juliette greco

 

 

 

Juliette Greco is our latest French singer obsession.  She lived (or lives - she's still alive) a life that you couldn't make up.  As a young teenager she fought in the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation.  After the war, she hung around Paris with Jean-Paul Sartre and the other existentialists, smoking and philosophizing at Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots, becoming a through and through Bohemian.  She acted in Jean Cocteau films, read poetry at Le Tabou, got married to a famous New Wave actor (Michel Piccoli), and she recorded records; amazing, soulful records first in a folk style, and then later, in the 60s in a more grand style, aligning herself (although not quite) with the French Yeh-Yeh signers we love so much - Sylvie Vartan, Francoise Hardy, Chantal Goya.  Her whole life seems like a mini-history of France from WWII.  That one person could have participated in all the sacred parts of French life is almost unbelievable, but here she is.