Phone call a few seconds away from flying to the Isle of Beauty. "Will you have a car there?" Because I thought of another program. »Finally, meet at the Olympic Club of Calvi (Haute-Corse). “This is where my father spent his first summer here, at 18. It's at the end of the bay, on the last beach. »Izïa Higelin speaks as she sings, with the sun in her voice.
The sun, we find it once the foot is set in Corsica. He does not leave us during the half-hour walk that takes us from the city center to the “CO”. The walk - pine forest, fine sand, turquoise water - cleanses our Parisian worries with great water: it is as light as a feather that we land in this holiday club created just after the war. Sensation out of time, postcard from the end of the world.
Before Izïa arrived, Hugo, club boss and grandson of the founder, told us about the Higelins' footprint in Calvi. “A family apart,” sums up this nice colossus, good friend of Izïa. They are not from here, but they are from here: they are Calvais at heart. The story has been going on for so long. A story, as beautiful as a saga, which waltzes through six decades, interweaves three generations and carries dozens of improbable anecdotes in which the music, the transmission and the family - by blood, but above all by heart, that which the we choose - take the leading roles.
"Live happy today, tomorrow it will be too late"
Izïa, who has arrived in the meantime with a stroller in which her two-year-old son with golden curls dozes, is responsible for recounting "once upon a time". “My father won a singing competition and the opportunity to spend a week here as a music host at the club. In fact, he had won a job, what! laughs the singer and actress. He is blond, tall, very thin, very young. He does animations, plays the guitar. And one day he sees a red light over there. "
With her finger, she points to the citadel of Calvi which, by the magic of the curves of the bay, stands right in front of us. Majestic. Radiant. The young Jacques Higelin follows the light as one follows a flute player and comes across the nightclub of Tao, a whimsical white Russian with a thousand and one lives, a former lieutenant of the Tsar who became a dancer on Broadway. "They got drunk on vodka, became friends, my father took to the piano, he played as you imagine". "A la Jacques", as will slip his friends that we will meet during the day. Later, much later, Jacques will become a legend with Tao. He will even make a sublime ballad of it with a chorus that sounds like a mantra: "Live happy today, tomorrow it will be too late".
Return to the Olympic Club. In the middle of the wooden cabins, the afternoon stretches like a cat. "I come here all the time," says Izïa, three Victoires de la musique and a Caesar on the clock at 29 years old. “I like the simple side with vacationers preparing the evening show. Hugo's wife mixes every Thursday, we dance on the beach like crazy with lots of children, it's authentic. The son, awake, swallows a popsicle while trying to catch a plane in the sky.
Izïa was pregnant with him when she started to compose "Citadelle", her last magnificent album, a powerful message of love to her father who died in 2018, just before the birth of the little one "When I had my son in my womb and my father disappeared, there was a kind of unexplained, shamanic transmission. He really left me with great strength. "
"Everything brings me back to my father when I'm here"
When she talks about Jacques Higelin, Izïa alternates past and present, bursts of laughter and nostalgic smiles. Mourning her father, she compares it to a whale. "Sometimes it's huge, it's huge, it takes up all the space in front of you," she confesses, her gaze plunged into the Mediterranean. Sometimes it goes to the bottom of the ocean, you can't see it anymore… and all of a sudden, it overwhelms you again. It's in waves. He is in me forever. He accompanies me, he carries me. "
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Even more here. “It all brings me back to him when I'm around. With the shovel, the memories return, like a session of slides without images. Her father who takes her in his arms in the citadel. The first Corsican Christmases with his godfather, Jean-Témir, son of the famous Tao. The white light in winter that floats around the mountains. The first fired, at barely 14 years old, in Acapulco, and the anthological paternal reprimand. And this story which, today, rewinds beautifully. “When I see my son playing in the citadel, I see myself small. This transmission is fantastic. "
For ten years, Izïa returns even more regularly to Calvi. “Today I really feel like I belong here. I have my roots there, ”she says nicely. As strange as it may seem, Jacques Higelin - honorary citizen of the city - has never owned any home there. Unlike friends and neighbors, the Bedos. "Every time he came home from dinner at Guy's, who lived there (she points to a house with a red roof on the horizon) , it was the same scene", laughs Izïa. Jacques who said: "But, damn, why don't I have a hut like that?" "And his wife who replies:" Because you didn't want to buy when it cost nothing ... "
The place where he stayed most often in Calvi will be our next stop. In the car that takes us to the citadel, Izïa recounts the memorable trips she took with her father, in Paris as in Calvi. “We were like Batman and Robin, we often went on an adventure. He had me at 50. His grandiloquent life was a little behind him, he was at peace. He had invaluable time for me. "
Chez Tao… "à la Jacques"
Here we are at the foot of a staircase. Not just any. The one who leads Chez Tao. The one who now bears the name of Jacques Higelin. “We will inaugurate it on October 18, the day he would have been 80 years old”, specifies Izïa, sister of musician Arthur H and director Kên Higelin, other children of the singer of “Champagne” and “Tombé du ciel”. Walk after walk, the observation is clear: the nightclub at the entrance of which the figure of Jacques Higelin rubs shoulders with that of Tao enjoys one of the most beautiful views in the world with these staggering 180 ° of shades of blue.
