The musician Marcel Zanini, great of French jazz and known for his hit Do you want or notHe died on Wednesday at the age of 99, AFP learned from his family. He died in a Paris hospital, his son, the writer Marc-Édouard Nabe (Alain Zannini’s pseudonym), told AFP.
Marcel Zanini, born Zannini in Istanbul on September 7, 1923, comes from a Franco-Italian father and a Greek mother from Asia Minor, who had left Turkey for Marseilles in 1930. He himself found his way on the clarinet and the saxophone, and was swept away by the post-war jazz explosion in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris.
“Jazz is my whole life. It’s a passion, a disease. Jazz is better than being in love,” he told AFP in 2005.
He left for New York in 1954, where for four years he saw the great names in music of the time: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and others.
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Despite the recognition he has obtained in the world of jazz, the general public preserves more of the humorous figure, with his long hair, mustache and large glasses, of a variety singer. His 1969 hit, Do you want or notis a hastily conceived adaptation of a hit by Brazilian Wilson Simonal, I don’t see that I’m not afraid.
Disarmingly simple, the song, rejected by several artists including Eddy Mitchell, is a huge hit. It is on everyone’s lips, including Brigitte Bardot, who picks it up a year later. A sudden glory (160,000 records sold in record time) who looks surprised, over her large glasses.
If it does not bring you fortune – “ask for money, I really missed it” – it gives you enormous notoriety. “And, in the end, interestingly enough, he made me known as a jazz musician.”
For decades after the success of “Do you want or do not want”, he continues producing jazz records, where he alternates covers and original compositions, and performing in clubs. Sometimes accompanied on guitar by his son Marc-Edouard Nabe, a writer who became sulphurous and went into exile in Switzerland. “I never left jazz. Every day I listen to it and play it.”
Source: BFM TV
