Jo Basile was an influential French accordionist, composer, and later publisher and arranger during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. During his lifetime he sold millions of records and was a household name in Europe, and to a lesser degree in the eastern half of the United States.
Basile was born
Giuseppe Ottaviano Baselli in Somain, in northern France. His parents ran their own café that catered to the wave of Italian immigrants who entered the Somain, Nord region of France after WWI. They were music enthusiasts who passed on their passion to sons
Giuseppe (nicknamed Joss) and Enrico. Both began playing the accordion when they were children. Their first gigs were playing for patrons in the café, but during their teens they graduated to playing weddings and other local celebrations.
After the Second World War,
Baselli met accordion virtuoso
Gus Viseur by chance. The latter had created the influential and now standard bal-musette style (he also influenced harmonicist
Toots Thielemans).
Viseur was impressed by
Baselli's playing, and encouraged him to pursue music as a career. The two became inseparable.
Baselli moved to Paris in 1950, and landed the gig that would alter his life's course: he was introduced to the French chanteuse
Patachou, who was making her mark on the bal-musette scene, and first became her accompanist, and later her musical director and soloist. As her star rose, so did his.
Baselli married
Viseur's daughter around the same time that
Patachou opened a café in Montmarte; it became the hive of bal-musette activity in Paris.
During
Patachou's widely celebrated American tour in 1958 (in which she was acclaimed as
Edith Piaf's chanson successor),
Baselli's playing was noticed by and captivated Sid Frey, owner of the Audio Fidelity label. Renaming him
Jo Basile, he initially capitalized on
Patachou's popularity and recorded
Basile playing French café songs and instrumental versions of some of her hits. It was the first in a long series of LPs (at least a dozen albums' worth) that all looked remarkably similar and fit right in with many space age pop/exotica records of the era: the album covers invariably portrayed
Basile playing his instrument -- the material usually a certain country's best-loved songs and pop hits -- on a motor scooter with an attractive young woman on the back.
Basile's brilliant technique, while readily on display, was unfortunately overshadowed by the simplicity of the material. However, 1964 proved to be a watershed year.
Basile teamed with the great Brazilian trio
Bossa Tres for the classic Swingin' Latin, and later
Foreign Film Festival Cannes, showcasing the accordionist playing music by composers
Nino Rota and
Luis Bonfa in the company of American jazzmen
Dick Hyman,
Milt Hinton,
Tony Mottola (as "Mr. Big"), Bobby Rosengarden, Phil Kraus, and
Al Caiola.
In 1965,
Basile left
Patachou's band and became the musical director of French pop icon
Barbara. This was fortuitous, as the singer had her own television program and
Basile was a featured soloist as well as accompanist. The gig provided his introduction to French television. He not only wrote and arranged songs for
Barbara's show, but for other programs as well, his tunes eventually numbering in the hundreds. Two years later he left the show and reunited with
Patachou for an American tour, but the stress of touring and performing got him thinking about other ways of making a living with music. With his many compositions for the
Barbara show as a guide and a prime résumé, he began composing and arranging for French television and film in earnest. But
Basile also wrote dozens of pop songs. One of his best known is "Free Again," which was recorded by
Barbra Streisand as the opening cut on 1966's
My Name Is Barbra. During the last decade of his life,
Basile started his own publishing company, Opaline, and hosted his own TV show called Le Monde de l'Accordeon, which featured the talents of gifted masters of the instrument; he also wrote and arranged for dozens of singers in French, English, and Italian and did session work.
Basile remained active until he was felled by a sudden heart attack in 1982. ~ Thom Jurek