Funny summer for a meeting
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In the spring of 1949, it was love at first sight between the black American trumpeter and the white French singer. Their love story, prevented by racism across the Atlantic, would last until the jazzman’s death.
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Adam and Eve, the Little Prince and the fox… All summer long, Liberation tells you about the magic of the first moments. For better or for worse.
“I had never seen a man so handsome and I have not seen one since, she will say. I was backstage and he was playing: a profile of an Egyptian god!” “It was magic, he will writeI was like hypnotized, in a kind of trance. Music had been my whole life until I met Juliette. She taught me what it was like to love someone other than music.” In the spring of 1949, she is just 22 years old, he will soon be 23. He is at the dawn of a career that will take him to the top, she is still in the wings of glory. They will love each other for a handful of weeks. And a whole life by proxy.
Miles Davis and Juliette Gréco, that’s a love at first sight that has a hell of a lot of character. It all began in early May 1949, when the trumpeter arrived in France for the first time for the Paris Jazz Festival. The young prodigy had joined pianist Tadd Dameron’s group to replace Fats Navarro, the shooting star who was too much of a junkie to take on this tour. A new world opened up to him, that of Sartre and Picasso,
