Michel Jonasz is the famous “Mister Swing”, this blues player at the heart of his own fabulous story. Starting out as a pianist, alongside a Moroccan rocker, Vigon and the group Les Lemons, he evolved, ensuring that his music and his voice became his trademarks. In October 2024 his album was released Soulten tracks revisited with a soulful sound, heralding a tour which will start on March 1, 2025 in Courbevoie before passing through Lille, Béziers, Toulouse, Paris, Marseille and Dijon.
franceinfo: Soul is the music of the soul, was it important to go back to basics a little?
Michel Jonah: Exactly, if we go back to the sources, I could say that the first music heard in my life was also soul music, because for me, Édith Piaf, gypsy and Hungarian music, all that is the music of the soul. But if we talk about soul music, for me, the first singer was Ray Charles and he was my idol. He’s the one who made me want to make music. When I heard one day, coming out of a jukebox, What’d I saidI wanted to touch a piano. It’s true that that’s when I really started to sing what resembled me, that is to say this rock, blues and rhythm and blues music, ultimately, what we can call soul. Soul is names, labels, it’s Motown, it’s Otis Reading, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, the Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, that’s it.
There is one particular song in this album, it is Love is getting serious. But is love serious, really? You who always take everything with a smile, with a laugh. We have the impression that you are a big child.
Yes, I am, it’s true. I even made a song, an album and a whole show called Men are still children. I don’t remember the exact moment I transitioned from childhood to adulthood and I often quote this interview with Marcello Mastroianni who said: “I can’t become an adult because children never get tired.”
“We must keep this wonder of childhood, this enthusiasm.”
Michel Jonahat franceinfo
So, going back to the question about love getting serious, no, I’m not talking about a serious thing versus a light thing. I explain that love becomes serious, that is to say, it becomes real love, when we look at each other without saying anything. When is it true? When does it correspond to something that really makes it throb inside?
You have managed to take the opposite view of this extremely difficult life that your parents lived. Your mother narrowly escaped the Holocaust, while part of your family remained there. Doesn’t this lightness, of enjoying the moment, come from there?
Surely it comes from there because I was amazed by it. After these terrible ordeals of having lost her parents and having lost four of her brothers in the camps, my mother, who arrived in France at the age of 16 from Hungary, had this joy of living in She.
“My mother wore the yellow star and I said to myself, that’s a lesson because it puts things into perspective, because we’re alive.”
Michel Jonahat franceinfo
I often quote this Hungarian proverb: “The Hungarian rejoices while weeping”. You realize that you are alive. If you can sing a sad song, you can sing it.
In this album, you invite us to groove on Super nana. What’s funny is that this song, when it came out, many forgot it, it was the B side of a 45 rpm: Tell me.
Yes, actually, it was the first album, in 1974, with the two songs that led this album to success. Tell meit was the first music I composed and Super Nana is a song written and composed by Jean-Claude Vannier that I sing almost all the time at every show.
What place does the stage occupy in your life as an artist?
It’s extraordinary, the stage, it’s an initiatory path. It’s the heart of my job and I say that because the stage allows you a lot of things, for example to learn clumsiness, uncertainties, things like that. But there is one thing she doesn’t forgive you for, and that is not giving everything you can give her. We can start, she accepts that, but not being 100% invested is not possible.
