“Without music, I would probably be even crazier than I am now,” said Jean-Jacques Champet in 2017, after releasing his book Musics, in which he shares with the public his great passion for musicians and music, which has shaped his.

The great French cartoonist passed away quietly, a few days ago, at the age of 89, and the echo he left behind is not the only thing that resounds over the rooftops of Paris and from the crowd of comments in which “Little Nicholas”. These are also divine notes on the Duke Ellington piano. In this book, in conversation with his biographer Marc Lacarpentier, he recounts his fantastic dinners with The Duke, Ravel, Satie and Debussy, and confesses how jazz saved his life.

From a young age, he wanted to be a pianist and struggled all his life to learn how to play the piano. A life in which he never found out who his real father was, was abused by his alcoholic stepfather, was expelled from school as a teenager, and worked as a toothpaste salesman and wine distributor. After lying about his age, he joined the army at 17 because “it was the only place they gave me a job and a bunk.” But he was expelled from there because he constantly painted.

He found his way to Paris, in the artistic district of Saint-Germain, and his compatriot André François, one of the great caricaturists of the last century, was his hero. But it was precisely in urban life that he became a gentle poet and brilliant commentator. The language and themes of cartoonist Saul Steinberg shine through in his work: often without a caption, his image can and does convey a powerful message, talking about difficult things with humor. Complexity expressed with ease is something all-encompassing in his sketches, something that also characterizes his favorite jazz music. He is credited with saying that “jazz is to music what cartoons are to art”, and this is vividly reflected in one of his images, where a warm yellow is visible under part of the frame in a gray, foggy and rainy New York City skyline. the light comes from the jazz club on the ground floor. Zooming in, we see a double bassist, trumpeter, and pianist playing to a crowded, excited audience.

It is the same urban poetry that he captured in the over 100 covers he made for the New Yorker, and which touched him during his early years in the center of Paris, where he met René Gossini, author of Asterix. Together they created “Little Nikolai” and his company, where the world was seen through the eyes of their children. The urban scenes set against the backdrop of their school adventures turn the French capital into the protagonist and surprisingly close to our urban and school environments, as if “Little Nikolai’s vacation” is not taking place in France, but in the heart of the neurotic family Greek summer of the 70s and 80s.

In fact, leafing through a rare 1973 edition called Face a Face, we see his gentle, melancholy, sweetly sarcastic approach to the neuroses of modern society. The shots he usually takes are general, wide-angle. We must focus on dark, dystopian metropolitan landscapes to find its little people falling in love with no tomorrow, stumbling over its little anxieties and hopes, creating a fleeting magic inside the city’s monster. In one of the volume’s most powerful images, we see a great battle about to begin. On the left, a formidable army of men rushes to the front, and on the right, an equally formidable army of women. Both armies hold a huge banner on which the same word is written: “Love”.