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From the beginning, his pursuits veered removed from the skilled middle-class very best. In his teenagers he learn Rimbaud’s verse and the well-known jazz hipster Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir. He listened to Bessie Smith, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin; wearing North African shawls; and as soon as famously exclaimed on the household dinner desk, head in fingers, “I’ll by no means work!”
Though fiercely clever, he was booted from one highschool and dropped out of one other, then began selecting up part-time jobs. (During a stint as an ambulance driver at Charles de Gaulle Airport, he pushed the wheelchairs of Jean-Paul Sartre and Charles Mingus.) When not working, he performed bass in rock bands and joined with pals to start out a discothèque and restaurant, which they saved open for 2 years. He and one other of its founders, Christine Corbet, would ultimately marry.
She survives him, as do their daughter, Céline Allard, and his brother, Jean-Marc. Mr. Allard’s son, Pablo, died earlier than him.
After taking a job within the classical music division at Fnac, the French information and electronics chain, he was employed at PolyGram France in its classical division. When the corporate’s executives determined to start out a jazz division, he reminded them that he didn’t know a lot about classical music however was wild about jazz. They put him answerable for beginning the division.
In 2007, with PolyGram now owned by Universal Music Group, Mr. Allard was promoted to run all of Universal Music France’s report and publishing divisions. He relaunched Impulse! Records, a once-mighty jazz label that had gone dormant at Universal, in 2014, and launched albums by the Henry Butler-Steven Bernstein Hot 9, the pianists Sullivan Fortner and Rodney Kendrick (Ms. Lincoln’s onetime accompanist), Mr. Haden and others.
He left Universal in 2017 to start out his personal artist administration firm, Le Bureau des Artistes, working primarily with French pop and hip-hop musicians. And in late 2022, he started an impartial label, Artwork Records.
