främsta artister genom tiderna.
I dag läser jag med sorg i musikhjärtat att han, Charles Aznavour har avlidit.
En fantastisk artist.
RIP Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour performing in New York in 2009. He continued to tour the world at an age when most performers have long retired.
Charles Aznavour, one of France’s greatest singers of popular songs as well as a composer, film star and lifelong champion of the Armenian people, has died. He was 94.
His death was announced by the French Culture Ministry.
At an age when most performers have long retired from the footlights and the brutal, peripatetic life of an international star, Mr. Aznavour continued to range the world, singing his songs of love found and love lost to capacity audiences who knew most of his repertoire by heart. In his 60s, even then a veteran of half a century in music, he laughed off talk of retirement. “We live long, we Armenians,” he said. “I’m going to reach 100, and I’ll be working until I’m 90.”
His accomplishments were prodigious: He wrote, by his own estimate, more than 1,000 songs, for himself and for others, and sang them in French, Armenian, English, German, Italian, Spanish and Yiddish. He sold well over 100 million records in his lifetime. He appeared in more than 60 films, beginning with bit parts as a child. His best-known film role was probably as a pianist with a mysterious past in François Truffaut’s eccentric 1960 crime drama “Shoot the Piano Player” — a part Truffaut said he wrote specifically for Mr. Azanavour.
Early in his career, he looked for inspiration to the French stars Charles Trenet, Édith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier. “Trenet for his writing, Piaf for her pathos and Chevalier for his professionalism,” he told The New York Times in 1992, “and all three for their tremendous presence on stage.” Also high in his pantheon were Carlos Gardel, the Argentine tango singer, and Al Jolson. “Gardel and Jolson were far apart,” he said, “but they had the same pathos.” He learned his idiomatic English from Frank Sinatra’s records, but he considered Mel Tormé and Fred Astaire his favorite American singers.
Här är Aznavour över 90 år (vårar) gammal.
