Serge Gainsbourg said that it was seeing Boris Vian on stage that made him decide to try his hand at songwriting.Ī jazz enthusiast, he served as liaison for, among others, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis in Paris. He himself recorded a good number of his many texts, with most of the rest recorded by other artists, among them Juliette Gréco, Nana Mouskouri, Yves Montand, Magali Noel, and Henri Salvador. His most famous song was "Le déserteur", a pacifist song written during the Indochina War. He was playing a pocket trumpet, which he called "trompinette" in some of his poems. He often played jazz at the "Tabou", a club (now disappeared), which was located in the Rue Dauphine, close to Saint-Germain des Prés, in Paris. He was also the author of plays, short stories and songs, including a 1958 collaboration on the opera Fiesta with Darius Milhaud. L'Ecume des Jours has appeared in English translation several times under different titles, but Stanley Chapman's translation Froth on the Daydream is generally regarded as the most accomplished. Under his own name he published L'Arrache Coeur (Heartsnatcher), L'Herbe Rouge, and what critics regard as his masterpiece, L'Ecume des Jours. He wrote 10 novels, including some mass-market sex-and-violence thrillers, under the pseudonym of Vernon Sullivan, who he claimed was an American whose works had been translated into French every one of these caused a scandal in France upon publication. His works were often highly controversial, but his writing and performance of jazz songs gained the admiration of many famous names. He was born in Ville-d'Avray, near Paris, and educated at the École Centrale Paris. īoris Vian (MaJune 23, 1959) was a French writer, poet, singer, and musician, who also wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan. But for various reasons, Vian is continually frustrated by the Whites in jazz, especially when they take attention away from Blacks. “Of course, it’s fun to play with Blacks.” But, he asked his readers, “who benefits? Surely not them!” “So,” he ends the piece, “do we have to exterminate the Whites? Of course not! But if only they could all just die suddenly…” Obviously, as a white musician himself, Vian is overstating his case. “The problem is the following,” he wrote in a 1948 editorial in Combat, “black music is increasing encumbered by white elements, often pleasant but always superfluous, easily and advantageously replaced with black elements.” Vian believed, in theory, in the idea of racial mixing among musicians. No matter what the jazz style, white musicians were inherently inferior to Blacks. In truth, Vian believed in the universality of this distinction. #Et on tuera tous les affreux skinVian believed that the color of his skin was the major impediment to mastery of the jazz idiom. The title Possible Songs betrays Vian's love for surrealism.īoris Vian chante Boris Vian () - Boris Vian I Spit On Your Grave (1959) - Michel Gast
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