Top Seller

French record fans were quivering last week to the cacophonous cadences of a Gallicized rock-'n'-roll number named Dis-Moi Qu'Tu M'Aimes Rock (Tell Me That You Love Me Rock). Ostensibly written by a U.S. rock 'n' roller named Mig Bike, the song is actually the latest and loudest product of a reedy, bespectacled 24-year-old named Michel Legrand. Although the people who buy his records have only recently become aware that he exists, Composer-Conductor Legrand has in the last three years become one of the most successful popular musicians in France and a top seller on both the U.S. and French record markets.

He has done so without the benefit of personal notoriety. The son of a vaudeville conductor, Legrand was packed off to the Paris Conservatory at ten. There he studied to become a serious composer, took to accompanying and arranging for popular singers to help pay his way. As the demand for his arranging talents grew, he formed his own combo (tuba, banjo, drums and piano), which he expands to a full orchestra as the need arises. He scored his first big recording success in 1954, when Columbia commissioned him to arrange and do an orchestral recording of an album of schmalzy favorites to be issued under the title I Love Paris.

The result was a low-key blend of strings and muted brasses which sounded as smooth as cream and went down with the public just as easily. The album is still Columbia's popular bestseller outside the jazz field. (It is behind Dave Brubeck but ahead of the albums of such old standbys as Frank Sinatra, Paul Weston and Les Elgart.) Legrand followed it up with a series of mood collections on European capitals (Holiday in Rome, Castles in Spain, Vienna Holiday) which, with his first album, have sold upwards of 400,000 albums.

While he was becoming France's best-selling composer and conductor, Legrand remained virtually unknown to the buying public, partially because he was not clearly identified with any single popular school. Maurice Chevalier changed that, when he hired Legrand to conduct the orchestra on one of his series of U.S. TV Spectaculars last spring. Legrand's loose-jointed, flop-haired conducting style intrigued TV audiences, and when he returned to Paris, he was greeted by a crowd (and a batch of publicity handouts depicting him as a man who had taken the U.S. by storm). Since then, Legrand has worked an around-the-clock schedule.

He will compose and conduct two pieces for Stuttgart's festival of popular music, has agreed to compose and arrange the music for Roland Petit's fall variety show and to co-star with Chevalier in a 13-week stand at the Theatre Alhambra. But he still casts a wistful look back at the classical career he planned for himself. "It's difficult to be a composer of serious music," he says. "You have to be convinced that you're terrific, or you're nothing. It's not the same as popular music."

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