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A BITTERSWEET FAREWELL: AZNAVOUR IN TORONTO
Richard Ouzounian
Toronto Star, Canada
Sept 4 2006
`Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular,' said poet Jean Cocteau of
the legendary singer, now on is farewell tour
MARSEILLE, FRANCE-Charles Aznavour stands behind the large bar in
his studio and pours himself a pre-lunch glass of port. He pauses as
a memory lights up his eyes.
"Edith Piaf. When she was trying not to drink, she would always order
Melon au Porto. She asked them to leave the bottle on the table and
kept pouring more and more of it over the fruit. When she finished,
she'd smile and say `I love to eat melon; it always makes me feel
so good.'"
The earthy laugh that rings out belongs to a much younger man than
the 82-year-old singer, who's getting ready to begin the farewell
tour that brings him to Toronto's Hummingbird Centre on Sept. 15.
"I am saying goodbye to all the parts of the world where I sing
in different languages," he says. "I have already done the German
countries. The English-speaking ones are next, then the Spanish,
then the Japanese."
But he leaves the door open to performing in his native country, in
his native tongue. "In France, I will sing until it's time to stop
and that's when the voice gets shaky." He raises his glass of port.
"It hasn't happened yet."
When reminded that he embarked on a tour several years ago that was
supposed to be his last, he quips: "Singers are like politicians.
They say something today and they say something else tomorrow. We
are all liars."
Then he puts his glass down to make a point. "Except in my songs. I
never lie in my songs."
Those songs - hundreds of them - have formed the backbone of his
career. English audiences know him best for numbers like the achingly
nostalgic "Yesterday When I was Young" and the romantic "She," but
his work contains more colours than Joseph's biblical coat.
Politics, religion, ecology, war, ethnic cleansing, divorce,
homosexuality, alcoholism, despair - there's hardly a topic he hasn't
explored in the past eight decades.
He has several homes around the world - Marrakesh, Geneva, Paris -
but every summer he returns here to his retreat near the Mediterranean,
a short drive from Marseille in the south of France.
The house is gated, but when you ring the bell it is Aznavour's
distinctive growl that answers.
The rambling structure is decorated in the classic Provencal
colours of yellow and blue. There's a large pool in the distance
where grandchildren splash happily in the bright August sunlight,
but inside his cool, dark studio, it's work, not play.
Yes, the large zinc bar - it's from a 1920s bistro - stands ready to
offer refreshment as needed, but the rest of the room is dominated
by a giant piano, holding the unfinished sheet music for a new
Aznavour song.
Posters on the wall point to key moments in his life - his triumphant
return to the Olympia in Paris, the 1960 film Tirez sur le pianiste
he made with Francois Truffaut - and there's a comfortable chair he
sinks into with his glass of port as he commences the long journey
back to the beginning.
"It all started," he recalls, "when a little Armenian boy of 3 stepped
through a curtain and recited a poem about a beautiful woman and her
perfumed kisses.
"Maybe," he smiles, "I haven't changed that much in all these years."
He was born Vaghang Chalnough Aznavourian on May 22, 1924 in Paris
to a pair of Armenian expatriates who were waiting for a visa to
the United States. It never came and they settled in France. His
father was a singer and restaurateur who kept going broke because
he insisted on providing free meals to all the Armenians and artists
visiting his restaurant.
"We were always moving," Aznavour remembers, "always going to a new
apartment and a new job that was going to be the one that lasted. It
was good training for a life in show business."
>>From an early age, he wanted to be an actor and a singer. His father
would take him to endless talent competitions, where he would always
wind up second to "a tall, blue-eyed handsome guy. I was short, I was
dark, I had a hooked nose. Who would listen to me sing `I love you'?"
Those insecurities would plague Aznavour for many years. Even today,
the 5-foot-3 singer says, "My stature was not the stature of a star.
I hate that word anyway. Look up to the heavens. Many stars die there
every day."
World War II and the German occupation of Paris put showbiz dreams on
hold while young Aznavour worked as a black marketeer. He shrugs. "I
was young and when you're young, everything is an adventure."
He teamed up with another singer, Pierre Roche, and they began to
acquire a certain popularity in the heady climate of post-war Paris,
even drifting into the inner circle of his idol, Edith Piaf.
"What was she like? She loved good food. She loved to drink with
other people, not alone. Sometimes, of course, she would call you
up at 3 a.m. and tell you to come over so that she'd have someone to
drink with."
