Jacques Brel & Gérard Jouannest – Ne Me Quitte Pas. Arr. for guitar sheet music, Noten, partition

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Jacques Brel, the voice of love and death

Born on 8 April 1929, the singer-songwriter of belgian francophone went to virgin to the marriage and sang emphatically to the love and death. Your ‘Ne me quitte pas’ is the theme French more radiatum of the story.

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‘What counts in life is not its duration, but its intensity…’ This maxim, pronounced by Jacques Brel in an interview in 1971, reflects perfectly his ideology of life. The artist was 42 years, and he knew very well what he was saying.

The young man, whose talent maverick had pushed to leave the safety and economic well-to-do, and offered to the family home a little over two decades before, he had very clear in their objectives. Baptized Jacques Romain Georges Brel, a name that he would shorten at the start of its path of art, he was a genuine lover of freedom.

Demonstrated already in the childhood, when his low grades at school brought their parents to put on the front of the family business, a thriving come, something that was bored sovereignty to the young Jacques, whose restless spirit was calling him to higher achievements.

Singer-songwriter vocational, begins to collaborate with a youth movement, the Franche Cordée, whose animations enable him to play his first song, there, will know that to be his wife Thérese Michielsen, ‘Miche’, two years older than him.

In 1953, he recorded in Brussels on his first album and, determined to succeed, he moves to Paris with the guitar under his arm. A year later began to perform in cabarets, the same as those by which roam Moustaki, Ferré and Brassens. This last, witty, no doubt adopatar the young flemish French as “l’abbé jacques Brel” (the abbot Brel). And it is that the artist had a halo parish that made him different. Their lyrics, far from being banal, try complex subjects by showing a great skill and acuity.

That young man, who married at just 21 years old, who came to virgin to the marriage, she sings emphatically on love and death (eros and tánatos), at the time, dared, dares to scorn of his fellow-countrymen, flamingos who criticize you for singing in French, or attack, without any of the bourgeoisie, establishment of the proceeds, even claiming its members: ‘The bourgeois are like pigs, the older you do, the more stupid you become’. The provocation above all.

Its theme ‘ Quand on n’a l’amour makes him a worthy winner of the prestigious prix Charles Cross in 1956, and three years later he recorded his topic most celebrated: Ne me quitte pas. Legend has it that Edith Piaf heard him, would say: ‘A man should not sing things as well ’. Inspired by his despair at the threat of being abandoned by Zidane, one of his lovers, the composition was always hated by the growth that I would define as ‘the story of an asshole, of a failure, a coward’. Paradoxically, Ne me quitte pas , would turn with time into a classic, being probably the topic in French more radiatum of the story .

At 29 years old, in 1961, Brel acts for the first time at the Olympia in Paris as a soloist. His triumph is absolute, the critical surrenders to the evidence and Piaf provides with good red wine by the artist. A star is born.

That same year, Jacques Brel sold 500,000 copies of his album La valse a mille temps, a milestone for a ‘newcomer’. Took off the legend of the interpreter.

Meanwhile, his personal life continues reeling, his collection of lovers and makes her feel guilty, but away from his wife and their three daughters. ‘Paternity does not exist’, he says. Went back to play at the mythical Olympia theatre in 1964. There is another of your instant successes, Amsterdam. His evocation of the sirens of the sea-ports is unparalleled. Years after the chameleon David Bowie will adapt and include in your repertoire.

In 1967, it takes a determination: always demanding with himself, afraid to end up becoming an ‘official music’, eager to defend their independence and refusing to bow down to the demands of professionals in show business, leaves virtually the song ‘because I was at the moment you begin to deceive’, to devote himself to the cinema and the theater.

This is when Jacques decides to once again change their style of life. In February 1974, it acquires the Askoy II, a magnificent sailboat of 19 meters, and embarks on a long journey which ends on the 24th of July in The Canary Islands.

There are manifest symptoms of a fatal disease, lung cancer. Back to Brussels and, a few weeks after undergoing a delicate operation, he goes off again, determined to cross the Atlantic. In November 1975 up to the Marquesas Islands, and decided to settle next to Maddly Bamy, a mulatto young woman of extraordinary beauty, in a small house of one of the insulas of the archipelago, Hiva-Oa.

There unearth another of his hobbies, aviation: buy an airplane ‘Jojo’ and it becomes ‘e’ in the service of the inhabitants of one island. In 1977, he returned to Paris in secret, and records which will be his last album, in the shadows, Les Marquises , in order to be published as a fact sensational. The long-term, which sold more than a million advance orders, harvesting an unprecedented success.

The singer’s voice mutes in Paris, on October 9, 1979, he had 49 years. By his express wish, her mortal remains will be laid to rest in Hiva-Oa, a few meters from the tomb of Gauguin.

Two free spirits that fate, always mocking, determined to gather.