Jean-Jacques Goldman
Jean-Jacques Goldman (; born 11 October 1951) is a French singer-songwriter and music record producer. He is hugely popular in the French-speaking world. Since the death of Johnny Hallyday in 2017 he has been the highest grossing living French pop rock act. Born in Paris and active in the music scene since 1975, he had a highly successful solo career in the 1980s, and was part of the trio Fredericks Goldman Jones, releasing another string of hits in the 1990s. He also wrote successful albums and songs for many artists, including D'eux for Céline Dion, which is the most successful French language record to date. He was also part of the Les Enfoirés charity collective from 1986 to 2016, and got his most notable official recognition in the English-speaking world for winning a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1997, as a co-author of three tracks on Céline Dion's Falling into You. Despite a voluntary retirement from the music scene in the early 2000s, he remains highly appreciated and influential in France. Biography Born in Paris to an immigrant Polish Jewish father, Alter Mojze Goldman (born in Lublin) and a German Jewish mother, Ruth Ambrunn (born in Munich), Jean-Jacques Goldman was the third of four children. As a child, he began his music studies on the violin, then the piano. In 1968, he abandoned his classical music studies for "American Rock & Roll" as well as folk music, listening to The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix or Aretha Franklin, and emphasizing the guitar. He also earned a business degree from the École des hautes études commerciales du Nord, commonly known as EDHEC, in Lille. In 1972, he met Catherine, his first wife, with whom he had three children. He first entered the French music scene as a member of a progressive rock group named Taï Phong ("great wind", "typhoon" in Vietnamese), which released its first album in 1975. Their first song to be a moderate hit was "Sister Jane". After three albums in English (on which he sang and played guitar as well as violin), Goldman was determined to write and sing in French, which led him to leave the band. Marc Lumbroso saw his potential and managed to sign him a five-album contract with Epic Records. That same year he released his first album, which he wanted to call Démodé ("old-fashioned", "out of trend"), but the label refused so it was left untitled (although "Démodé" is now its unofficial title). "Il suffira d'un signe" was his first significant success. In 1982, he released a second album with no title – this time the intended title was Minoritaire, which was also refused as it was deemed un-commercial (and has likewise become its unofficial title). It featured several hits: "Quand la musique est bonne", "Comme toi" (inspired by a picture of a young Jewish girl who died in a concentration camp although the heartfelt lyrics never explicitly mention this specific historical context), "Au bout de mes rêves", and was his breakthrough