Georges Moustaki

Alexandria to Saint-Germain-des-Pres

Giuseppe Mustacchi was born in Alexandria on May 3, 1934, to Greek-Jewish parents of Corfu origin, Sarah and Nessim Mustacchi, who owned the Cite du Livre bookshop. Italian was spoken at home, Arabic in the street and French at school. He moved to Paris in 1951 and stayed with his sister Marcelle and her husband, the poet Jean-Pierre Rosnay, working as a journalist and then as a piano-bar barman in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where he heard Georges Brassens. He took his first name from Brassens, whom he called his only master, and was naturalized French in 1985. He sang in French, Italian, English, Greek, Portuguese, Arabic and Spanish.

In 1958 the guitarist Henri Crolla introduced him to Edith Piaf, for whom he wrote "Milord", dated 1958, 1959 or 1960 depending on the source; it reached number one in Germany and 24 in the UK. During the 1960s he wrote for Yves Montand, Barbara and Serge Reggiani, who first sang "Sarah", and in all about 300 songs for others, among them Dalida, Francoise Hardy, France Gall, Brigitte Fontaine, Juliette Greco and Tino Rossi. His first album, Les Orteils au soleil, came in 1961, and his first film score, for Jean-Pierre Mocky's Solo, in 1969.

Le Meteque and the albums

"Le Meteque" and the album of 1969 made him a star as a performer, and in January 1970 he headlined Bobino in Paris, recorded as Bobino 70. Il y avait un jardin (1971), Danse (1972), Declaration (1973, with a Brazilian influence), Les Amis de Georges (1974), Humblement il est venu (1975), Prelude (1976), Esperance (1977), Si je pouvais t'aider and Et pourtant dans le monde (1979) and C'est la (1981) followed, then Moustaki et Flairck (1982), Pornographie (1984), Joujou (1986), Mediterraneen (1992), Tout reste a dire (1996), Odeon (2003), Vagabond (2005) and Solitaire (2008), his last album. In 1972 he made Greek translations of Mikis Theodorakis songs and acted in Mendiants et Orgueilleux, and in 1998 he played the Abbe Faria in a Count of Monte Cristo.

Live records include Olympia (1978), Olympia 2000 (2001) and Presque en solo, from the Berlin Philharmonie (2002). Setlist.fm holds 80 setlists, most in Canada, with Place des Arts in Montreal his top venue. He was made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres on May 30, 1996 and was a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur. On January 8, 2009 he stopped a Barcelona concert because he could not breathe, and announced a last public performance; on October 14, 2011 he said he could no longer sing. He died in Nice on May 23, 2013, aged 79, and was buried at Pere-Lachaise on May 27. President Hollande and Juliette Greco were among those who paid tribute. The Prix Georges-Moustaki was created in 2010 for self-produced albums, and a Place Georges-Moustaki in Paris's fifth arrondissement was inaugurated on May 23, 2017.

He wrote books including Les filles de la memoire (1989), Fils du brouillard (1999) and La Sagesse du faiseur de chanson (2011); Louis-Jean Calvet wrote about him in Georges Moustaki: la ballade du Meteque (2005) and Georges Moustaki: une vie (2014).