But his voice was still true sounding at times like a human saxophone

But his voice was still true, sounding at times like a human saxophone. With Sonny Rollins, he created the beautiful rhapsody “A tes Seins” (“To Your Breasts”), and “Sing Sing Song” with Nat Adderley.He became part of French cinema’s Nouvelle Vague from its beginning, and helped immortalise Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960) with his own version of that title, based on Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo ?a la Turk” – written while hospitalised after a car crash. .That wilful creative arrogance was indeed to know a mixture of light and dark periods, reaching a pitch-black climax in 1985 when he was dropped by his impresario Eddie Barclay: the poet had lost his public. But Nougaro hit back with a triumphant tour of Africa, then made straight for New York, where he was “reborn in the Duke Ellington clinic founded by Boris Vian”. Nougaro gave them their full poetic as well as musical value: “I sing in the French language, that itself sings in rhythm.” Melodious troatings of a stag for some.For his first 33rpm recording in 1958, the poet and dramatist Jacques Audiberti wrote for its cover: “He gives words a concrete resonance seldom heard in the work of poets on paper only.” For his first 45rpm disc (1962) Audiberti wrote: The young bull Nougaro, one who knows how to write, charges once more in full force into the black arena of the disc, his hooves thundering out poems on the night, women, hotel rooms, the rain (“the tap-dancing rain”) – women above all, far from the dried-up riverbed of books. But I seized upon those heart-rending street songs with an aristocratic arrogance.” One of the people who helped him to achieve those poetic heights was Michel Legrand, who composed for his texts the immortal “Le Cin?”, “Une Petite Fille”, “Les Don Juan” and “Le Jazz et le Java”.

He sent some to Edith Piaf’s paroli?, Marguerite Monnot, always veiled in clouds of opium fumes, and she produced his first two settings, “Mephisto” and “Le Sentier de la Guerre”, which for a while were taken up by Piaf. She also asked Nougaro to be her curtain-raiser at the Olympia, and Dalida followed suit. Nougaro was at last on his way in the chanson world of Paris, so fiercely competitive and cruelly envious of the success of others.”I, too, like the poets, wanted to sing my life, do self-portraits, express the universal. With the Liberation, he too was liberated and made straight for Paris, determined to be a poet and an actor. He was also attracted by new developments in the composition and performance of chansons under the influence of live American jazz.In France, famous writers and poets did not look down upon the chanson, a unique popular art form. .” His own first child, a girl, was named after his grandmother, and forms the subject of one of Nougaro’s most touching ballads, a real declaration of fatherly love, “C?le ma Fille”.He was bored by schools – always a good sign in a budding artist at odds with himself, and with society.

“A rose-red city, half as old as time”, the only line everyone knows of the 19th-century poet J.W. Burgon in a poem on Petra, also comes to mind – though Toulouse today is a thoroughly modern city, swarming with university students: the Canal du Midi runs just across the road from the station. He bought and restored an old house in the countryside at Paziols (the Occitane version Pasi?is also given on the sign at the entrance to the village). His father was a fine first baritone at the Paris Op?, and his mother a professional pianist at the Toulouse Conservatoire.In his last album, Embarquement imm?at (2000), he talks between numbers about his childhood in Toulouse: “My mother gave birth to me at home, helped by my grandmother C?le Nougaro, a professional midwife. Nougaro sang of that, too.Claude Nougaro was born in 1929 in the ancient quarter of Minimes, and throughout all his wandering professional life he never forgot it; towards the end, though living in a luxurious apartment facing Notre Dame in Paris, he returned to it.