Jean-Jacques Goldman

Jean-Jacques Goldman emerged among France’s leading pop figures during the 1980s. After launching his career as lead singer of Tai Phong, he embarked on a solo path and delivered Non Homologué, the nation’s top-selling album of 1986. Born in Paris in 1951 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland and Germany, he studied both piano and violin throughout childhood. At seventeen he first encountered pop music, drawn in particular to Aretha Franklin. He pursued higher education in the early 1970s and also completed a stint in the French Air Force. In 1975 he responded to a notice placed by Vietnamese siblings Khanh May and Tai Sinh, joining their band Tai Phong—whose name translates as “high wind” in Vietnamese. The group issued multiple albums in the latter half of the 1970s, yet Goldman departed before the next decade began.

Following a prolonged period without commercial traction, he achieved his breakthrough in 1986 with the single “Je te Donne,” taken from Non Homologué. That album surpassed one million copies sold inside France. One year afterward he released the even stronger seller Entre Gris Clair et Gris Foncé. Strong sales persisted into the early 1990s, and he performed several concerts in North America after issuing Traces in 1994.