His face grows severe. "But not drugs. Never drugs. They say she
did heroin, cocaine. I never saw that. She might have taken some
prescription drugs she grew too fond of, but not the hard stuff,
not Piaf."
When asked what he learned from her, he generously says, "I have
learned something from everyone. Maurice Chevalier taught me panache,
Charles Trenet lyricism, Al Jolson energy and Piaf, of course,
passion."
************** `I have grown older and wiser, and my public have
grown older and wiser with me'
Charles Aznavour, 82 **************
He took that passion across the Atlantic, where Piaf promised him and
Roche she would find them work. They wound up in Montreal in 1948,
spending several years at clubs like Cafe Society and Le Faisan d'Or.
"It was starting to be a very swinging place," he recalls. "A richness
of two different cultures that lived side by side but never crossed
over. A tension, maybe, but an excitement too."
By now, Aznavour had broken up with Roche and begun writing songs,
darkly personal documents that weren't like anything anyone else
was singing.
The first, "J'ai bu," told of a man who boasted drinking himself
senseless to forget the pain of life and a later number "Je haïs
les dimanches" attacked the whole bourgeois culture on which France
was based.
"They called me the first existential songwriter," he boasts proudly.
"I always said `Je' not `vous' and everyone thought my songs were
autobiographical, even when they weren't."
He sips deeply from the port. "And then a funny thing happened. The
songs grabbed hold of me. They may not have been my life when I wrote
them, but they soon turned out that way."
As Aznavour became increasingly successful, his life grew equally
complicated. He married and divorced twice and nearly lost his life in
a 1957 car crash. And he continued to be dogged by doubts about his
personal inadequacy even while he was filling the Olympia Theatre in
Paris three times a night, starring in successful films and touring
around the world.
Some of his best songs of the period tap into this despair. His 1964
"Hier Encore" (later translated into "Yesterday When I Was Young")
paints a picture of man with no lovers and no friends who concludes
"j'ai gâche ma vie" ("I wasted my life").
"Yes, that was me back then," he admits. "Not a pretty picture. Mon
ami, don't let them tell you fame is everything. I have been there.
When it's all you have, fame is nothing."
Aznavour credits two things with changing his life. He married his
third wife, Ulla Thorsell, in 1968 (they are still together) and he
shifted the focus of his songwriting to include more social issues.
"When I looked outside myself, I found that the world was in much
worse shape than I was," he says sardonically.
He began addressing issues of urban violence, homosexuality and racial
inequality in his songs and found that it liberated him.
"If a man is curious about the world he lives in, he must learn. If
he learns, he must see, and if he sees, he must write. That is how
I feel."
One of the areas this led him into was a deeper exploration of his
Armenian roots and the Turkish genocide that destroyed so many of
his ancestors. "When I was young," he reveals, "my parents never
told us much about the Armenian holocaust. It was years later when
I discovered how horrible it had been."
In 1975, he was asked to write a song for a movie called Armenia. The
film was never made, but the song "Ils sont tombes" with its moving
tribute to "the children of Armenia," began a new chapter in his life.
"Our dead people have the right to have a grave," he says, "even if
it is only in our hearts."
Over the past 30 years, he has participated in numerous concerts
for his homeland, started a foundation to aid the victims of the
1988 earthquake that killed 50,000 and, in 2002, starred in Ararat,
Atom Egoyan's film that explored the legacy of the Armenian holocaust.
"Let me make it clear," he insists, "I do not hate the Turkish
people. My dream is to go to Turkey and sing there, but they tell me
it is not safe for me; one crazy man with a gun is all it would take.
"Look, one crazy man with a gun is all it takes anywhere."
Aznavour finds himself deeply troubled by the religious wars that
beset the globe these days. "I respect every religion. The husband
of one of my daughters is Jewish; the husband of another daughter is
Muslim. We all live in peace with this. Why can't the world?"
He puts down his empty glass.
"I'm anxious to meet my audiences one last time. When I was a young
man, I sang foolish songs, but I have grown older and wiser and my
public have grown older and wiser with me."
With such a long and full existence, is there anything he would do
over again?
"I regret nothing. Not even my young anger. I have done more than I
ever expected ...
"I would not change anything in my life. Even the bad moments have
been constructive. Love disappears? Well then, you say goodbye."
Charles Aznavour will make his farewell Toronto appearance on Friday,
Sept. 15 at 8 p.m. at the Hummingbird Centre. Tickets are available
through hummingbirdcentre.com or by calling 416-872-2262.
