He has composed over 200 film and television scores, several musicals, and made well over a hundred albums. He has won three Oscars (out of 13 nominations), five Grammys, and an Emmy nomination. He was 22 when his very first album, I Love Paris, became one of the best-selling instrumental albums ever released. He is a virtuoso jazz and classical pianist, and an accomplished arranger and conductor who guests with orchestras all over the world.

He has worked with Maurice Chevalier, Miles Davis, Edith Piaf, Barbra Streisand, to name just a few. His songs have been recorded by Frank Sinatra, Cleo Laine, Nina Simone, Henry Mancini, Tony Bennett, and Rosemary Clooney, among many others.

In his free time, he pilots his own small plane, rides his horse, or cruises in his boat, and spends time with his wife, children, and several grandchildren.

In Michel's own words....

Michel was born in Paris on February 24th, 1932.

The only thing I wanted to do in life was music. When I was young, I was home alone all day because my poor mother had to work. Fortunately, there was an old piano, and this piano was my only friend. I'd play all day long, out of boredom. I'd listen to a melody on the radio and try to find it, try to find the chords. Because music came very quickly to me, I felt it was my world.

      So my childhood was very sad and solitary. But fortunately, when I was ten years old, I was able to enter the Paris Conservatory of Music. That was my home, my planet, my language, for eleven years.

  Strangely enough, at that time, they had no class for orchestration. I was very interested in it, so I enlisted in every class of every instrument - trumpet, trombone, violin, cello, harp - and I audited the classes when I had time.

      During the war, jazz was forbidden by the Germans, so we had only heard old-fashioned jazz. But in 1947, I remember very well, a friend of mine said, "I have a ticket for a concert tonight by Dizzy Gillespie." We had never heard of him. He did two concerts back-to-back at the Salle Pleyel, and I stayed for both of them. So my jazz life started that night, and that's when I started to buy records by Miles Davis, Stan Kenton, Count Basie, and all these people. It was an extraordinary time for me.

      When I finished my classes I had to make a living. I accompanied some classical soloists, but I wasn't known, so it was impossible to get classical work. I was approached by singers -- people like Henri Salvador, Catherine Sauvage, Jacqueline FranÁois -- and I started to work for them. Then for two years, I was Maurice Chevalier's musical director. He brought me to New York for the first time in 1956.

      I had done an album called I Love Paris, which was French melodies that I arranged and orchestrated. Strangely enough, that record was a big, big hit in America, but I didn't get any royalties because it was my first recording - I just got a fee.

      In 1959, a new wave of film directors arrived in Paris who wanted to change everything about the film world. I worked with them for ten extraordinary years -- Jacques Demy, Agnus Varda, Jean-Luc Godard -- we made films that were really art. It was beautiful.

      Jacques Demy and I did The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1963. It was the first film musical that was entirely sung -- no one had ever done that before. Looking for the money to make it was another big adventure -- it took a year. We were playing it almost every day for every possible producer in Paris, and the only way to do that was to sing the score. So I sang all the roles, the soprano, the bass, the tenors, and Jacques would turn the pages for me.

      I don't write at the piano. I write in silence at the table. With an instrument you only have ten fingers, but in your imagination you have infinity. I hear the music in the silence.

      What interests me in music is originality. I never approach a score in a safe way -- I always try to find an oblique way to bring something different, and to put myself in danger. You should always put yourself in danger, because as soon as you know yourself too well, your demands on yourself are lower. And when you don't ask yourself to be at the peak of your possibilities, it's not interesting -- or not interesting enough. So when you're in danger and you do something for the first time, you're scared -- and if you survive that, you are a hero to yourself.
Yes, I'm an adventurer. I'm an airplane pilot, I do things like that. And when I write a score, the music that I propose is dangerously different.

      I don't believe in the past. When something is behind me, I want to forget. I never listen to my own music, never, never. When I finish an album, I listen to it once to make sure the technical quality is okay, and then I don't even have it at home. For many reasons. For one, I don't want to have any regret -- you know, "Why did I do that, I wish I had done this" -- because you change from year to year. Nor do I want to be tempted to imitate myself: "Oh! I did that ten years ago, that's a great idea! Let's do it again!"

      So -- I have no past. Every morning I'm someone else. That's my dream: to be fresh and new, different, hopefully better.

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