Singer Marina Roussel has always been in awe of singer-songwriter Georges Moustaki. He was impressed by the fact that he was a child of many cultures. “He brought Greek, Italian, French culture… He was born in Egypt, in Alexandria, and he was Arab and Jewish,” Roussel explained by phone a few days before he left for France to perform. “The multiculturalism was noticeable in the way he was. He was a free thinker, and that’s what attracted me to him.”
He met her personally through the Valencian singer-songwriter Paco Ibáñez who introduced them. Georges Moustaki began inviting her to sing with him, at the Palau de la Música when he came to Barcelona and in Nice when he returned home.
Marina Roussel went to record an album in France with French musicians and spent three months in Paris with Moustaki, who was living in the French capital at the time. They lived together more and built a lifelong friendship. “We were lovers sometimes. We had a friendship and a free love affair until his death. Our partners knew about it, even though he didn’t have many steady partners,” Roussel recalls.
Meeting him was shocking because I had “mythologized him,” yet I was amazed to discover that George Moustaki was a person with “a wonderful combination of vulnerability and strength.” “It’s a combination that’s hard to find, and when it’s there, it’s very beautiful because so many feelings unfold.” “Love is sometimes something as simple as admiring someone’s way of thinking and their way of being on earth,” the singer notes, adding: “I don’t know if I can define love, because in every situation there’s a way of love that’s born, and not all ways of love are the same, everyone has their own, very special and very intimate ways. For me, maybe good love means respecting the other.” He sees love as also “standing in front of a landscape and seeing it as it is, and feeling the same feeling, in front of a rural landscape or a human landscape.”
The singer says that music “provides a feeling of happiness, as well as love.” For her, two of the people who sang love best were Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday. In Catalan, it stays with Phyllis and the openings De Raymond sings Ausiàs March, and to feel his sorrow, die from lightningwhich Russell included on the album. 300 critical points.
When George Moustaki died in 2013 at the age of 79, the singer felt she had lost “someone very valuable” in her life. The Greek-Egyptian singer-songwriter had come at the right time, a year before his death, to hear some of his songs translated into Catalan by Rosell, a promise he had made and fulfilled on the album. Marina was a mustachio.
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