Michel Legrand, who comes to Dublin next week, went to the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10, during the second World War, and has been playing and composing ever since. Now 76, he's busier than he's ever been, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea
WHERE DOES anyone start with someone as insatiably prolific and versatile as Michel Legrand? Is he a singer, a songwriter, a composer, an arranger, a conductor, a producer, a director, an actor? Difficult to pin down and virtually impossible to categorise, Legrand is approaching his 77th year and, certain aches, pains and coughs notwithstanding, still finds it a pleasure to wake up in the morning and wonder what new work is going to come his way each day.
He was born in the Parisian suburb of Bécon-les-Bruyères on February 24th, 1932. His mother, Marcelle der Mikaelian, was a descendant of the Armenian bourgeoisie; his father, Raymond Legrand, was a French musician. Something of a child prodigy, Michel entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10, spending seven years studying and training under teachers such as Henri Challan, Lucette Descaves and Nadia Boulanger. He won numerous awards for his skills in fugue, counterpoint and piano.
As a war child, he recalls the experience in strong detail and, perhaps inevitably, with a degree of nostalgic reverie mixed with bitterness.
“It was terrible for me, really terrible,” he relates in excellent English, sniffling slightly due to a bout of flu that had postponed an earlier interview appointment. “I hated the enemies of our country. My mother was very poor, and she had to work from early in the morning to late at night. We had effectively nothing to eat for four years, as it was very, very difficult. She didn’t have enough money to buy anything on the black market – it was too expensive.
“But when you’re a little boy, you look upon those kinds of tragedies in a different way, so when the Americans came in to liberate us in June 1944, for me it was an extraordinary adventure. I was so excited to see them I almost followed them everywhere! It was like a continuation of the adventure, the US army coming in and beating the villains.”
IN THE IMMEDIATE post-war years, Legrand graduated from classical music to chanson and jazz, the former through his father’s contacts, the latter through a revelatory concert by Dizzy Gillespie.
“In 1952, when I was 20, I didn’t know what to do,” he says. “I had to make my living. As I say, my mother was poor, and my father wasn’t around, so after I finished school I started working with lousy singers – you know, old people who were singing out of tune and tempo. But later, little by little, I became known as a pianist and good singers started to hire me, and so I worked with them.
“The first ones I worked with were Henri Salvador, Catherine Sauvage and Juliette Gréco, and subsequently Maurice Chevalier, for whom I became musical director. Then I started to make orchestrations for these singers, and then to record these with them.”
In New York because of his musical director duties with Chevalier, Legrand soon fell in love with the city. Every night out, he remembers, ended in a visit to a jazz club, where he watched gigs by the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Gillespie.
“I totally embraced New York – it was a town of jazz,” he says. “I loved the people playing it. New York had jazz music coming out of almost everywhere – bars, clubs, hotels. Compared to Paris I was in heaven there. It was a wonderful time, and I vowed to stay and live there.”
In 1954, his wish was granted when Columbia-EMI (as it was then known) commissioned him to make an album of English adaptations of French classics.
It was more, remarks Legrand, an "ambient mood album about Paris – all the well-known songs about the city. It was called I Love Paris, my first instrumental recording."
THERE WAS ONE stumbling block, however: Columbia said they would give him a flat fee of $200 for the record, with no royalties, and would he be willing to accept these conditions?
“I was at the start of my career, really,” recalls Legrand, “so I said sure, I will.”
The album went on to sell more than eight million copies, turning the composer into an immediate star in both the US and France. Did he subsequently regret not insisting on royalties? Even in the 1950s, he would have been guaranteed a considerable sum of money. Legrand’s reply is surprisingly bereft of resentment, a measure, perhaps, of his innate good nature and philosophical equanimity (although if his career hadn’t turned out to be so incredibly successful, he might easily have become just a little bit irked).
"I don't regret it at all," he says. "Remember, I was quite unknown at that time, so I thought it was a good idea to accept. Anyway, the album was so successful the record company threw a big party for me, and said that because of me not insisting on royalties for I Love Paris, they would like to give me a present – they would fund any record I wanted to make. So I said I wanted to make a jazz album with Davis, Coltrane, Gillespie, Bill Evans, Ben Webster. Columbia said fine, do it.
"So, in 1958, I did a jazz album, Legrand Jazz, with those musicians."
From the 1960s onwards, Legrand just hasn't stopped working. He has done it all, from scoring films for key movies in the French New Wave – including Jean-Luc Godard's Bande á part(1964) and Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) – to having his songs covered by the likes of Liza Minnelli. He has scored countless movies in the US – including Joseph Losey's The Go-Between(1970) and Louis Malle's Atlantic City(1980) – and worked with Jacques Brel, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey, Ray Charles, Stephane Grappelli, Diana Ross, Kiri Te Kanawa and Björk. He is also a recipient of the Légion d'honneur, has been nominated for a Grammy almost 30 times (he won five of them between 1971 and 1975) and has nabbed several Oscars.
Legrand’s work credo? He was part of, he says with a typically casual French flourish, a group of “audacious young people daring to do things that other people didn’t”. And the workload? Does he not feel like putting his feet up, or even into his slippers?
“I have never worked as much as I am working now,” he states, sounding bullish. “I’m involved in stage shows, operas, directing, concerts, and will be performing gigs in New York, Canada, Japan, Russia, Brazil – and, of course, Ireland!
“I’m busier than I have ever been, which is good because I feel I am a young man, full of strength and ideas. I’m more than happy.”
Michel Legrand and his Orchestra, with special guest Alison Moyet, will perform at Dublin’s National Concert Hall on Sun, Feb 1
