Les fontaines du jazz [English translation]

All the local girls

Were learning to count

On the keys of a second-hand piano

Those who were counting on earning

A few cents of freedom

Were doomed before they'd begun

In the underworld bars

The beautiful black singers

Whipped up for two or three deadbeats

The red ebony haze

That flowed in their veins

And that came from the fountains of jazz

Ask Billy,

Chet or Louis

How it feels when life crushes you

You play and clear off

And you twig on the way

Love, it’s not there that you find it

It’s waiting somewhere

In leopard skin pants

Nearly naked under the gaslights

It’s in the arms of a whore

Not even made up

That fountains of jazz were born

Much higher than the music

Lower than the last B flat

It makes magnificent losers

From the winners cut down in full flight

Geniuses that no one explains

Asleep on the bare floor

The vices have taken all their money

And the cops all that was left of the alcohol

When I want some real life

Some beautiful melancholy

I don’t think about turquoise lagoons

I talk to Wes, to Oscar

To Ella in her scarves

And I go to drink at the fountains of jazz

• Artist:Francis Cabrel
• Album:In Extremis