The musician, who was an authority in jazz, enjoyed success with the general public with this hit from the 1960s.
The musician Marcel Zanini, great of French jazz and known for his hit Do you want it or not, died Wednesday at the age of 99, AFP learned from his family. He died in hospital in Paris, his son, writer Marc-Édouard Nabe (pseudonym of Alain Zannini) told AFP.
Marcel Zanini, born Zannini in Istanbul on September 7, 1923, comes from a Franco-Italian father and a Greek mother from Asia Minor, who had left Turkey for Marseilles in 1930. He himself found his way in the clarinet and saxophone, and was swept away by the post-war jazz explosion in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district of Paris.
“Jazz is my whole life. It’s a passion, a disease. Jazz is better than being in love,” he told AFP in 2005.
He left for New York in 1954, where for four years he saw the biggest names in music of the time: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and others.
Tube-surprise
Despite the recognition he has obtained in the jazz world, the general public retains more the facetious figure, with bob, mustache and big glasses, of a variety singer. His 1969 hit, Do you want it or notis a quickly conceived adaptation of a success of the Brazilian Wilson Simonal, Nem vem que não tem.
Disarmingly simple, the song – refused by several artists, including Eddy Mitchell – is a huge success. It is on everyone’s lips, including Brigitte Bardot, who takes it up a year later. A sudden glory (160,000 records sold in record time) that he looks surprised, over his big glasses.
If it does not bring him fortune – “question money, I really missed it” – it gives him enormous notoriety. “And, in the end, oddly, it made me known as a jazz musician”.
For decades after the success of “You want or you don’t want”, he continues to produce jazz albums, where he alternates covers and original compositions, and to perform in clubs. Sometimes accompanied on the guitar by his son Marc-Edouard Nabe, a writer who became sulphurous and exiled in Switzerland. “I never gave up jazz. Every day, I listen to it and I play it”.
