Adieu Henri Salvador

That famous laugh is no more

Paris 

13/02/2008 - 

Henri Salvador died in his Paris home this morning, Wednesday 13^th February, in the wake of an aneurism. The French Caribbean singer could have gone down in music history as the musical court jester, the man who brought a smile to all our faces with his gently funny songs Le Travail c’est la santé and Zorro est arrivé. Salvador had, in fact, gone into semi-retirement, feeling angry and let down by his record label, the music "business" and perhaps even the public. But then, at the ripe old age of 83, Salvador made a quasi-miraculous comeback with Chambre avec vue, an album that brought him more acclaim than anything else in his career (which already figured as one of the longest and most successful in French music history). Salvador died a respected patriarch of French ‘chanson’, loved by several generations of music fans and revered by fellow music professionals.

Henri Salvador’s lifestory began at 19, rue de la Liberté, in Cayenne, where he was born on 18 July 1917. His parents were both Guadeloupean; his father, Clovis, being of Spanish origin, his mother, Antonine Paterne, the daughter of a Caribbean Indian. Young Henri was thus brought up with a rich cultural mix. But his parents, who both worked as civil servants in the tax office, also gave their son an unshakable faith in the values of the Republic. Salvador senior was also musically minded and played the violin in his spare time. "Not very well,” Henri Salvador later admitted. “I once asked my father if he’d teach me to play, but he said he wouldn’t teach me unless I worked hard at school. But I never got good grades at school, so my father never taught me the violin. Otherwise, I’m sure I would have been a virtuoso!"

The violin’s loss was the guitar’s gain, young Henri teaching himself to play the instrument as soon as he could. When Henri was seven years old, the Salvador family left Cayenne and moved to Paris where he discovered the wonderful world of show business. On Sundays, his parents regularly took him along to a ‘matinée’ performance at La Comédie française or the Cirque Médrano, and it was here, in a ringside seat at the circus, that Salvador’s infectious laugh first came to public attention. "I remember, it was at the Médrano that I discovered this amazing clown called Rhum,” Salvador recalled, “He used to make me laugh so much I really split my sides. And one day Rhum invited me back to his dressing room and said, ‘You know, it’s so good to have your laughter echoing round the ring. Your laugh makes everyone else laugh with you. So from now on you can come along to the show every Sunday for free. After that, Rhum taught me a whole series of gags and that’s how I first fell in love with this business. "

Henri went on to develop another great passion in life, falling in love with the jazz sounds which had just arrived in France. It was around the same period that the young performer got his first on-stage job, doing a brief comic stand-up routine on the cabaret circuit when he was sixteen. By that stage of his career, Henri was already an excellent guitarist and he learnt to play trumpet and violin, too. At the age of eighteen, he joined the resident band at Jimmy’s Bar, renowned as the hottest nightspot in Paris at the time. Django Reinhardt, the Gypsy guitarist who had already made his name as a swing guitar legend, hired Salvador to play in his band. And from there young Henri went on to play guitar with the famous American jazz violinist Eddie South.

Salvador’s steady rise to fame was cut short by his call-up to do military service. And it was here, shacked up in barracks with the ordinary infantry that private Salvador learnt about ordinary day-to-day racism - an evil he managed to deflect with a laugh and a smile. Salvador displayed the same imperturbable attitude over sixty years later when radio reporters interviewed him on the death of a famous French singer of his generation. Salvador paid tribute to his illustrious peer without the slightest trace of bitterness despite the fact that the great man in question had spent years referring to him as "un petit nègre" (little negro).

When the Second World War broke out Salvador was ready to do anything to avoid getting back into army uniform. This led to him spending a brief spell in prison in Marseilles where he was protected from other inmates by the notorious Carbonne (a master crook later used as a model for the film Borsalino). Ray Ventura eventually hired Salvador as a musician-cum-variety entertainer in his orchestra, Les Collégiens. But fearing that France’s ‘zone libre’ was not about to stay free much longer, Ventura whisked his orchestra off on a whirlwind tour of South America seeing this as the perfect escape from war-torn Europe.

Christmas 1941 found Ventura and his group playing in Rio de Janeiro where Salvador became a big star in the Collégiens’ line-up. Ventura and his band were packing their bags to leave for the U.S. when Salvador was offered a contract that would make him a headlining star in Brazil in his own right. Salvador signed on the dotted line and, within the space of a few months, he became a major star performing a medley of songs and comedy routines in a mixture of French, English and Brazilian Portuguese. Despite his newfound star status, the young singer found himself being regularly ripped off. “I toured all the big casinos at the time,” he said, “and the shows were always a huge success. But I ended up having to nick bottles of Coca Cola and sell them on at four centavos a shot so that I could buy myself a sandwich. Jean Sablon was on tour at that point, too, but I never plucked up enough courage to go to him and ask him to lend me a bob or two. He would never have believed that I was grovelling around for money when my shows were doing so well. One day, I finally got a telegram from Ventura that read ‘We’re getting the orchestra up and running again in Paris.’ Well, I didn’t have to think twice about it. I started packing on the spot!”