Up there, we find Tao-By and Jean-Témir, two of Tao's sons. It is with them that, twenty years after the history of the red light, Jacques Higelin has reconnected with Calvi and the citadel. With them he spent sleepless nights electrifying the crowd behind the piano. “Jacques played two, three, four hours, we could no longer spend in the room, people were seated on the floor, fascinated, and he who went into improvisations with this incredible gift, remembers Tao-By. Sometimes I had to slam the piano to stop it. "
"He had an energy of madness, it could last until 7 am, it was incredible beauty, and the next day, he said: I do not remember anything at all", smiles Jean-Témir. "A la Jacques, what". Over the nights, there was this concert on the Place de la Caserne with the piano to be transported at 4.30am, this improvised show with Diane Dufresne, these singers or dancers from all over the world with whom to play the beef… “So bad that the 'we did not record all that,' whisper the two brothers, one after the other.
Izïa drinks the words. "What a great life you had," she whispers, "nostalgic" for a time she didn't live. Later, she who “scratched grenadines at the counter” will also sing Chez Tao with her father. From 10-11 years old, little Izïa, soon to be grown up, took over the choirs or took over an old Richard Cocciante.
Upstairs, we discover Jean-Témir's apartments, the room in which Jacques Higelin slept, the kitchen where he wrote until the end of the night. "My godmother had to be discreet, at night, to go to the toilet: if he saw her, he would engage her in an endless discussion with a glass of red wine and cheese", reports Izïa. On the terrace, where the panorama strikes in full plexus, Jean-Témir, physique of elegant pirate returned from everything, summarizes a life of friendship with the singer. “We were all, happily, burned by Jacques. A passionate person with an open heart. We will have been brothers of life. "
A drink at the Café des Fleurs, a dinner at the Chalet
Leaving Chez Tao, the "stretta Sant'Antone", a charming street with ocher and pastel walls, leads to the barracks. “When I was little, it was my playground,” says Izïa. This is the place she had in mind when she wrote "Calvi": "It looks like you dance when you walk in the streets, I remember / Your two arms held that lift me, citadel, I remember . "
The sun is going down. We resume, a few minutes later, our spirits on the terrace of the Café des Fleurs, run by a tonic Tony. "In Calvi, you'll really have a drink or eat at someone's house, rather than in a simple establishment," Izïa appreciates. These are places run by souls and people that really exist. Here, you still have a lot of people who have sacred personalities! "
Dinner time. No hesitation on the choice of the table. It will be at the Chalet, a legendary restaurant on the port, simple and tasty, where Jacques Higelin came to satisfy a craving in the early morning after a night of fiesta. "He often ate the lasagna," smiles Mouss', the boss. Sometimes fans would stay until 6 o'clock to see him… and it was right on the day he didn't come! "
Legend has it that it was there, on the quay, that Zalim, another son of Tao, danced one night with Elizabeth Taylor. "It's the story of her life," smiles Izïa. At the table, the singer tells us behind the scenes of her first “real” concert here, at the Festival du vent, at the age of 14. And the origin of his first name, also born in Calvi. “My father had played Chez Tao with Georgian musicians who had told him about a princess from their country whose name meant solar . You could hardly find better.
Defend your "Citadel"
Night has fallen. Next to the table, Izïa's young son fell asleep in the stroller. A little earlier, we had asked him if he knew "babbo" songs, grandpa in Corsican. And the little boy exclaimed with a smile as sunny as his mother: “Champagne! "
To defend “Citadel”, one of the prettiest records of the last re-entry, Izïa had planned the “grand slam”: a tour of gargantuan festivals, his first Zenith, a detour through the Olympia. Patatras, the Covid-19 has put an end to its show after only about thirty dates. The recovery is - theoretically - scheduled for September. If the health crisis prevented him from being able to return to the stage, it would be heartbreaking. “This album, compared to what it says about my father, I really wanted to defend it on stage. In the meantime, she is already preparing her fifth album.
Izïa's summer top
1. “Eurovision song contest”, on Netflix. “In recent years, there were good and bad with Will Ferrel's films. There, it's really great. This parody of Eurovision features a duo of Icelandic musicians composed of Will Ferrel and Rachel McAdams, "at the top". "And the last song… it brings hair and tears to my eyes!" "
2. Brazilian music. “Maybe it's the scenery here that inspires me, but right now, apart from Brazilian music, I don't listen to much. She still sings a lot. In July, she recorded with Barbara Carlotti a cover of “La Ballade de chez Tao”, by her father, for the needs of an album of Corsican songs.
3. The Austrian Cross hike. A walk on the heights of Calvi that she walks frequently with Jean-Témir, her godfather. “The view up there over the bay is magnificent. "
