Today I indulged myself with epic "sleep in" and while the autumn fog completely surrounded my house, I watched youtube duet of Charles Aznavour and his old friend until I could sing along. When these electronic duets first came along, we dismissed them as a cheating but with time we got used to them and some of them actually work just fine, this is one of them. It works wonderfully actually because visually it doesn't try to patch up old & new but shows Aznavour looking at ghost of his own memory and I am sure he did this privately many, many times. I just melted, utterly fascinated.
At this point Édith Piaf has been away from this world longer than she had been in it - some half of century, to be precise - but my God, what a wonderful flame this little candle has left us! I can't even remember the very first time I've heard her voice, it feels like she was alway around - but where other "classic" singers fall more or less in time when they performed, there is something truly everlasting about her old recordings, they feel like a monument to France and for most of us she IS France. The place of our dreams.
I still remember one particular very late night when I was walking home trough streets of Zagreb, everybody has been listening popular radio station 101 at that time and it was usually very trendy, current hit music but that evening someone decided to end the program with "La Vie en Rose" and there was Édith, singing from every single window as I slowly walked home, now looking back some 30 years later I know it was one of the prettiest memories of my life.
To get swept in her music one doesn't necessarily have to understand either the language nor the facts (much later in life I found about Marguerite Monnot and Damia) after all, everything in this life is so transient and brief, yesterdays tears are just past. What is fascinating about Piaf is that her music even today radiates sheer magic and class, where by all accounts this little child of the streets shouldn't be the one who knew about these things at all. Books, movies, articles and memoirs usually focus on sordid aspects of the myth that threatens to completely cover the real person buried somewhere under countless layers of these stories. Than you come to her music and discover real emotions, laughter and "joie de vivre" mixed up with drama and defiance, it opens up like the best work of art or wonderful book inviting you to come in - no matter what her life might have been and how lowly her start was, there was this absolutely fascinating spark of the universal spirit in this little body and it soared to the skies in life-affirming joy that was instantly recognised by millions who heard her and are listening even today. On some unconscious level we all understand this is all real and there is nothing artificial about Piaf who comes across as genuine sound of the heart. I heard people saying that they don't understand this or her voice was not "feminine" but it just shows their ignorance or unwillingness to open up to something that was unique even in her time. Not for nothing is she remembered, towering above absolutely everybody else who was her contemporary back than (good as they might have been) - no matter what I listen to and where life leads me, this is one of the cornerstones, pillars of my music collection and its so etched in my personality that I don't even need to have it physically with me in order to hear this sound in my dreams. Thanks to this recordings, her spirit would continue to live long after all of us flicker out.
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