Salvador returned to a liberated France and was soon swept up on his own wave of success. In 1947, he released his first solo recording, Maladie d’amour, which went on to become a huge international hit. This was soon followed by Salvador s’amuse featuring a three-minute excerpt of his notoriously infectious laugh, an act he regularly presented live on stage, much to the delight of audiences, throughout his career. In 1948, Salvador starred in the operetta Le Chevalier Bayard alongside Yves Montand and Ludmilla Tcherina. The following year, he headlined at the ABC with Mistinguett in the Paris s’amuse revue and released another hit, Le Loup, la Biche et le Chevalier (une chanson douce). It was at this point that Salvador met Boris Vian. The pair hit it off immediately, sharing the same wacky sense of humour and love of practical jokes, and they wrote a number of hit songs together.

Meanwhile, Salvador continued his own singing career, alternating crooner-style ballads with comic songs and amassing a whole string of hits with Dans mon île (1958), Faut Rigoler (1960), Le Lion est mort ce soir (1962), Minnie petite souris (1963), Syracuse, Count Basie et Zorro est arrivé (1964) and Le travail c'est la santé (1965). In 1968, Henri Salvador took his photogenic smile and personal charisma to the TV screen, becoming a household name in France presenting his “Salves d’or” then “Dimanche Salvador”, shows on which he performed his own sketches and songs as well as acting as genial host to all the major French ‘variété’ stars of the day.

By that stage of his career, Salvador could indulge his own musical tastes, releasing singles where the A-side featured a comic song or a tender ballad destined for young audiences and the B-side featured a jazz composition or a song inspired by Brazil. Meanwhile, in real life, Salvador also switched niftily between his own A and B-sides, combining general fun, naivety and ‘bonhomie’ with a crafty sense of cunning and solid business sense. While on the one hand, Salvador was the gentle comedian making the gallery laugh, he also went down in music history as one of the first artists to set up his own record label (Les Disques Rigolo in 1964). The Caribbean crooner also fought a long drawn-out battle in a court of law to have himself recognised as the official author of Maladie d’amour.

Gradually, however, Salvador began to slip out of the showbiz spotlight, his songs failing to capture the mood of the young generation. The singer ended up going into official retirement after the release of his ‘farewell’ album, Monsieur Henri, in 1995. At the ‘Victoires de la musique’ in 1996, Salvador was honoured with a special lifetime achievement award and performed a legendary on-stage duet with Ray Charles (Le Blues du dentiste). As he celebrated his 80^th birthday in 1997, no less than fourteen Salvador compilations hit record stores. And the wily businessman also announced he would be commercialising his own ‘pétanque’ set with balls specially designed by himself.

It was at this point that the artistic director Marc Domenico came along and offered Salvador the chance to record the album of his dreams. Salvador confessed that these days he “only listened to Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. King Cole for the way he breathes and Sinatra for the diction and the way he places his voice.” Salvador added that, if anyone was interested in his opinion, this time around he would drop the jokes, the comic routines and the clever puns. And thus it was that Salvador went back into the studio in his eighties to record Chambre avec vue, an album written by the young singer-songwriter Keren Ann and her alter ego, Benjamin Biolay, as well as Art Mengo, Marc Estève and a host of other young songwriters raised on a diet of Joao Gilberto, Chet Baker, Fred Astaire – and Salvador! As the icing on the cake, Salvador got to write and perform a duet with the great French 60s icon Françoise Hardy (Le Fou de la reine).

Chambre avec vue proved to be a runaway success, selling over a million copies, a score never attained by Salvador, even in the wildest days of his 60s success. Salvador suddenly found himself back in the showbiz spotlight with the red carpet rolled out in style, showered with official government honours and prestigious music awards. Tributes flooded in from his peers as his photos graced the covers of glossy magazines and Salvador went on to perform a sell-out tour with record crowds applauding him at that summer’s biggest music festivals including Les Vieilles Charrues and Le Paléo Festival in Nyon.

Salvador savoured every moment of his new success, recording and touring at an impressive rate and repeating his musical mantra as a committed jazz aficionado and a fan of sentimental ballads. At the ripe old age of 87, Salvador found himself with a concert schedule filled for the next three years ahead! He lived and died as an exception to the show business rules, eternally young in body and mind, loved and revered as a national icon. Henri Salvador was proof indeed that a laugh and a smile a day really did have the power to keep the doctor away – and he shared that infectious laugh of his with fans right up to the end!

Bertrand  Dicale

Translation : Julie  Street