Góc Học Trò: The Music of Paul Mauriat

Paul Mauriat - The Maestro Whom Introduced, Safeguarded and Eternalized "La Chanson Française" of the Sixties and Seventies

Dear Friend,

In two previous posts in Vietnamese, I had tried to explain my passion about Paul Mauriat's music. From his anthology of more than 1000 songs, two hundreds or so are of French music, ranging from the fifties: Comme d'habitude, La vie en rose to the sixties and seventies: Une belle histoire, Après toi, Tu te reconnaitras, and so on. In this special post, I will try to roughly edit then translate my three previous posts into English, as well as adding any new thoughts since last year's time.

I looked and looked on the internet, searching for some good sites that talk about Paul Mauriat's music in English, and could not find any other good source except this excellent site:

http://www.grandorchestras.com/mauriat/index.html

I hope my post here will eventually be discovered by other Paul Mauriat's fans around the world!

This is a work in progress ...

***

During the last five years or so, I spent lots of times listening to Paul's music, especially the LPs he created in the seventies. There are lots of French songs that I didn't know about, since I grew up in the eighties. In my intermediate school years (1976-1980), I had no idea about the world's music. Not just me, but the entire Vietnam under communist ruling after the fall of Saigon, the government didn't like that stuff at all, they prohibited any music from the West.

Back to French music of the seventies, here are the songs composed by Paul that I discovered and loved the most:

Tombe la neige
Apres toi
Ce n'est rien
La decadance
L'avventura
Summer of 42
Une belle histoire
La maladie d'amour
Rien qu'une larme
Tu te reconnaitras
Viens viens (Rain rain)
Le premier pas
Emmanuelle
Et bonjour a toi l'artiste
L'ete Indien (Africa)
Il a neige sur yesterday
L'oiseau et l'enfant
Michèle

Paul paid special attention to the music of some composer-singers or duos such as Stone et Charden, Gerard Lenorman, Michel Fugain, or Julien Clerc. Some examples are:

Laisse aller la musique
Il y a du soleil sur la France
14 ans les Gauloises
Chant...comme si tu devais mourir demain
Ce n'est rien
Si on chantait
Sur le chemin de la vie

and some other songs, which originally were only popular in the French-speaking countries (francophonies), but Paul's orchestra had made them famous all around the world. Those songs were:

Les rois mages
Un banc, un arbre, une rue
La decadence
J'ai un probleme
Je pense à toi
Sonia
Une fille aux yeux clairs
Je vais t'aimer, etc.

I was very lucky that, after a long time searching on amazon.com, I was able to obtain the only book written about the life and music of Paul Mauriat, entitled "Une Vie En Bleu". This is an excellent book, even though it is written in French, it was in an easy and down-to-earth style that I was able to understand most of the material.

I discover the fact that the Paul compositions I like the most are completely belonged to the period when Gerard Gambus was hired as Paul's assistant (1973-1982), and eventually became "partner-in-crime" during the early eighties. Here are some of the songs I like during that period of time:

I especially like this song, co-written by Gerard and Paul, entitled Blue Sticks for a Rainbow:

Here is the picture of book "Une Vie En Bleu"