Biography

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, Rovi