Collection Universal

"It's not easy to summarize in a few words how these recordings of George Delerue‚s work came about. I see them first of all as a way of revisiting my own youth. All of us have I think been touched by Delerue's music at different times of our life. For me, when I was very young, it was Jacquou le croquant, L'homme qui revient de loin or Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine, in adolescence it was the King of Hearts, and later, as an adult, Police Python or L'Important, c'est d'aimer. Wanting to have these scores in a recording first came from the simple frustration of not being able to hear them without watching the film. But I also wanted to share my enthusiasm and have others hear this music. I have a marvelous memory of a long afternoon talking with Delerue at the Cannes Festival in 1990. I was twenty, and at that time television had acquainted a large audience with the films he had scored and created a demand for recordings impossible to satisfy. Old vinyl recordings were difficult to find or were simply non-existent. I bombarded Delerue with questions that afternoon : "Why don't you record an anthology of music you wrote for De Broca's films ? And how about a complete recording of the Deux anglaises ? Do you have the masters for Les rois maudits ? He smiled. "Yes," he said, "there's a lot to record, but I'm very busy." Like a lot of artists, Delerue preferred dreaming about tomorrow, not yesterday. He was more interested in composing than organizing his catalogue of past successes. His sudden death in 1992 made it all the more necessary to take matters in hand and get his film scores recorded, with three goals in mind: recover it, restore it, and distribute it.

We undertook this task together with Colette Delerue. The first result was a double CD album, Trente ans de musiques de films (EMI-Odéon), and then another album in the series Ecoutez le cinéma! (Universal Jazz, France). The preparation of each album was a roller-coaster ride over a mountain of details, with good and bad surprises. The hard work began with master recordings themselves. We spent hours in studios especially equiped for rough assembly, stocking, and organizing this material. To paraphrase Robert Mitchum, talking about his work with David McLean, it was like constructing the Taj Mahal out of tooth-picks. We came up against everything imaginable : masters that were warped, incomplete, bent, crumpled, mildewed, tapes that clogged magnetic heads of our machines ( for that the only solution was four hours in a tape heater), and worst of all, missing tapes. Although Delerue generally saved things, he did not always keep a quarter-inch tape of all his recordings. In that case, we were obliged to take the long, hard path of tracking down and getting a recording from a film's producer, or a music production company, or sometimes even a film's director. Jacques Deray, for example, to our pleasant surprise, had carefully saved a complete master for Rififi at Tokyo. In the darkness of the recording studio, besides the music, the tapes delivered up little interruptions, fascinating little pieces of life - Delerue talking between takes with a sound engineer, explaining a musical passage to the musicians, struggling with the producer for another fifteen minutes of rehearsal time. These little moments of an artist overheard in the act of creating explain as much as many a learned critical commentary.

I could go on about other important stages in preparing these albums (the legal details, illustrations, etc.) but it was above all meeting with the directors with whom Delerue worked that has had the most effect on me. How could one forget the conversations about him with Colpi, Verneuil, Schoendoerffer, Blier, Bellon, Oury, Pinoteau, Corneau or the long hunt to find Alain Cavalier and to coach his memories from him. How could one forget Philippe de Broca unable to hold back his tears in listening again to the waltz from Diable par la Queue and his simple words : "It is so beautiful. I'd like to have it played at my funeral !" His wish was honored. All the testimony of the directors fill out the rich kaleidoscopic picture we have of Georges Delerue. They agree on some points, disagree on others.

As his music appears the mosaic forms, refining itself and reflecting different aspects, from neo-baroque to working-class waltzes to Ellingtonian jazz to twelve-tonality. He was an artist with his share of transparency and obscurity, certainties and contradictions. With see all of these in the accumulation of infinite, decisive details taking shape from one album to another. But our task has really just begun. Delerue's work is so vast and combines so many expressions, musical languages and faces that most of it still needs to be gathered together. Actually we are thinking about a boxed set of four CDs. I wish to thank you, Georges Delerue, in advance for all the exciting moments that this project still holds in store. Getting your music back to the public is one more way to struggle against time and its eroding of memory. It is also a passionate way for us to continue to talk about you."

Stéphane Lerouge