Biography
Les Frères Jacques emerged as a French vocal quartet in the years immediately following World War II and quickly established themselves among the country’s most cherished musical institutions, sustaining that position across nearly four decades. Their first release, a 78 rpm collection issued in 1947, launched an unbroken sequence of widely admired recordings that continued through successive decades and every major advance in audio formats and technology. The four original members stayed together without alteration from the group’s founding until the deaths of Francois Soubeyran in 2002 and Andre Bellec in 2008, after which only Georges Bellec and Paul Tourenne remained. A 1996 box set gathered previously unreleased material alongside the most celebrated selections from their extensive catalog, while a second retrospective, Farewell Recital, appeared in 1998 and preserved the quartet’s 1982 farewell performance.