1925–1956: Early life and career Mauriat was born in 1925 in
Marseille,
Bouches-du-Rhône,
France where he spent his childhood years. His father was a postal inspector who loved to play classical piano and violin. In 1935, at the age of 10, he enrolled in the Conservatoire in Marseille to study classical music, but by the time he was 17, he had fallen in love with jazz and popular music. He arranged 135 songs by Aznavour, including "
La Bohème", "
La mamma", and "
Tu t'laisses aller", and worked with Aznavour until he concentrated on his own touring and recording career in the 1960s. In 1992, the song was featured prominently in the film
Sister Act starring
Whoopi Goldberg. More recently,
Eminem sampled it in his song "Guilty Conscience". Mauriat started recording under his own name with
Philips Records in 1965 as the label was interested in someone who could compete with Franck Pourcel, who was the dominant figure at that time. Mauriat's collaboration with long-time arranger
Gérard Gambus resulted in the 1978
disco/funk album
Overseas Call, which was later rediscovered by rare disco collectors in the 2000s. The album was recorded at the
Power Station studio in New York and engineered and remixed by disco producer
Bob Clearmountain. One of the tracks, "The Joy of You," was included in DJ
Dimitri from Paris's influential 2007 compilation
Cocktail Disco. Dimitri described the
Cocktail Disco sub-genre as having "that ubiquitous 4/4 beat and flying open high hat, complemented by rich orchestrations, campy over the top vocals, and an often tropical Latin vibe. Something that wouldn't feel out of place in a Broadway musical." In the early to mid-1980s, Paul Mauriat appeared in several Japanese coffee and wine television commercials, which featured music from his orchestra. He had sold over 15 million albums in Japan and performed over 1,000 shows in 25 Japanese tours by 1996. For several decades, some of Mauriat's compositions served as musical tracks for
Soviet television programmes and short movies, such as the 1977 animated
Polygon, "In the world of animals" (V mire zhivotnykh) and "Kinopanorama", among others.
1998–2006: Retirement and death Paul Mauriat retired from performing in 1998. He gave his final performance in the Sayonara Concert, recorded live in
Osaka, Japan, but his orchestra continued to tour around the world before his death in 2006. Mauriat's former lead pianist,
Gilles Gambus, became the orchestra's conductor in 2000 and led successful tours of Japan, China, and Russia. Gambus had worked with Mauriat for more than 25 years. In 2005 a classical French Horn instrumentalist named
Jean-Jacques Justafré conducted the orchestra during a tour of Japan and Korea. On 3 November 2006, Paul Mauriat died in
Perpignan,
Pyrénées-Orientales, France, at the age of 81. == Recordings ==