Jean-Jacques Goldman

He also wrote successful albums and songs for many artists, including D'eux for Céline Dion, which is the most successful French language record to date. He was also part of the Les Enfoirés charity collective from 1986 to 2016, and got his most notable official recognition in the English-speaking world for winning a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1997, as a co-author of three tracks on Céline Dion's Falling into You. Despite a voluntary retirement from the music scene in the early 2000s, he remains highly appreciated and influential in France.

Born in Paris to an immigrant Polish Jewish father, Alter Mojze Goldman (born in Lublin) and a German Jewish mother, Ruth Ambrunn (born in Munich), Jean-Jacques Goldman was the third of four children. As a child, he began his music studies on the violin, then the piano. In 1968, he abandoned his classical music studies for "American Rock & Roll" as well as folk music, listening to The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix or Aretha Franklin, and emphasizing the guitar. He also earned a business degree from the École des hautes études commerciales du Nord, commonly known as EDHEC, in Lille. In 1972, he met Catherine, his first wife, with whom he had three children. He first entered the French music scene as a member of a progressive rock group named Taï Phong ("great wind", "typhoon" in Vietnamese), which released its first album in 1975. Their first song to be a moderate hit was "Sister Jane". After three albums in English (on which he sang and played guitar as well as violin), Goldman was determined to write and sing in French, which led him to leave the band. ...

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