--Boundary_(ID_0EdGS63e+BZHMzXsE44z 8Q)--
Richard Ouzounian
Toronto Star, Canada
Sept 4 2006
`Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular,' said poet Jean Cocteau of
the legendary singer, now on is farewell tour
MARSEILLE, FRANCE-Charles Aznavour stands behind the large bar in
his studio and pours himself a pre-lunch glass of port. He pauses as
a memory lights up his eyes.
"Edith Piaf. When she was trying not to drink, she would always order
Melon au Porto. She asked them to leave the bottle on the table and
kept pouring more and more of it over the fruit. When she finished,
she'd smile and say `I love to eat melon; it always makes me feel
so good.'"
The earthy laugh that rings out belongs to a much younger man than
the 82-year-old singer, who's getting ready to begin the farewell
tour that brings him to Toronto's Hummingbird Centre on Sept. 15.
"I am saying goodbye to all the parts of the world where I sing
in different languages," he says. "I have already done the German
countries. The English-speaking ones are next, then the Spanish,
then the Japanese."
But he leaves the door open to performing in his native country, in
his native tongue. "In France, I will sing until it's time to stop
and that's when the voice gets shaky." He raises his glass of port.
"It hasn't happened yet."
When reminded that he embarked on a tour several years ago that was
supposed to be his last, he quips: "Singers are like politicians.
They say something today and they say something else tomorrow. We
are all liars."
Then he puts his glass down to make a point. "Except in my songs. I
never lie in my songs."
Those songs - hundreds of them - have formed the backbone of his
career. English audiences know him best for numbers like the achingly
nostalgic "Yesterday When I was Young" and the romantic "She," but
his work contains more colours than Joseph's biblical coat.
Politics, religion, ecology, war, ethnic cleansing, divorce,
homosexuality, alcoholism, despair - there's hardly a topic he hasn't
explored in the past eight decades.
He has several homes around the world - Marrakesh, Geneva, Paris -
but every summer he returns here to his retreat near the Mediterranean,
a short drive from Marseille in the south of France.
The house is gated, but when you ring the bell it is Aznavour's
distinctive growl that answers.
The rambling structure is decorated in the classic Provencal
colours of yellow and blue. There's a large pool in the distance
where grandchildren splash happily in the bright August sunlight,
but inside his cool, dark studio, it's work, not play.
Yes, the large zinc bar - it's from a 1920s bistro - stands ready to
offer refreshment as needed, but the rest of the room is dominated
by a giant piano, holding the unfinished sheet music for a new
Aznavour song.
Posters on the wall point to key moments in his life - his triumphant
return to the Olympia in Paris, the 1960 film Tirez sur le pianiste
he made with Francois Truffaut - and there's a comfortable chair he
sinks into with his glass of port as he commences the long journey
back to the beginning.
"It all started," he recalls, "when a little Armenian boy of 3 stepped
through a curtain and recited a poem about a beautiful woman and her
perfumed kisses.
"Maybe," he smiles, "I haven't changed that much in all these years."
He was born Vaghang Chalnough Aznavourian on May 22, 1924 in Paris
to a pair of Armenian expatriates who were waiting for a visa to
the United States. It never came and they settled in France. His
father was a singer and restaurateur who kept going broke because
he insisted on providing free meals to all the Armenians and artists
visiting his restaurant.
"We were always moving," Aznavour remembers, "always going to a new
apartment and a new job that was going to be the one that lasted. It
was good training for a life in show business."
>>From an early age, he wanted to be an actor and a singer. His father
would take him to endless talent competitions, where he would always
wind up second to "a tall, blue-eyed handsome guy. I was short, I was
dark, I had a hooked nose. Who would listen to me sing `I love you'?"
Those insecurities would plague Aznavour for many years. Even today,
the 5-foot-3 singer says, "My stature was not the stature of a star.
I hate that word anyway. Look up to the heavens. Many stars die there
every day."
World War II and the German occupation of Paris put showbiz dreams on
hold while young Aznavour worked as a black marketeer. He shrugs. "I
was young and when you're young, everything is an adventure."
He teamed up with another singer, Pierre Roche, and they began to
acquire a certain popularity in the heady climate of post-war Paris,
even drifting into the inner circle of his idol, Edith Piaf.
"What was she like? She loved good food. She loved to drink with
other people, not alone. Sometimes, of course, she would call you
up at 3 a.m. and tell you to come over so that she'd have someone to
drink with."
