It’s hard to summarize all that 92-year-old Jacques Morgantini has accomplished in this short biography. The first thing you understand when talking to Jacques Morgantini is that the “Bill” he’s talking about sitting with in 1951 is Big Bill Broonzy! He first introduced blues music to France and all of Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1945 he founded the Hot Club de Pau, through which he organized blues concerts throughout the region. In the ’70s he came with his late wife, Marcelle, to the U.S. with a passion for photographing, filming, and recording black blues musicians in Chicago and delivering this content to Europeans. The recordings he produced in the late ’40s and through the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s range from Big Bill and Sister Rosetta Tharpe to T-Bone Walker, Magic Slim, Memphis Slim, Luther “Snake” Johnson, and many other iconic blues masters. He chaired the Hot Club of France for 22 years and started influential record labels like MCM and Black&Blue. He arranged the European tours for the Chicago Blues Festival. His biographical DVD, Mémoire de Blues de Jacques Morgantini, is a four-hour, two-DVD set which features archival performances and interviews with 30 featured musicians like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Luther Allison, Koko Taylor, Homesick James, Jimmy Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, and many others, Though the dialogue is in French, the performance segments showcase the raw energy of a band of blues musicians in the energetic prime of their lives. In 2017 Jacques was presented with the first French Blues Laureate Award, a fitting honor for a man who continues to share his blues knowledge wherever he travels.
