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MUSIC

New Montreux jazzfest director announced

The board of the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland has named Mathieu Jaton, who was chief aide to the late festival founder Claude Nobs, to take charge of the annual event.

New Montreux jazzfest director announced
Screenshot of Johnny Hallyday's Twitter page: the French star tweeted plans for Montreux this summer.

Jaton, who began working for the festival in 1999 and became its general secretary in 2001, had been "chosen by Claude Nobs to be his successor", the festival foundation said in a statement released on Tuesday.
   
Nobs, who founded the summertime jazz event in 1967, became a legend in musical circles for bringing the top names in jazz to the shore of Lake Geneva and for gradually broadening the festival's scope.
   
He died last week, aged 76, and the festival foundation said that Jaton's appointment followed "very moving memorials" to "an exceptional person who shaped the world of music and his region for nearly 50 years."
   
A tribute to Nobs will take place at the Stravinsky Auditorium on February 8th, the foundation said, to be followed in the spring by a memorial event in New York.
   
Finally, on July 26th and 27th London's Royal Opera House will host a "special event" conceived by Nobs.

The programme will be released later.

The lineup for the 47th Montreux Jazz Festival, to be held from July 5th to 20th 2013, has also yet to be announced.

But French rock star Johnny Hallyday tweeted a few days ago that he would be at Montreux this year "to pay tribute" to Nobs, whom he hailed as "passionate and courageous."

His planned appearance has yet to be confirmed.

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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