Michel Legrand in 1961. Photograph: Common Music France/Stan Wiezniak
He may not have been a family identify outdoors of his native France, however French composer and jazz pianist Michel Legrand helped outline the 60s along with his composition “The Windmills Of Your Mind,” which received an Oscar after it was featured within the 1968 crime film The Thomas Crown Affair. Legrand’s prolific work price and prodigious expertise, nonetheless, ensured that he left behind an enormous quantity of music to find following his demise in 2019, only a month shy of his 87th birthday.
Michel Legrand was born in Paris, on February 24, 1932, right into a household that was musically well-connected. His father was Raymond Legrand, who earned renown in France as a composer and conductor of jazz and lightweight music, and his mom was the sister of the famous French classical conductor Jacques Hélian. Steeped in music from a younger age, younger Michel proved to be a baby prodigy who excelled at taking part in the piano. By the point he was 10, he was finding out classical music on the prestigious Paris Conservatoire, however when he left, in his late teenagers, armed with an array of formal music {qualifications}, he bought a job as an accompanist for celebrated French common singer and film star Maurice Chevalier.
Take heed to Legrand Jazz on Apple Music and Spotify.
After gleaning a lot invaluable expertise touring the globe with Chevalier, in 1954, on the tender age of twenty-two, Michel Legrand took his first solo flight, recording I Love Paris, a brilliantly-conceived orchestral album that showcased his distinctive skills as a composer, arranger, and conductor. It proved successful in his native France, topping the album charts, and was additionally instrumental in accelerating Legrand’s profession, which blossomed exponentially thereafter. The identical yr, he scored his first film, Les Amants Du Tage, which might be the primary of 154 movie soundtracks Legrand put his identify to.
Because the 50s grew to become the 60s, Legrand labored with a few of France’s pre-eminent New Wave administrators, amongst them Jean-Luc Godard (with whom he labored on seven movies) and Jacques Demy. It was his work for the latter’s 1964 movie, the award-winning operetta Les Parapluies De Cherbourg, that introduced Michel Legrand worldwide fame.
Hollywood calling
With Legrand’s star within the ascendant, Hollywood inevitably beckoned. In 1968 Legrand made an indelible mark on cinema along with his memorable rating to director Norman Jewison’s romantic crime caper, The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Steve McQueen and Fay Dunaway. The film picked up an Oscar for Finest Authentic Tune within the form of the evocative, era-defining “The Windmills Of Your Mind.”
When the 70s arrived, Legrand continued to work at a prolific price, his scores complementing a variety of films, from taut crime thrillers (Cops & Robbers) and historic dramas (The Go Between, The Three Musketeers) to coming-of-age romances (Summer time Of ’42, for which Legrand received one other Academy Award) and even kids’s motion pictures (The Smurfs And The Magic Flute).
A profession in jazz
Legrand additionally loved a parallel profession as a jazz musician. Undoubtedly, his best-known solo jazz work is the 1959 album Legrand Jazz. It featured the French pianist taking part in alongside among the largest names in modern American jazz, together with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Invoice Evans, Ben Webster, and Donald Byrd.
As an arranger, Legrand additionally labored on jazz albums by West Coast saxophonist/flautist Bud Shank (Windmills Of Your Thoughts, 1969) and saxophonist Stan Getz (Communications, 1972). In 1979, the Frenchman launched Le Jazz Grand, which featured famous US jazz saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Phil Woods. Legrand additionally famously collaborated for a second time with Miles Davis on the soundtrack to the 1991 film Dingo, which the legendary jazz trumpeter additionally starred in.
A prolific and versatile musician whose music knew no boundaries, Michel Legrand was efficiently capable of straddle the worlds of jazz, pop, and classical music with consummate ease. “Melody is a mistress to whom I’ll always be faithful,” he as soon as stated, a confession that chimed with many individuals’s notion of him. He was, certainly, a grasp whose present for fashioning melodic strains that might contact the guts and linger lengthy within the reminiscence was arguably probably the most outstanding of his many accomplishments.
Take heed to Legrand Jazz on Apple Music and Spotify.
