Barney Wilen & Loustal

French-American saxophonist Barney Wilen passed away for the second time last week. He was 59 and was suffering from cancer. Nine years ago, in 1987, he also died once - of a combination of heroin and an overdose of unhappy love - but he had successfully rebelled against it.

At the time, French comics authors Loustal and Paringaux described in monthly episodes the tragic fate of a brilliant white bebop saxophonist named Barney Wilen, whose appearance and career resembled those of the real thing like two drops of water.

In real life and in the comic, he was born in 1937 to an American father and a French mother. He was not yet twenty when he made his debut as an alto saxophonist in Paris shortly after the Second World War, but his style stood out and he played with the greats of his time: Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Kenny Dorham, Miles Davis and Art Blakey. His music - a subtle mixture of precise and casual - can still be heard in famous film noirs such as Les liaisons dangereuses and Aseenseurpour l'échafaud (by Louis Malle).

After that, the comic strip Barney and the real parted ways. The cartoon character goes awry and dies. The real one, as he said, had fled the "monoculture of bebop", traveled to Africa. to listen to drums and the wind and made a few records that would later be called free jazz - far beyond the view of the average listener. Until the mid-eighties he devoted himself to producing other artists and organizing jazz concerts in the south of France.

There he accidentally read in A Suivre about his own death and protested. Loustal and Paringaux admitted that they should have checked that he had actually died, but also said that this was a good opportunity for a comeback. When the comic strip Barney et la Note Bleue - and the Dutch weakly translated as Besame Mucho - appeared in book form, a CD of the new Barney Wilen was simultaneously released, the first soundtrack to a comic strip about which Le Monde wrote that it was necessary for the popularity of jazz would have been more important than the movie 'Round Midnight, starring Dexter Gordon.

His first death did him no harm. He formed a new quintet that bore his name, his old records were re-released, and he toured the US, Canada and Japan. Jazz fundamentalists thought his reincarnation played "slick" - for example on a CD with French orchestra arranged by him. chansons (French ballads). Self added that "unless you're the Rolling Stones you can't keep playing everything the same way year after year." Loustal and Paringaux certainly saw his real end well: he did everything he could to play the tragic saxophone hero. He drank like a sponge and smoked like a heretic. Prior to an interview in 1987, he appeared in the door of his hotel room dressed in a hat and towel, while a bath overflowed in the background.