Jacques and Marcelle Morgantini

Jacques Morgantini (21 February 1924 – 2 December 2019) and Marcelle Morgantini (née Chailleux, 7 April 1925 – 23 September 2007) were French record producers and promoters of American blues music.

Biography

Jacques Morgantini was born in Montbéliard, eastern France in 1924. He became a jazz fan after hearing his father's records, and while studying chemistry in Toulouse organised a conference on jazz music addressed by Hugues Panassié, the influential critic who was the president of the Hot Club de France. Panassié invited Morgantini to become vice-president of the Hot Club, and in 1945 Morgantini set up the Hot Club de Pau. He started developing a network of contacts in the U.S., which provided a basis for him to invite American jazz and blues performers to perform in France. In 1951, with the support of the Hot Club of France, he invited Big Bill Broonzy to perform in the country.^[1][2]

He worked as a salesman for an electrical company, and met Marcelle Chailleux at a conference he organised in Pau to discuss blues music. Marcelle, born in Sarthe, had been a fan of classical music but was drawn by the emotional power of the blues. They married in 1963.^[3]

Through

Marcelle Morgantini's set of recordings was described by blues expert Stuart Constable as "a remarkable body of work, not only for the moment in blues history that it captures, but also because of the quality of the sound and the unique character of the performances. The blues was in transit at the time these recordings were made. In the work of Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Slim and Willie James Lyons, you can hear the seeds of blues-rock being sown. At the same time, there is much to bring joy to the hearts of Chicago traditionalists...".[4] Many of the MCM recordings were later released on CD by Storyville Records.^[4]

Jacques Morgantini supervised many of the releases on the Black & Blue label. He wrote articles on the music, and liner notes, and helped launch the RCA France "Black and White" blues series, many drawing on his own record collection. He produced the Jazz Forever and Blues Forever series of CDs in the 1980s, before creating a series of compilation CDs for the EPM label and for Frémeaux & Associés as well as the Riverboat series of albums of jump blues musicians.^[1]

Marcelle Morgantini died in Gan in 2007, aged 82.^[3] Jacques Morgantini continued to record blues musicians, organise concerts, work as a music critic, and present radio programmes of jazz and blues.^[1] He received a Keeping The Blues Alive Award in 2017 from the Blues Foundation in Memphis, Tennessee. He died in 2019, aged 95.^[6]

References