Via YouTube
Academy Award-winning composer Michel Legrand has taken his final bow at 86-years-old.
Legrand was a prolific film composer and jazz pianist. He won three Oscars for his film scores, including a Best Song Oscar for the iconic The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) theme The Windmills Of Your Mind. That song and I have a little history. I orchestrated and arranged it for string quartet for a class in 1970, and it one of the few I was to sing and play on guitar. In the original film, the song is sung by Noel Harrison. It was performed on the Academy Awards broadcast in April (!) 1969. It has been covered a hundred times, but, for me, the best version his by Dusty Springfield on Dusty In Memphis (1969). Sting sings in on the soundtrack for 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
With Sting recording for “The Thomas Crown Affair” via YouTube
I recall I performed it in a medley of songs in 1989 with a pianist. The medley also included my favorite Legrand songs: The Summer Knows (theme from Summer of 42′), What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?, Summer Me, Winter Me, and How Do You Keep the Music Playing?.
He changed the meaning of music in films. Legrand composed lush, gorgeous scores for 200 films over 50 years, including The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg (1964), The Young Girls Of Rochefort (1967), Summer Of ’42 (1971). He famously wrote the score for Yentl (1983) starring Barbra Streisand. Legrand’s final score, for the film The Other Side Of The Wind, an experimental film directed, co-written, co-produced and co-edited by Orson Welles, released last year after more than 40 years in development. Legrand’s instrumental version of his theme for the television weeper Brian’s Song was in the Top Ten on the Billboard Pop Chart for eight weeks in 1972.
He began his career as a jazz musician in the 1950s. He conducted orchestras in concert and recorded over a hundred albums. Legrand Jazz, his 1959 album, features Miles Davis and John Coltrane,
Legrand won five Grammy Awards with 17 nominations, including a win for his 1975 jazz album Images (1975). He was also nominated for an Emmy and Tony Award.
Legrand practiced piano for an hour a day up until shortly before his death.
He worked with many lyricists yet he is especially noted for his work with Marilyn and Alan Bergman, who penned the lyrics for Windmills Of Your Mind and the songs from Yentl.
With Streisand and the Bergmans recording songs for “Yentl”, Sky News via YouTube
He worked with some of the music world’s biggest stars such as Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Ray Charles, Neil Diamond, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, James Ingram, Jack Jones, Kiri te Kanawa, Frankie Laine, Johnny Mathis, Jessye Norman, Diana Ross, Sarah Vaughan, and Shirley Bassey.
He collaborated on films with directors as different as Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy, Richard Brooks, Claude Lelouch, Clint Eastwood, Streisand, Robert Altman, Louis Malle and Joseph Losey.
Born into a family of musicians in Paris in 1932, Legrand entered the Paris Conservatory of music when he was 10-years-old, in a 2013 interview, he said the Conservatory was like “crossing the threshold into a magical world where the only question was music”.
