Jacques Morali

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Jacques Morali was a French producer and songwriter of disco and dance music. He was born in 1947 in Casablanca, in a Jewish Moroccan family. In the late 1960s he wrote music in Paris for orchestras and for the Crazy Horse, and also released a single of his own. In the early 1970s he met the producer Henri Belolo. Because his success in France was disappointing, he tried his luck in America.

Music and breakthrough

In 1975 Morali wanted to turn Brazil, a song from a film with Carmen Miranda, into a grand club track with powerful female singers. Belolo paid for his stay at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, and so the Ritchie Family came into being. After that came The Best Disco in Town (1976), among others. In New York Morali visited a costume party at a gay disco in Greenwich Village. There he got the idea for a group of singers and dancers who each played a different gay fantasy figure. This is how Village People came about, with San Francisco (You've Got Me) (1977), Macho Man and YMCA (1978), In the Navy (1979) and Go West (1980).

Influence

Morali's music had simple arrangements, simple lyrics and melodies you remember at once, with a healthy dose of camp. Between 1974 and 1982 he recorded more than 65 albums and wrote for artists such as Cher, Dalida and Patrick Juvet. He showed how a producer could devise a group from beginning to end. Morali contracted HIV in the mid-1980s and died in 1991 in Paris of the consequences of AIDS.

Listening

In School of Rock

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