavourian, grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia; his mother, Knar, came from Izmir. They married in Turkey, then fled the Armenian genocide, intending to emigrate to the United States. Visa problems stranded them in Paris, where Charles was born in 1924 – a stroke of luck, he reckons: “I’m sure that I wouldn’t have been able to write in English as well as in French.” Both parents were performers: Michael Aznavourian ran a restaurant, La Caucase, but he was also, his son recalls, “a good singer, singing difficult songs” – a tendency that Aznavour would inherit. Knar Aznavourian was an actress, and although the family struggled financially (Aznavour makes the gesture of rubbing thumb and fingers together that signifies “le fric”, or cash) their life was culturally rich. “I was raised in the understanding of the method of Stanislavski,” he recalls, “and knowing everything about the plays of Chekhov, and poetry – it’s fantastic to be fluent in different traditions.” At nine, Aznavour and his elder sister, Aida, had already begun training as dancers. He got his first part as a young actor in a dramatisation of Erich Kästner’s classic, Emil and the Detectives. At 10 he left school (again the “fric” gesture) and began appearing in revue as a singer. One day the director asked if he could dance. “I said yes. He said, ‘Can you dance with the girls?’ So I put on a tutu. I was not ashamed. It was my work. For years I tried to find a picture of myself in my tutu, and when I finally found it, I was so happy.”
Charles Aznavour By 15, he was singing in the nightclubs of Montparnasse. At 20, he formed a partnership with the pianist Pierre Roche, and started to write songs. “I didn’t think it would be very difficult to write one chorus and two verses.” His colleagues laughed, “But I came back with a song for [the singer-songwriter] Georges Ulmer.” The lyric was J’ai bu – a slangy, maudlin love song – and it was a hit. “We won the prize for best record of the year. We started very early to win prizes. More prizes than money.” That changed in 1946, when the 22-year-old Aznavour was spotted by Edith Piaf, who invited him to tour with her in the US. “She never gave me any advice,” says Aznavour with a sly twinkle. “She gave advice only to the men she loved. But I knew she loved my way of writing, and that gave me confidence. And she was very funny – not like she is shown in the movies.” Even after this early success, Aznavour notoriously remarked of himself: “My shortcomings are my voice, my height, my gestures, my lack of culture and education, my frankness and my lack of personality.” What prompted this brutal self-analysis? “I wanted to know who I was. Before presenting yourself to the public, you have to know who you are. Your faults and your abilities – and often you should keep the faults, which can be very spectacular, and avoid some of the good things. Even now, I’m in search of who I am.”
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour The artist and film-maker Jean Cocteau said, “Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular.” The tradition of French chanson is notoriously melancholic, but Aznavour brought gritty street drama to his lyrics and his performance. “When I write a song, it is as if I write a scene for a movie,” he says. “The writing is very precise. If I find one word difficult, I don’t sleep for nights until I find the right one.” From the beginning, he courted controversy: “It started with Après L’amour,” a celebration of post-coital bliss, which was banned by French radio. These days, he says, the lyrics seem so mild that “they could have been written by Little Lord Fauntleroy!” What Makes a Man followed in 1972, a song about the life of a gay man, which his entourage implored him not to release. But, “I wanted to write what nobody else was writing. I’m very open, very risky, not afraid of breaking my career because of one song. I don’t let the public force me to do what they want me to do. I force them to listen to what I have done. That’s the only way to progress, and to make the public progress.” Ideas, he says, come no more slowly at 90 than they did when he was young: “I never had many. It was always very difficult.” To find inspiration he watches the news, talks to people: “They tell me their problems, which can be helpful.” This morning he finished a new song, about a blind person falling in love. “It’s called De l’ombre à la lumière – from the shadow to the light.”
Charles Aznavour Apart from that, he has a couple of books on the go – “I write two or three at the same time: when I am stuck with one I switch to the other. It’s very convenient.” And although he reckons his acting career is over, you never know: “I met Jean-Pierre Mocky recently, who made my first movie [Les Dragueurs, in 1960], and he said, ‘I did your first movie. Will you do your last one with me, too?’ And I said, Yes!” The great chansonniers with whom he began his career are almost all gone now, but “I am very close to the young generation. I am open to all kinds of music. There are only two kinds, the good and the bad, so it’s not difficult.” He has worked with the Belgian singer-songwriter Stromae, the rapper Kery James and the EBBA award-winning singer Zaz. “I’m always open to the young generation because when I started it was so difficult. I’ll never forget that.” Eighty years after he started his career, skipping about in a tutu, he brushes away suggestions of retirement: “I’m in retirement right now. That’s what keeps me young.” So if he should, in the words of his duet with Sinatra on Young at Heart, “survive to 105”, what would he be doing? “Travel,” he says. “Travelling is much more important than performing. To meet other people, to see other cultures – I’m a curious man. Curious because I want to learn, and curious because I’m a very special character.” The new greatest hits album, Aznavour Sings in English, and a 60-disc box set of his recordings, are out now on Wrasse records
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour