In 1947, a small Parisian radio station, Paris-Inter, broadcast programs designed by the Essay Club. It was a veritable laboratory for radio art with programs on African literature, poetry, tourist and social documentaries. At the inside, André Francis offered a montage of works with the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire modulated by rare music by Duke Ellington. After that, André Francis produced jazz shows there with Charles Delaunay (co-founder of the Jazz-Hot review with Hugues Panassié) and presented "Jazz Varietes" on Sunday morning with him. In April of the same year, in the large studio of the Club d'Essai building on rue de l'Université, he organized his first jazz concert (Coleman Hawkins and Erroll Garner).

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He has recorded and presented so many concerts, more than 10,000, that his voice and his silhouette are not unknown to the spectators of many festivals, and not least, the Festival of Antibes-Juan-les-Pins, the Grande Parade from Nice Jazz, Django Reinhardt Festival from Samois, Jazz In Marciac… His voice is also engraved on some discs, it presents musicians so well that it is impossible to doubt the importance of the moment (those of Miles Davis or John Coltrane to name a few). His friend, pianist Martial Solal dedicated a composition to him, Sans Francisco sans Francis.

 

When in 1997 he retired after 50 years of radio, an evening was dedicated to him at Radio France with more than 5 hours of live concert on France Musique and in the same year, as part of the "Django d'or" , he received the Django Reinhardt Prize for his entire career.

 

With retirement, this bulimic of work elaborates with his friend Jean Schwarz, of the boxes of jazz which he produces for the label Chant of the World, in particular in 2011 "A history of the jazz" in four boxes of 25 CD, which retraces the first half century of jazz epic.

 

By chance, he got on the radio at 22 but he was not a dilettante. His passion for jazz was his work force. Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, he defended throughout his career, those in whom he discerned talent, phrasing, creativity ... His benevolent gaze, full of mischief and humor n has never stopped photographing them on stage, then drawing, painting and exhibiting them in jazz clubs and festivals, in France and abroad and in galleries.

 

Francis Marmande, in his article in Le Monde of February 19, 2019, wrote: “He wouldn't have had the nerve to proclaim himself“ demanding journalist ”: he was. He seemed to serve a cause, to work with a passion, and a modest historian's job: in popularization in the enviable sense of the term, as in the controversy which he did not deprive himself of ... "