His face grows severe. "But not drugs. Never drugs. They say she
did heroin, cocaine. I never saw that. She might have taken some
prescription drugs she grew too fond of, but not the hard stuff,
not Piaf."
When asked what he learned from her, he generously says, "I have
learned something from everyone. Maurice Chevalier taught me panache,
Charles Trenet lyricism, Al Jolson energy and Piaf, of course,
passion."
************** `I have grown older and wiser, and my public have
grown older and wiser with me'
Charles Aznavour, 82 **************
He took that passion across the Atlantic, where Piaf promised him and
Roche she would find them work. They wound up in Montreal in 1948,
spending several years at clubs like Cafe Society and Le Faisan d'Or.
"It was starting to be a very swinging place," he recalls. "A richness
of two different cultures that lived side by side but never crossed
over. A tension, maybe, but an excitement too."
By now, Aznavour had broken up with Roche and begun writing songs,
darkly personal documents that weren't like anything anyone else
was singing.
The first, "J'ai bu," told of a man who boasted drinking himself
senseless to forget the pain of life and a later number "Je haïs
les dimanches" attacked the whole bourgeois culture on which France
was based.
"They called me the first existential songwriter," he boasts proudly.
"I always said `Je' not `vous' and everyone thought my songs were
autobiographical, even when they weren't."
He sips deeply from the port. "And then a funny thing happened. The
songs grabbed hold of me. They may not have been my life when I wrote
them, but they soon turned out that way."
As Aznavour became increasingly successful, his life grew equally
complicated. He married and divorced twice and nearly lost his life in
a 1957 car crash. And he continued to be dogged by doubts about his
personal inadequacy even while he was filling the Olympia Theatre in
Paris three times a night, starring in successful films and touring
around the world.
Some of his best songs of the period tap into this despair. His 1964
"Hier Encore" (later translated into "Yesterday When I Was Young")
paints a picture of man with no lovers and no friends who concludes
"j'ai gâche ma vie" ("I wasted my life").
"Yes, that was me back then," he admits. "Not a pretty picture. Mon
ami, don't let them tell you fame is everything. I have been there.
When it's all you have, fame is nothing."
Aznavour credits two things with changing his life. He married his
third wife, Ulla Thorsell, in 1968 (they are still together) and he
shifted the focus of his songwriting to include more social issues.
"When I looked outside myself, I found that the world was in much
worse shape than I was," he says sardonically.
He began addressing issues of urban violence, homosexuality and racial
inequality in his songs and found that it liberated him.
"If a man is curious about the world he lives in, he must learn. If
he learns, he must see, and if he sees, he must write. That is how
I feel."
One of the areas this led him into was a deeper exploration of his
Armenian roots and the Turkish genocide that destroyed so many of
his ancestors. "When I was young," he reveals, "my parents never
told us much about the Armenian holocaust. It was years later when
I discovered how horrible it had been."
In 1975, he was asked to write a song for a movie called Armenia. The
film was never made, but the song "Ils sont tombes" with its moving
tribute to "the children of Armenia," began a new chapter in his life.
"Our dead people have the right to have a grave," he says, "even if
it is only in our hearts."
Over the past 30 years, he has participated in numerous concerts
for his homeland, started a foundation to aid the victims of the
1988 earthquake that killed 50,000 and, in 2002, starred in Ararat,
Atom Egoyan's film that explored the legacy of the Armenian holocaust.
"Let me make it clear," he insists, "I do not hate the Turkish
people. My dream is to go to Turkey and sing there, but they tell me
it is not safe for me; one crazy man with a gun is all it would take.
"Look, one crazy man with a gun is all it takes anywhere."
Aznavour finds himself deeply troubled by the religious wars that
beset the globe these days. "I respect every religion. The husband
of one of my daughters is Jewish; the husband of another daughter is
Muslim. We all live in peace with this. Why can't the world?"
He puts down his empty glass.
"I'm anxious to meet my audiences one last time. When I was a young
man, I sang foolish songs, but I have grown older and wiser and my
public have grown older and wiser with me."
With such a long and full existence, is there anything he would do
over again?
"I regret nothing. Not even my young anger. I have done more than I
ever expected ...
"I would not change anything in my life. Even the bad moments have
been constructive. Love disappears? Well then, you say goodbye."
Charles Aznavour will make his farewell Toronto appearance on Friday,
Sept. 15 at 8 p.m. at the Hummingbird Centre. Tickets are available
through hummingbirdcentre.com or by calling 416-872-2262.
--Boundary_(ID_0EdGS63e+BZHMzXsE44z 8Q)--