Johnny Raducanu

In the quiet, hilly suburb of Meudon, Johnny Raducanu is recording. The elegant sound studio has a large recording room, two Steinways, and passing sound-proof double glass doors you enter a vast salon-style cum American kitchen leading to a lush bamboo hedge surrounded terrace garden.

A couple of years ago Pierre-Denis and Sorin* decided to produce a record with Johnny Raducanu whose work was no longer available in stores. Sorin went to Bucharest looking for Johnny who'd survived an open-heart surgery.

They took my heart out and washed it in a pisspot, Johnny cries, laughing like a brat.

At 75, Johnny Raducanu "Mister Jazz of Romania", as Duke Ellington called him - is en pleine forme. He is all heart, health, happy to be alive. He unbuttons his short-sleeved Romanian 100% cotton shirt to reveal his 2 inch wide scar down his chest.

You smoke? he asks Solomon.

Don't smoke, never smoke, he warns Solomon. No! no! You won't miss anything, instead go for the girls. But be careful, too. Don't exaggerate! he repeats. Don't overdo it.

He chats non-stop like a man in his prime.

He came to Paris after the war in 1949 when people danced to jazz and many American jazzmen lived here. Jazz wasn't taken seriously. It was fun. It was "dans l'air de Paris".

We talk of musicians. Dexter Gordon (gone), Miles Davis (trash), Chet Baker (abnormal), Steve Lacy, Bill Evans, Duke Ellington, Bud Powell, Michel Petrucciani, Keith Jarrett (who had a rich father who didn't approve of his son playing the piano) - you get dizzy sipping Evian from wine glasses. He drinks Candia milk.

Johnny Raducanu is from a family of gypsy musicians whose musical tradition goes back for a number of generations. He makes a distinction between "gypsies" and "gypsies", they are as different as people from different regions of France.

He started playing the piano at 8, in a Bucharest cinema where his mother was playing the musical sound track for silent films. He played the accordion during the war, and then the double bass of his father. His parents transmitted all their knowledge to him, and although he did visit the Conservatory in the 50s, his music is in his blood.

Jazz is a great family. The first jazz-man is Bach, he suggests, because music is not what you play, it's how you play, your honesty, your integrity, improvisation, fantasy, finesse, beauty - beauté; we switch from French to Romanian, English and sometimes a strange language that swings, called jazz.

His knowledge - or rather wisdom - is encyclopedic. Once he was asked why he knew so much? Because my father was no idiot, my mother was no idiot, my grandparents and great-great grandparents weren't idiots, he cries.

Money has never been important to him. He lives in a small studio with his piano and his cat and his neighbors complain when he practices, and he complains when his cat jumps on the keyboard at night and starts pawing endlessly the "f-key".

But when the neighbors knew he was coming to Paris to record, they stopped complaining.

Now Johnny Raducanu just wants to study the piano - now I can study the piano like a cosmonaut, he says, metaphorically speaking.

The technique is there, the gift of music, and although he's very careful, the beauty is there, too.

After the first recording that afternoon, a fantasia of the glades, where jazz mixes Czerny and Romanian folklore with jazz mastery, he exclaims satisfied, "quelle finesse!"

We get a glimpse of the upcoming CD to be released later this year - a collection of musical inspirations, compositions, fantasias, spanning his life-time that have been polished through age and might rightfully be called his "song to life".

Einar Moos